Currents of Change: NextWave Plastics’ Stories of Impact

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A Case For Collaboration CASE STUDY 01

04.22.2022

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A Case For Collaboration Why would a group of companies—including direct competitors—openly share solutions on oceanbound plastic? It’s good for business and the planet.

Sometimes, pivotal partnerships start with a bit of serendipity. For Trek Bicycle, a founding member of the NextWave Plastics consortium, the spark was a chance conversation a few years ago.

As a product compliance manager for Trek, Stefan Berggren was traveling a lot. Berggren likes to network: He’s not shy about making new connections.

“I was in between flights at the airport,” Berggren recalls, “And I started up a conversation with Oliver Campbell from Dell Technologies.”

They ended up having plenty to talk about. Campbell is a distinguished engineer in charge of procurement and engineering for Dell’s packaging team, including the pursuit of innovative sustainable packaging alternatives. He saw a kindred spirit in Berggren, a 25-year veteran at Trek, who has long been an instigator of environmental efforts at the company.

The connection stuck. As Dell prepared to launch NextWave with Lonely Whale in 2017, Campbell asked Berggren whether Trek was interested in joining.

The answer: Absolutely.

BETTER TOGETHER Since then, NextWave’s members have been working together to increase the use of oceanbound plastic—material such as fishing nets and soda bottles that are at high risk of ending up in

- ADRIAN SOLGAARD, FOUNDER OF SOLGAARD PG.1

waterways—in their products. The consortium brings together a diverse group that ranges from small makers of luxury lifestyle goods to multinational corporations with a broad customer base. Some of them, such as Dell Technologies and HP Inc as well as Humanscale and MillerKnoll, are direct competitors.

Others, such as Trek and CPI Card Group, are in completely unrelated sectors.

No matter the industry, all of them find common ground on the tricky but rewarding challenge of diverting plastic waste from entering the ocean.

Through regular calls and (when possible) in-person meetings or conferences, NextWave members share what’s working and what isn’t.

EMBRACING EACH OTHER’S STRENGTHS “There’s just so much power in learning from others’ experiences,” says Adrian Solgaard, founder of the sustainable, design-driven travel goods company Solgaard. He points to the opportunity to hear from leaders like HP on labor practices.

“The larger companies in NextWave have far more staff dedicated to social responsibility issues. We can learn and grow from that,” he says.

On the flip side, companies like Solgaard have the ability to prototype and test out ideas more quickly than larger companies. He points to HomeBase, a wireless charging station made from ocean-bound polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles. Facing a new landscape created by the COVID pandemic with a reduced market for travel goods, Solgaard came up with the HomeBase idea. He funded the system via Kickstarter in the spring of 2020 and released it within three months.

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Afterward, Solgaard shared his experience with NextWave members on a call that included the companies’ engineering teams and a representative from Solgaard’s supplier in China.

“We were able to basically provide a brain dump for all the other NextWave members about what working with this material was like,” Solgaard says.

“That knowledge-sharing is a great part about being in the consortium.”

AN EMPHASIS ON PROBLEM-SOLVING NextWave members are often trying something for the first time: an ocean-bound plastic material, a production technique, a supplier relationship. Because of this, they are likely to run into snags—and they do.

For companies like Dell Technologies and HP Inc, their shared competitive space means they can tackle supplier issues at scale.

- BOB TEASLEY, DIRECTOR OF SUPPLY MANAGEMENT AND NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT AT MILLERKNOLL

“Dell and HP have a long history of partnering with others in our industry to make advancements in social responsibility, health and safety and other areas across our very connected supply chain,” said Page Motes, head of global sustainability at Dell. “That experience paved the way for a natural collaboration with NextWave members to advance social responsibility considerations while strengthening the market for ocean-bound plastic.”

