Plastic trash to blockchain treasure, The CEO Magazine

How Plastic Bank is using blockchain to turn plastic waste into currency and tackle global poverty at the same time.

A garbage truck’s worth of plastic is dumped into our oceans every single minute. There are more microplastics in the ocean than there are stars in the Milky Way. The amount of plastic produced in a year is roughly equal to the weight of humanity. Shocking facts like these are easy to come by today as the conversation around the world’s plastic problem reaches fever pitch. What many don’t consider is that all this plastic ‘waste’ is actually valuable – it just needs someone to give it value.

Launched in 2013 by David Katz and Shaun Frankson, Plastic Bank has created a model to help alleviate two of the world’s very big problems – poverty and plastic pollution.

It’s using blockchain to turn plastic trash into digital cash, making the plastic too valuable to enter the oceans and helping to lift communities out of poverty in the process.

Read the story here.