Above: illustration by Brian Stauffer

In 2008, Sarah Kauss (MBA 2003) attended a presentation on climate change and the global water crisis at her five-year HBS reunion. Harvard Professor Daniel Schrag, who directs the University’s Center for the Environment, argued that governments could not solve these problems on their own; the private sector would need to step up as well.

Kauss paid attention. “I actually talked to the professor after the presentation and told him how inspired I was,” she recalls.

So inspired, in fact, that two years later she went on to found S’well, a company that sells reusable insulated water bottles. Kauss works with designers and artists to introduce new looks every season, often in partnership with major brands such as Disney and National Geographic.

Her goal, however, is not to help people look good while hydrating. It’s to reduce our use of disposable plastics. “We’re trying to get our customers to covet this product that will help change their lives in a positive way—and make the world a better place too,” says Kauss.

The world is literally drowning in plastic: Research indicates that only 9 percent of the world’s plastics have been recycled, and by 2050 our oceans will contain more of it by weight than fish. Single-use petroleum-based plastics contaminate our water, pollute our land, and contribute to global warming. And given current rates of production and consumption—1 million plastic bottles are purchased every minute around the world, and global production of plastic packaging is on course to quadruple by 2050—no amount of conventional recycling will get us out of this mess.

Instead, experts say we need to improve our mopping-up efforts through recycling, upcycling, and waste-to-energy conversion, while simultaneously changing consumer behavior and replacing petroleum-based plastics altogether.

At S’well, Kauss estimates that each bottle she sells can replace at least 167 single-use plastic ones per year—enough to put her Million Bottle Project, which aims to eliminate 100 million plastic bottles by 2020, well ahead of schedule. (In 2018, S’well distributed bottles to every public high school student in New York City, where the company is headquartered, displacing as many as 54 million single-use plastic bottles in one fell swoop. The company also recently expanded its offerings to include reusable food containers, barware, and accessories.)

Ocean plastic is a particularly vexing environmental problem: By contaminating our water and killing marine life, it endangers everything higher up the food chain—including us. That’s why Robert Goodwin (GMP 3, 2007) cofounded and heads the social enterprise OceanCycle, which works in developing countries to prevent ocean-bound plastic from entering the water in the first place and channels it into recycled products.

OceanCycle builds and certifies supply chains for recycled ocean-bound plastic, partnering with everyone from the workers who gather discarded bottles on beaches to the processors that turn those bottles into recycled plastic pellets and flakes. It then matches those supply chains to major manufacturers looking for large volumes of recycled plastic.

“We’re dot connectors,” Goodwin says. “We make it easy for companies to integrate purpose that is still profitable into their value chain.”

The firm has certified supply chains in Thailand and Indonesia, which are among the worst contributors of plastic ocean debris, and plans to expand into other parts of Asia and Latin America soon.

OceanCycle also consults with manufacturers to identify specific products such as food containers and shopping bags that could be made with recycled plastic rather than virgin resin, helping to divert more plastic that might otherwise wind up in the ocean. Goodwin says they are currently working with a major European manufacturer of plastic food packaging that uses 1,000 metric tons of OceanCycle’s certified material every month; he plans to announce several large retail and brand partnerships early this year. By 2021 Goodwin expects OceanCycle’s customers to be using tens of thousands of metric tons of recycled plastic every month—no drop in the ocean, by any measure.

Unfortunately, not all plastic products can be recycled, or are worth recycling from an economic standpoint: think wrappers, straws, and bottle caps, for example. Solving that problem will require an alternative to conventional petroleum-based plastic that isn’t made from fossil fuels and breaks down safely in the environment.

Enter Full Cycle Bioplastics, a California startup that has found a cost-effective way to produce mass quantities of PHA, which is an eco-friendly alternative to plastic that harmlessly degrades on land and in the ocean.

While PHA is naturally produced by bacteria, previous attempts to manufacture it at industrial scale were stymied by the need for expensive feedstocks such as sugar and seed oils. Full Cycle, however, coaxes microbes to make PHA from organic waste—banana peels, newspapers, “ anything that would go in your compost bin,” says Andrew Falcon (MBA 2000), who stepped down in November after four years as CEO; he has stayed on as a strategic advisor. And because rotting organic waste is itself a source of greenhouse gases, Full Cycle’s waste-based bioplastic not only removes fossil fuels from the picture, it also helps eliminate another driver of climate change.

“It’s a two-for-one shot,” Falcon says, adding that Full Cycle’s bugs will even happily chow down on food-contaminated items that cannot normally be recycled, like pizza boxes and sandwich wrappers.

As a pilot project, Full Cycle is preparing to convert food waste from a large commissary kitchen into PHA that will be used to make compostable bioplastic products for the kitchen’s own food service operations. Since the bacteria that produce PHA also eat it, anything made from the stuff can ultimately be fed back to them to produce fresh bioplastic, creating a closed-loop system where nothing is wasted—not even waste.

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