UNITED STATES AGENCY FOR INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Administrator Samantha Power at the CIRCLE Alliance Launch Event

ADMINISTRATOR SAMANTHA POWER: I really want to thank Gillian [Caldwell] for her leadership at USAID and that of the team. You know, this is unfortunately a growth area, an urgent growth area for development. And Gillian has really taken up the charge, and with her team shown tremendous hustle, ensuring that our impact goes well beyond even the programs that we are managing at USAID. So really grateful – grateful for the partnership with the State Department, of course, as well. And really want to give a big shout out at the start to Senator [Sheldon] Whitehouse, who is here, Senator [Dan] Sullivan, who will be here shortly.

You know, there are issues that generate leadership up here on Capitol Hill. And then there are issues where you can see that the members that you are engaging with are completely seized with the finest details about how resources are being expended, about the impacts that are being had, who traveled the world to try to see this work up close, and come back and offer feedback and try to help us iterate. I would really put Senator Whitehouse in that latter category when it comes to plastics. I sympathize, Senator, with your family, because I suspect you spend a lot of time talking to them about plastic pollution – so seized are you with this.

I also want to give a shout out to Tim Rieser, who is here with us, dressing down for the occasion, as always. But Tim is a person who has dedicated his life to finding creative solutions to being ahead of his time, helping America be ahead of our time, and really just brings the human dimension to all discussions of policy, resourcing, and development. And so many of the programs that we’ve inherited at USAID came about because Tim Rieser, Senator [Patrick] Leahy, and others champion them up here.

Senator Sullivan, maybe I’ll wait to give a proper shout out to, but I did just want to note that he has been a stalwart champion in ensuring that these issues are bipartisan. Those people who are affected by plastic pollution certainly are not thinking about party affiliation, aren’t thinking about politics. They’re just living the devastating effects of plastic pollution. And it’s really amazing, and when he comes, we’ll get to hear him speak. You know, as a senator from Alaska, just about how personal this is for him and his constituents. So we are grateful to him.

We have with us Unilever Chief Sustainability Officer Rebecca Marmot. Where’s Rebecca? There’s Rebecca. Hi, nice to see you again. And EY’s Global Vice Chair for Sustainability, Amy Brachio. Nice to see you, Amy. And what you’ll hear about today is really a one of its kind public private partnership that we hope is going to expand month by month, bringing in new partners.

We are coming together during Capitol Hill Oceans Week, which is a few days before World Oceans Day. And almost exactly two years since we launched the Save Our Seas Initiative in this very building in either this room or I think the room just around the hall.

Today is also the 80th anniversary of D-Day. And this is a day where we are marking the beginning of the liberation of Europe. And it is a day that we honor our service members, and I do again want to note even though he’s not here, I hope it will get back to him that we celebrate Senator Sullivan and his service. He was just retired as the last actively serving Marine in the U.S. Senate – he just retired a few months ago. And so again, we thank him not only for his leadership on combating plastic pollution and also on Ukraine, I would note but also for decades of military service to our nation.

So bringing us to the issue at hand. I’d like to start by making a request. The next time that you are home on garbage day, and you see that truck outside picture that truck, taking its contents, driving to the beach, and emptying a load chock full of plastic into the sea. Then imagine that just a minute later, another truck pulls up and does the exact same thing. Again and again, every single minute.

Right now a full garbage truck, full of plastic enters our ocean every single minute. And what is worse, as demand for plastic grows, experts estimate that by 2030, this rate will increase to the equivalent of two garbage trucks being loaded into the ocean every minute. And by 2040 at the rate we are on, that will be three garbage trucks every minute. All told, for every human on earth, there are right now about 21,000 pieces of plastic in the ocean. We can see some of the consequences – we see the beaches where the sand has been replaced by a carpet of plastic waste. We see in our kids bring to us images, rightly of animals tied up in plastic debris who wash up on shore.

But there’s a lot that we can’t see. The microplastics that are now contaminating the food that we eat, the air that we breathe, the water we drink, and unsurprisingly, our bodies themselves. That is why two years ago, we gathered here at the Capitol to launch the Save Our Seas Initiative and to implement the Save Our Seas 2.0 Act. That, thanks to Senator Whitehouse and Senator Sullivan’s leadership, passed both houses of Congress with unanimous support in 2020. Save Our Seas works with local and national governments, with businesses, with civil society, and with other organizations to help countries to reduce, reuse, and recycle plastic. In the past two years alone, these programs have already helped prevent 1.2 million metric tons of plastic from leaking into the environment. That is the equivalent of 127 billion plastic bottles. Today, I’m thrilled to open up a new chapter in the Save Our Seas Initiative and launch the CIRCLE Alliance, a new public private collaboration between Unilever, USAID, and EY. To start, CIRCLE is going to launch in four countries – and these are really important countries when we think about combating plastic pollution: India, Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines. We hope to have the resources to scale to additional countries in the future, and we very much hope as well to bring in new private sector partners and welcome collaboration with our colleagues up on Capitol Hill to do so.

