Fishing for Plastic
Plastic Fishing Boat, the Netherlands (credit: Plastic Whale)
Concerns about plastic pollution range from international organizations, to remote island nations, to individuals walking along a favorite, once pristine, beach. An innovative Dutch company, Plastic Whale, offers boating excursions through the canals of Amsterdam to fish for plastic rubbish. The Company launched when it was challenged to build a useable boat made entirely from discarded plastic waste. Since that day, they haven't stopped in their mission to restore the City's famous canals so they become plastic-free once again.
Plastic Whale is also creating value from all the garbage they gather up. The turn the waste plastic into more of their canal-cleansing boats and work with furniture and interior designer manufacturers to create other utilitarian products.
So far, they have: recruited over 3000 people to join their plastic fishing trips; removed more than 35,000 plastic bottles from Amsterdam's canals; filled more than 560 bags with collected waste; and built 7 new boats from the discarded trash.
wisely the Dutch enterprise says: "we don’t like talking about the problem too much but rather working on the solution by creating cool products from the waste. The more people who join in, the more positive impact we create, and we want to go global."
The plastic fishers are showing that restoration of waterways, rivers, and marine environments is clearly possible when the focus is on solutions rather than simply talking about the problem. WHB