In another example of problem-solving, MillerKnoll, a global design leader, recently found that a batch of resin they procured turned out to be unusable for its intended application. Bob Teasley, director of new product development and supply management for the collective’s Herman Miller brand, alerted NextWave. Within days, he had two companies interested in using the material for their own projects, while another company offered ideas on an additive that might salvage the supply.

Business sustainability groups can have a tendency toward self-congratulation, Teasley says. NextWave is different.

“When you’re trying to accomplish something, it’s not always, ‘This went well,’” Teasley says. “NextWave is a very action-oriented group. It’s about getting the right stuff done.”

FOSTER YOUR OWN COLLABORATION Widen the circle of potential collaborators to include diverse points of view.

Be willing to share both successes and failures.

Focus on knowledge or resource gaps.

Team up on solutions.

Visit nextwaveplastics.org to learn more

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Don’t hold back on asking for help.

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Taking Ideas To Reality CASE STUDY 02

04.27.2022

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Taking Ideas To Realiy So your company wants to use ocean-bound plastic in its products. How do you go from talking to doing?

Plastic, by nature, lends itself to creativity. Shapeshifting and versatile, the material can be a soda bottle in one form, a watch or a desk chair in another.

Repurposing ocean-bound plastic, however, requires a creative spirit apart from design. As Max Michieli of CPI Card Group knows, that means being willing to rethink long-established norms.

In 2018, Michieli, then CPI’s director of new card development, was having a conversation with his managing director about the problem of plastic waste in the ocean. The question was posed: Did Michieli think he could make a credit card out of ocean-bound plastic? Michieli, who today is CPI’s director of sustainability products, thought he could.

“It was really just brainstorming together. At that point, we didn’t know where to start,” Michieli recalls.

“Dealing with recycled plastics in any way, shape, or form was a little bit foreign to me.”

REIMAGINING THE CREDIT CARD On the surface, the idea seems simple enough. How hard could it be to swap materials in a roughly 3” by 2” rectangle? But the payment card industry is dominated by polyvinyl chloride, or PVC. The form factor of the card is strictly defined. It must be able to take on a variety of colors for designs and branding for CPI’s customers, which are financial institutions.

And most importantly, it must reliably store sensitive

data. PVC has done that job for decades, but you won’t find it among suppliers of ocean-bound plastic, which is dominated by other types of plastic.

Despite the challenges up front, Michieli was given license to figure it out. CPI sourced high-density polyethylene (HDPE) and began working with it. The process was bumpy.

“We went through many, many iterations trying to get this polymer into a sheet form that we could use in our processes and failed miserably many, many times,” Michieli says. Among other problems, the HDPE tended to crumble when it was run through the same calendering presses used for PVC. Through perseverance and finding the right partners, CPI succeeded in creating a patent-pending process to integrate ocean-bound plastic into the core layer of its cards. The Second Wave® card was released in 2019, and Michieli says it’s been tremendously successful in the marketplace. The following year, CPI Card Group joined the NextWave Plastics consortium, where members share insights and collaborate on solutions for ocean-bound plastic.

SHINOLA’S SUPPLIER-DRIVEN INNOVATION For NextWave member Shinola, the Detroit-based maker of lifestyle goods, the idea started with a supplier relationship. The company connected with Thomas Schori co-founder of #tide ocean material. #tide sources ocean-bound plastic from Southeast Asia for use in a variety of products. In 2021, Shinola released Sea Creatures, a line of watches made using #tide ocean-bound plastics.

- BRANDON LITTLE, VICE PRESIDENT OF PRODUCT DESIGN AT SHINOLA PG.1

“We were continuously looking at using that material in strap format for watches,” says Shinola’s Vice President of Product Design, Brandon Little. “That

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sparked the conversation of how ocean-bound plastic could be used in a variety of ways across the product’s composition beyond the strap and to the case and beyond.” Stemming from the success of Shinola’s first iteration of its Sea Creatures line, the brand is looking at other ways it can innovate and use #tide ocean-bound materials in other products and categories.

