Roughly 12 million tonnes of plastic waste finds its way into our oceans every year, killing one million sea birds and one hundred thousand aquatic animals and turtles.
This problem seems overwhelming until you learn of Anssi Mikola, founder and CEO of Finnish SME, RiverRecycle, who has a business model that is cleaning up plastic debris in rivers before it enters the ocean. In an Innowwide project, RiverRecycle tackled the river Mithi in Mumbai.
As a young man, Mikola began studying shipbuilding at the Helsinki University of Technology before pursuing an eclectic mix of career paths. He became involved in three-way trade partnerships between Finland, Türkiye and Russia. Specialising in the construction industry, he founded his first company, established offices in Helsinki, Istanbul, Ankara, Moscow and Saint Petersburg and subsequently sold the business to his Turkish partner.
After this, he changed direction, this time following a business course, moved to London and worked on mergers and acquisitions for a dot-com business, which unfortunately collapsed. In a change of tack he returned to Helsinki to venture into medicine. He founded another company, this time in healthcare, which he developed in Finland and India and then sold.
On 1 June 2018 at 02:30, Mikola, surprisingly precise in his recollection of the exact day and time, had an epiphany, which he describes as the workings of his bubble brain. He had recently read that of all the plastic pollution in the world's oceans, 80% is carried by just a thousand rivers. These numbers struck Mikola, given there are more than 160,000 rivers in the world, and more than 20,000 in Finland alone. In that moment he knew exactly what his next business had to be. He founded RiverRecycle and within the year had his first client.
Huhtamaki, a Finnish food packaging manufacturer, became one of RiverRecycle's first clients by investing in a project to source sustainable feedstock for recycled plastic packaging. It did so, according to Mikola, "in the hope of being able to reinforce its sustainability credentials more than with any expectation of financial return."
The project was supported by UN Global Pulse Finland with VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd. joining to lend manufacturing expertise. On the project, Razi Latif, Lab Manager at UN Global Pulse Finland, said: "Partnership and global collaboration are a fundamental tool for sustainable development. The action of multiple partners working on a common goal lays the foundation for future action and offers an example for others to follow."
Eureka provided funding, which helped RiverRecycle to overcome early budget pressures and enhance cooperation with AP Chemi, a global industrial recycling company headquartered in Mumbai, as a subcontracted partner best able to contribute recycling expertise and market knowledge. Mikola and Suhas Dixit, AP Chemi's founder and CEO, share both extensive experience doing business in India and a common commitment to social entrepreneurship. The similarities soon proved fundamental to the project's success.
RiverRecycle recovers pieces of plastic at the source by installing a 150-meter-long boom in the river to divert the waste onto solar-powered conveyor belts. The conveyer belts carry the plastic to the riverbank to be sorted by hand, generating employment opportunities.
High-value waste is sold to be reused and low-value waste is converted back into constituent hydrocarbons; mostly diesel, petrol and the heavy fraction oil used to power ships. Huhtamaki, in supporting RiverRecycle, sought a solution by which the low value parts can be refined into pyrolysis oil. In its most highly refined form, this is an ideal feedstock for manufacturing high quality, food-grade, recycled plastic packaging.
Pyrolysis oil is quite challenging to source in large quantities and so commands a significant price premium. This is especially the case in India where 5% of feedstock in plastic will soon be required by law to be produced from specifically Indian recycled waste.
The creation of significant value from waste means cleaning rivers of plastic can be both scalable and sustainable, resulting in beneficial impacts on the environmental and economic well-being of poor or marginalised communities. This is the circular economy in action, applicable to ten of the UN's seventeen sustainable development goals.
RiverRecycle recently carried out a project in the river Mithi, which flows through Mumbai, the commercial capital of India and home to a population of more than 21 million people.
Since poverty is increasingly being recognised as the single biggest cause of plastic pollution and more than half of Mumbai's population lives in slums without proper sanitation and little to no waste management, the endemic poverty in Mumbai led to the river Mithi’s environmental degradation to what some describe as a floating landfill.
Not all its pollution is plastic waste and the river Mithi is still far from being worthy of its name, the “sweet river”, but helped by RiverRecycle, there is certainly progress and a sense that the cycle of decline is at last beginning to be reversed.
As much as anything else the river Mithi is an example for others to follow.
RiverRecycle has already installed two million kilograms of plastic recycling capacity in five countries. There are further projects underway in India, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Indonesia and Ghana. In total, RiverRecycle has a further 59 projects in the pipeline.
Its success, in only its first five years of existence, is in part down to Mikola's ability to scale up solutions.
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