Welcome
Plastic solution
A big idea to slow massive, incalculable, global flows of plastic.
How to slow 8 billion point-sources of plastic leakage?
By Suzette Mehler and Jim LeVine, Ph.D.
Daily plastic release by nearly 8 billion people fuels planetary pollution, leading to invisible threats from micro and nano plastic across ecosystems and human health. Without solutions, these consequences will intensify. Recognizing the limitations of all current viable interventions (Lau et al.; Borelle et al., 2020), scientists urged private sector action. We initiated a study in 2014 to solve plastic pollution. After a decade of R&D, we present a viable, profitable solution.
Our success hinges on a "new paradigm" – a key discovery from our interdisciplinary, high-up research that identified multiple knowledge gaps to first slow plastic leakage, and to reduce it at speed and scale.
We reframe plastic pollution as a human herd problem, driven by a widespread social norm of plastic release—a behavior distinct from blatant littering, which has been effectively reduced through campaigns. This release norm spread like a contagion alongside the globalization of plastic products. We have a plan to change this.
Our focus targets two critical release points in the product lifecycle—arguably the greatest source of global leakage—yet they remain wholly unaddressed in existing stakeholder solutions.
To shift this release norm, we have developed a proprietary "ideal norm" and a strategic approach to drive mass consumer adoption.
Understanding consumer leanings to choose convenience over environment, our solutions are designed for fast, easy, universal integration into lifestyles with clear media directives crafted using evidence-based sociological insights to inform and remind, with the result of rallying a global cohort of concerned citizenry.
To accelerate the shift, we are developing a compelling streaming docuseries and strategic licensing/co-branding partnerships to embed our ideal norm into everyday consumer choices.
Leveraging research and a broad distribution network, our global model could generate widespread behavioral shifts, significantly slowing 710 million metric tons of plastic that scientists estimate will accumulate in the environment – on land and in oceans – between 2016 and 2040 if current trends continue (Lau et al., 2020), as circularity comes to fruition.
Innovative materials and processes alone are insufficient without a plan to change societal behavior. Low global recycling rates, despite advancements, underscore the need to address factors beyond technology.
Our solution leverages "awareness" media, credited for creating global public concern, with actionable directives and products. Catapults beyond anti-littering, we propose a scaled strategy to disrupt consumer release of macro, micro, and nano plastics, stemming from diverse sources beyond just packaging. While specific details are proprietary, our approach is novel to the plastic pollution discourse—it is not anti-littering, "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle", awareness media, and non-disruptive to industries. We leave those efforts to others.
In September 2024, we formed World Harmoni Corporation (WHC), a for-profit C Corp. Our financially self-sustaining business model allows free access to global markets via a non-disruptive, business-friendly approach.
To maximize our impact, we are building a world-class team envisioned to bring proven success in global brand development, a robust end-to-end supply chain (including engineering and manufacturing), monitoring strategy, and a high-performing sales engine.
Our plan targets the most upstream opportunity in the product lifecycle to mitigate environmental leakage because once plastic is released, it becomes borderless, nearly impossible to clean up, and will degrade into nano-particles over time, devastating all ecosystems and human health.
If our plan is adopted, we could slow future release of plastic by millions of metric tons per year, trillions of dollars in savings across global cleanup efforts, human health expenditures, ecosystem preservation, and industrial burdens, while concurrently accelerating the realization of a circular economy. Project specifics are proprietary and will be shared with key stakeholders.
Why Private-Sector, For-Profit
Plastic pollution has a growing body of research documenting harms and its insidious reach into ecosystems. Reviewing viable scenarios to solve plastic pollution, even with aggressive measures such as circularity, scientists in two 2020 studies forecast annual plastic emissions will increase to 53 million MT by 2030 (Borelle et al., 2020) and 710 million MT of cumulative plastic will enter all ecosystems by 2040 (Lau et al., 2020); both studies call for an urgent response from the private sector to employ an economical solution.
The challenges faced by governments and non-profit organizations in addressing plastic pollution are multifaceted and complex, to include:
- Sovereign Constraints: Governments must stop at their borders--but when plastic escapes, it becomes borderless, redistributing by water.
- Resource Constraints: Non-profits often operate with limited resources compared to for-profit entities. This can restrict their ability to invest in large-scale advertising and marketing campaigns.
Findings & Benefits
The Intersection Point: Our proposed paradigm offers a middle-ground solution that satisfies environmentalists and business, with the potential to slow plastic emissions to reduce cumulative plastic buildup as circularity comes to fruition. We identified an intersection point for the ideal strategy that could slow global plastic pollution.
Project benefits include:
- A synergistic plan that could disrupt land-based plastic tonnage flows into terrestrial, riverine, and ocean ecosystems, achieving the most significant reductions in High-Income and Upper-Middle-Income Countries within two to five years.
- A plan to achieve a critical mass of human participation that could cascade to a global scale.
- A private-sector, for-profit business model and marketing strategy to amplify price and scale efficiencies for fast deployment and financial sustainability.
- An effort that is not dependent on plastic value.
- Monitoring technology would be developed to measure regional and global campaign success in real-time data, and fill knowledge gaps by collecting elusive global terrestrial plastic pollution data.
- It scales with world population growth, corporate expansion into new international markets, and anticipated increases in virgin plastic production.
- It is a-political and non-adversarial to business to avert delays from special interest groups.
- It could be a candidate for extended producer responsibility (EPR), which producers might welcome because we monetized a scaled solution.
- It reduces plastic pollution in the immediate future as permanent solutions come to fruition.