Emerging companies like Shinola and lifestyle brand Solgaard, which took its HomeBase wireless charging system made from ocean-bound plastics from idea to reality in under three months via Kickstarter funding, are well placed to take a concept and run with it. For a multinational corporation like HP, the beginnings of a project may be more conservative and have a longer timeline, but the ability to scale makes the endeavor worth the persistence.

HP was already using recycled plastic from North America for its ink cartridges when the idea came up to use ocean-bound plastic from Haiti and provide a market for less desirable dark color materials - an infinitely more risky prospect. HP already had a stable process. The company was already doing a good thing. Why make it harder?

“We made it harder so that we could make it better for all of the parties involved—and it has,” Ellen Jackowski, HP’s chief impact officer, said. “This is a project of long-term investment and attention. As we continue to strengthen it, it proves to all of us what is possible in the world.”

BRING YOUR IDEA TO REALITY Ensure buy-in from decisionmakers Think big, but start small with a pilot or a single product component to build momentum Expect and plan for trial and error Build on successes Stay true to your commitment as a company PG.2

- ELLEN JACKOWSKI, CHIEF IMPACT OFFICER AND HEAD OF SUSTAINABLE IMPACT AT HP INC

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Reinventing The Supply Chain CASE STUDY 03

05.03.2022

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Reinventing The Supply Chain Ocean-bound plastic is unfortunately abundant, but difficult to source. Getting it into products requires problem-solving, persistence, and the right partners.

For several years now, HP has been diverting almost a million plastic bottles a day from landfills, putting that plastic into ink cartridges for printers. The bottle plastic, collected from North American waste streams, mixes with that of used cartridges that customers return through HP’s Planet Partners program.

It’s a success story HP’s chief impact officer Ellen Jackowski has been accustomed to sharing at sustainability conferences. She was doing just that in 2016 when a new opportunity arose. Someone in the audience came up after her talk, saying there was an effort underway to recover ocean-bound plastic in Haiti, but the program needed more demand.

Would HP consider sourcing some of its plastic from there?

That audience member was Ian Rosenberger, CEO of First Mile, now HP’s partner in a landmark project in Haiti that not only diverts plastic but creates livelihoods for collectors and provides education for children.

“It was just luck that the right person was sitting in the audience and brought this forward,” recalls Jackowski, who is HP’s chief impact officer and head of sustainable impact.

TREK

- STEFAN BERGGREN, PRODUCT COMPLIANCE MANAGER AT TREK

Since then, HP—with First Mile and recycling partner Lavergne—have sourced more than 3 million pounds of plastic from Haiti, keeping more than 110 million bottles out of the environment. Even more, this is plastic that is difficult to use by others due to its dark coloring. This number is set to increase substantially with the installation of a $2 million wash line, which will eventually enable the processing of up to 20 million pounds a year.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF RECYCLED PLASTIC It’s one thing to recover plastic from U.S. waste streams, where typically a bottle goes from the end consumer straight into a collection bin. Oceanbound plastic is different. It comes from places such as Haiti or Southeast Asia, where there is no formal waste management system. These plastics tend to be contaminated with sand or dirt, so it needs to be washed intensively and can be more challenging to thoroughly dry.

A growing number of companies are surmounting these challenges, putting processes in place to reliably and consistently process ocean-bound plastic. They share both problems and solutions through the NextWave Plastics consortium.

The snags can be daunting. Bicycle company Trek uses fishing nets recovered in Chile from partner Bureo to make its Bontrager Bat Cage for mounting water bottles. The first factory run resulted in an unusual smell that required the facility to be aired out.

“I got a call from the manufacturer, ‘Yeah, we’re never doing this again,’” says Trek Product Compliance Manager Stefan Berggren.

Experts at the University of Georgia’s New Materials Institute helped Berggren pinpoint the problem: Not

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bag for laptops that integrates ocean-bound plastic.