This Alliance is designed to take on two major challenges that stand in the way of effective waste management systems around the world. The first challenge is that many companies are of the view that producing a high volume of single-use plastic is simply the most cost-effective way to do business right now. But that is why USAID is working with EY and Unilever to support something called Extended Producer Responsibility or EPR systems, which placed the responsibility for the cost of the disposal of plastic waste back onto the producer. In doing so, this incentivizes companies to use less plastic and to make the plastics they do use recyclable. Unilever and EY bring the business expertise we need to design, apply, and scale these policies effectively so that we can create an environment where companies making better choices for their communities are themselves earning better returns.

Many consumers, we know, are troubled by the extensive and unnecessary use of plastics. So we do believe that this is an initiative that is going to actually prove to be good business, and not only good for the environment. We know that consumers across a range of areas are increasingly expressing, with their spending choices, their values, and they are very, very concerned about the growth in plastic pollution. So again, getting the private sector to see this as in their interest to produce in a manner that is environmentally friendly, is a really important next phase of this challenge. The second challenge in many of the countries where we work, the backbone of the waste management system, are informal workers – and many of you have seen these workers up close. Most often they are women, their ethnic minorities in their communities – they dominate waste collection, sorting and recycling.

But because the work is so often stigmatized, underpaid, and undervalued, they lack the resources to improve and to scale their operations. So this is where USAID really can come in, we’ve started a small pilot program, where we offer these entrepreneurs, because that’s what they are, training and equipment to grow their businesses and to help them get their services recognized by local government authorities.

We worked with women like Riza Santoyo. She once spent days pedaling a bike with a cart along the roads in Quezon City in the Philippines, collecting waste, at the same time inhaling pollution from the traffic, and she would earn just a few dollars a day for the long hours of really grueling labor. Then USAID offered her training, and in collaboration with the private sector partners, equipment. Now she has a business, an actual business collecting waste door to door, so she can help collect and sort it before it gets into the environment. She doesn’t have to work the same punishing hours, yet she is managing more waste and actually earning more money – she has doubled her income through this pilot program. This small pilot has trained so far, just 700 women, and it has awarded grants to dozens of women-led micro enterprises to establish or expand their operations. These women, just that small number of women, have prevented an estimated 42.5 metric tons of plastic from entering the environment. That’s about 4.6 million, the equivalent 4.6 million plastic bottles. And that’s just that number of women. Imagine when we scale this sufficiently, given the breadth of the waste collector community, in the countries in which we’re working and all around the world.

We are scaling this program by combining the specific comparative advantages of each partner in the CIRCLE Alliance. And this is really the key takeaway for today: you bring together USAID’s experience in empowering women in plastic waste value chains, and our long standing local relationships with national and local governments – and of course, with civil society. That’s what we bring. Unilever has unrivaled knowledge of, and an unrivaled role in, the plastic supply chains. EY brings experience in providing professional support to help businesses grow and thrive. So this is an incredible foundation for the CIRCLE Alliance, it’s a triple win. It is going to help families rise out of poverty and drive inclusive economic growth for their communities. It helps companies create more local, efficient circular supply chains with reduced carbon footprints. And it stops the flow of plastic into our oceans, improving the health of our marine ecosystems, as well as our communities worldwide.

What’s more circle is leveraging roughly three private sector dollars for every single $1 that USAID invests – and that is what we at USAID are trying to do more and more of, which is to leverage the resources that the taxpayer, through the Congress, are generous enough to provide to us and turn one into much, much more. CIRCLE is a brilliant use of taxpayer dollars, and one I’m honored to be a part of launching here in our nation’s Congress.

I want to thank you all for being part of this extraordinary initiative.

And now that Senator Sullivan has joined us I want, Senator, to do what I did earlier once again, which is given that today we are celebrating D-Day, to thank you for your longtime service as a Marine, as the I think only recently retired Marine up here on Capitol Hill. And to thank you and Senator Whitehouse for your leadership on this. Thank you so much.