The two companies have built strong trust over many years of working together, says Bin Jiang, Veritiv’s director of global sourcing and product development.

“We challenge each other all the time: ‘’What’s next, what else can we do?’” Jiang says. “Now that we’re part of NextWave, we’re working really hard to find other applications for ocean-bound plastic so that we can contribute even more.”

REINVENT YOUR SUPPLY CHAIN Look for raw material suppliers that prioritize social responsibility

- BIN JIANG, DIRECTOR OF GLOBAL SOURCING AND PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT AT VERITIV

enough drying time. He convinced the supplier to give it another try.

“We ran it a second time, and it worked out perfectly.

Just because you hit a wall, that doesn’t mean you should stop,” Berggren said. “We had resources through NextWave that we could use to analyze what happened and try another run.”

Trek and other NextWave members share experiences like this so that others can avoid similar issues or know how to fix them when they pop up.

They also help each other locate the right partners.

Getting a steady supply of ocean-bound plastic is challenging enough, but companies also need experts to help ensure social responsibility on the ground, as well as vendors willing to process the material and try new manufacturing techniques.

For example, founding member Dell Technologies worked with supplier Veritiv to use ocean-bound plastic in a packaging tray for its laptops. The tray’s surface wasn’t coming out with the even, smooth finish Dell required during the initial tests. As a solution, Veritiv applied the design-of-experiments methodology to identify the right balance between the new material characteristics and manufacturing process controls to achieve the desired finish.

Veritiv joined NextWave last year and is now working on a second packaging solution for Dell, a nonwoven PG.2

Rely on samples and prototypes to verify quality Push for another try if the first effort fails Find suppliers that will really partner with you through challenges Be open to creating solutions to the problems you didn’t even know existed

Visit nextwaveplastics.org to learn more.

DELL TECHNOLOGIES

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Engaging Stakeholders & Building Buy-in CASE STUDY 04

05.11.2022

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Engaging Stakeholders & Building Buy-in A clear rationale and dogged persistence can help

catalyze success when addressing obstacles to using ocean-bound plastic.

Early on in his work as an engineer, an employer sent Nick Abbatiello to a training course—in sales. Why would a company take a new hire out of engineering school and then teach them sales, he wondered?

As his career progressed, it became clear. “You’re always selling your ideas,” says Abbatiello, who today is a distinguished engineer for sustainability and circular materials at Dell Technologies. “If you get brushed off one time, that just means your story wasn’t right. You need to hone your message a little better and try it again.”

Abbatiello and his team are constantly coming up with use cases—and stories—for using oceanbound plastic in products for Dell, a founding member of the NextWave Plastics consortium. “We work across our internal teams to sell-in not only the environmental benefits, but the business benefits of using ocean-bound plastic. We also partner closely with our suppliers to reinforce the opportunities ocean-bound plastics present.”

HUMANSCALE

- JANE ABERNETHY, CHIEF SUSTAINABILITY OFFICER AT HUMANSCALE

COMMUNICATING THE “WHY” Sharing problems and solutions via NextWave Plastics has helped Dell and other consortium members anticipate many hurdles that can shake confidence in trying a new material. But even more importantly, NextWave’s members are always ready for failures and going back to the drawing board.

Humanscale, a founding member of NextWave that uses reclaimed fishing nets in its Smart Ocean, Liberty Ocean, and Path task chairs, holds a kickoff meeting for each new project that will use ocean-bound plastic. The meeting sets context for the plastic waste problem and how Humanscale can have an impact.

But it’s also the beginning of conversations about what’s ahead in terms of sourcing and working with ocean-bound plastic, says Jane Abernethy, Humanscale’s chief sustainability officer.

“It’s not like just sourcing a regular material where you can buy it from anyone. Instead of having many, many options, you’ll have one option. And you’ve got to work through every challenge to make it happen,” Abernethy says. “You need to set the expectation of some of the challenges and frustrations that might happen.”

Many of the changemakers at NextWave companies are used to hearing some form of “no.” For Ellen Jackowski, chief impact officer and head of sustainable impact at HP, it was a supplier telling her they were two years into a five-year contract with a source for recycled plastic. How about circling back to the idea of ocean-bound plastic in three years? She convinced the supplier to start right away with a very modest trial instead.

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“There was this incredible opportunity. We just needed to have the right people understand what that opportunity could be,” Jackowski says. “It’s fine if we start small.”

The effort to incorporate ocean-bound plastic into HP products has since scaled to encompass over 300 HP products.

APPEALING TO VALUES AND EMOTIONS The argument for keeping plastic out of the ocean is easy to make for anyone who cares about the planet. Oliver Campbell, distinguished engineer at Dell, likes to ask people to talk to their kids and see what they think, since they are the ones who are going to inherit the world from us.

“That sounds simplistic, but you’d be amazed at the number of times that has changed people’s perspective,” Campbell says.

Beyond personal commitments, it helps to map efforts on ocean-bound plastics to a company’s values and goals. Founding NextWave member MillerKnoll, a collective of design brands, worked for four years before launching five products made from oceanbound plastic in 2021, including the Herman Miller brand’s classic Aeron office chair.

MillerKnoll’s Gabe Wing, director of sustainability, advises: “Figure out what you care about as an organization, and then find the intersection with what your customers care about. If you work in the overlap of those two, you’re going to be successful.”

MILLERKNOLL

- NICK ABBATIELLO, ENGINEER FOR SUSTAINABILITY AND CIRCULAR MATERIALS AT DELL TECHNOLOGIES

ENGAGE YOUR STAKEHOLDERS Articulate a strong and a personal sense of “why” Set expectations to learn and evolve - snags are likely, and that’s OK Appeal to values, both personal and organizational Create a culture of inclusivity with open lines of communication Be relentlessly committed to your goal

Visit nextwaveplastics.org to learn more.

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Innovating Product Design CASE STUDY 05

05.18.2022

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Innovating Product Design Using ocean-bound plastic isn’t simply about

substituting materials. It’s a chance to reimagine products and packaging.

Ocean-bound plastic can pose a somewhat paradoxical design challenge: to fundamentally rework a product without the customer noticing. You would never know by look or feel that a Humanscale chair or a Shinola watch contains plastic that was once sandy, dirty, and at risk of ending up in the sea.

All you - the buyer - know is that it works well, and it looks good.

The designer’s magic lies in restoring value to this abandoned material by using as much of it as possible in desirable products and functional packaging. Members of the NextWave Plastics consortium achieve this feat with a combination of collaboration, creativity, and perseverance.

Humanscale launched the first ever task chair made with recycled fishing nets back in 2018, and then again in 2021. With its Path chair, launched in April 2022, Humanscale set a new standard for integrating ocean plastic. Each Path chair integrates nearly 10 pounds of upcycled ocean plastics, including recovered fishing nets and ocean-bound yogurt cups.

This and other aspects of the design mean Path is certified climate, water, and energy positive, yet uncompromising in its ergonomic function or aesthetic.

“Our persistent approach to sustainable design inspired our team to pull together and make this ambitious vision a reality,” said Jane Abernethy, TREK BICYCLES

- NICK ABBATIELLO, SENIOR ENGINEER FOR SUSTAINABILITY AND CIRCULAR MATERIALS AT DELL TECHNOLOGIES

Humanscale’s chief sustainability officer. “Our sustainability team worked tirelessly with our design, engineering, quality, purchasing, supply chain teams, and the suppliers themselves, to make Path the most sustainable task chair on the market.”

FAMILIAR PRODUCTS, UNCHARTED TERRITORY For Oliver Campbell, a distinguished engineer at Dell Technologies supporting the company’s sustainable packaging efforts, working with ocean-bound plastic is an opportunity to rethink standard approaches.

“It lets you go back in and fundamentally ask questions about your entire design paradigm—not just the material aspect of it but, hey, do I still want to design this the same way?” Campbell says.

Working with packaging partner company Veritiv, Dell is beginning to replace conventional plastic protective bags for its non-woven bag made with oceanbound plastic. Previously, Veritiv worked with Dell to create molded trays made of 50% ocean-bound plastic and 50% recycled high-density polyethylene (HDPE) plastic for laptops and accessories.

Customers unboxing products with these materials probably won’t sense that anything is different, but the environmental impact is significantly lower.

Through packaging, Dell has increased its use of ocean-bound plastic ten-fold since 2017, meeting a commitment under the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals nearly four years early.

“I always assume the existing material specifications are at the top end of the spectrum from a requirements point of view,” says Nick Abbatiello, a senior distinguished engineer for sustainability and circular materials at Dell Technologies. “Just because the properties aren’t the same doesn’t mean it’s

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staying true to the customer’s brand and design requests.

Designers also need to keep in mind the recyclability of their end products, avoiding blends of materials where possible. The bicycle company Trek, which uses ocean-bound plastic in its Bontrager Bat Cage Water Bottle Cage and other products, is in the process of creating design guidelines for circularity.

- BRANDON LITTLE, VICE PRESIDENT OF DESIGN AT SHINOLA

not going to work. It just means we need to identify where that lower limit is.”

Ocean-bound plastic requires both design and manufacturing creativity to be adapted for certain purposes. Shinola went through several tests for its Sea Creatures watch, which contains ocean-bound plastic in its strap and case.

“There are so many points in a watch that require a lot of strength, and they’re small,” says Brandon Little, vice president of design at Shinola. “You have such a small space that you’re working with, but there’s so much pull on it on a daily basis, as people take it on and off their wrist.”

That need for strength had to be factored into both the design and the manufacturing process.

Shinola’s product team worked with the company’s watch case supplier to manufacture with the right temperature and stabilizers to achieve the functionality they needed.

‘LESS IS MORE’ CPI Card Group has a different type of challenge: Its Second Wave cards containing ocean-bound plastic not only have to store sensitive data and function reliably, they must also satisfy the marketing goals of the issuing financial institution.

“From a design perspective, a lot of what we’re working to do is help to educate the customers on potential ways to achieve the look and feel of their card,” says Megan Bogard, a design manager at CPI. She aims for a “less is more” approach, layering on as little as possible in terms of inks and materials while PG.2

The goal is “to adjust our designs to make sure that the plastic isn’t being rendered unrecyclable by the things we’re doing to make it perform better,” says Courtney Munch, sustainability specialist at Trek.

Sometimes, succeeding with ocean-bound plastic means you might have to let go of a singular idea exactly as you imagined it, explains Little of Shinola.

But pursuit of the goal to use ocean-bound plastic produces a different kind of satisfaction.

“If you really want to do it, you’ll find a way to engineer or invent something that is interesting and different and still achieves your goal,” Little says. “I can guarantee you we could have probably folded on this [Sea Creatures] project a handful of times. We just kept going for it and saying to ourselves, this can be done—just, how can we do it?”

REALIZE YOUR IDEAS Be clear on your objectives from the outset Design with the product’s full lifecycle in mind from raw material sourcing to enduse Don’t be afraid to rethink an established design to improve sustainability Stay persistent with your goals and flexible with the execution Keep an open mind throughout the process

Visit nextwaveplastics.org to learn more.

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Ensuring Social Responsibility CASE STUDY 06

05.25.2022

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Ensuring Social Responsibility Recovering ocean-bound plastic is not just

imperative for the environment. It’s a way to lift up communities around the world.

Jon Khoo, Interface’s head of sustainability for Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia, has a framed message on the wall behind the desk in his London home office. It says, “Embrace the squiggly path.”

Interface is a founding member of the NextWave Plastics consortium and a commercial flooring company that has integrated discarded fishing nets into its carpeting products. The sign in Khoo’s office nods to what change looks like—often not a smooth trajectory.

NextWave Plastics members are certainly familiar with the squiggly path as it relates to ocean-bound plastic. This bumpy but rewarding road includes designing new products and reinventing supply chains—it also means creating opportunities and improving lives in the communities where the materials are collected.

NEW SUPPLY CHAIN, NEW TERRITORY In the early 2000s, Interface began recycling old carpets to make new ones. The effort was so successful that after several years, the company’s INTERFACE

- JON KHOO, HEAD OF SUSTAINABILITY AT INTERFACE

nylon supplier flagged that it needed more sources of waste material to meet demand from Interface and other customers.

It turns out that fishing nets are also made from nylon—Interface saw an opportunity.

After meeting with suppliers, economists, the Zoological Society of London’s (ZSL) marine conservationists, and other experts, the Interface and ZSL team launched Net-Works. They started first with small-scale fishing communities in the Philippines, later expanding to Cameroon in central Africa.

“What we were looking for at Interface was, how can we make a supply chain that was going to be more inclusive?” Khoo says. “How can you have a social impact alongside the recycling and environmental impact?”

As part of the initiative, Interface helped set up community banking systems that locals administered, providing a way for people to invest their earnings and maintain transparency. A decade after launching Net-Works, which has since become part of the social enterprise Coast 4C, Interface continues to integrate fishing net material into the nylon fiber used in over half of their carpet tiles.

“We were never going to be able to set up Net-Works in every single village in the world that could use a program like that, but we could really develop and promote the model,” says Mikhail Davis, Interface’s director of technical sustainability. “We felt like joining NextWave was going to be a wonderful way to turn our little ripple into a global wave of programs.”

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FOSTERING RESILIENCE Ocean-bound plastic typically comes from areas where formalized collection systems are nonexistent or inadequate to keep waste out of the environment.

These same coastal places also face a host of challenges, including poverty, devastating storms, and political instability. Having consistent demand from a buyer of ocean-bound plastic lends crucial support to social responsibility efforts.

“We’ve kept our pricing and volume stable, even in the face of changing markets. That’s what allows a supplier to be a stable employer with the ability to invest in enhanced health and safety processes,” said Romi Lessig, program consultant for sustainability at Dell Technologies, which sources ocean-bound plastic from Indonesia. “Our supplier has actually made physical plant changes since we’ve been there, based on the advice of our audit specialists in Asia.”

For this reason, partner organizations can be essential for companies that aim to increase social responsibility across their supply chains. NextWave members HP and CPI Card Group both work with the nonprofit First Mile in procuring ocean-bound plastic from Haiti. First Mile works on the ground in Haiti, providing a crucial communication link with collectors.

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HP helped pioneer recycling efforts in Haiti, partnering with First Mile, Lavergne and WORK to address both social and environmental issues as it embarked on the project in 2016. The resulting program includes creating two tech-enabled learning centers for children of collectors and has created more than 1,100 income opportunities. HP recently invested $2 million in a recycling wash line that simplified HP’s ocean-bound plastic supply chain in Haiti by eliminating a washing step off the island. This has increased the value of plastic collected on the island as well as the prices that collectors receive, which will add an estimated 1,000 more income opportunities for adults in Haiti.

In a prime example of embracing the squiggly path, HP persevered with the wash line even as the pandemic and a severe tropical storm threatened to derail the effort.

“We have kept the collector at the center of this effort,” says Dean Miller, global head of recycling innovation at HP. “It’s a social impact story that happens to have an environmental benefit—not the other way around.”

ESTABLISHING GUIDELINES In the fall of 2021, NextWave released the Framework for Socially Responsible Ocean-Bound Plastic Supply Chains with guidelines to help organizations safeguard worker welfare by asking the right questions, enlisting the right partners, and seeking the best tools and information. Ikea, Dell, CPI Card Group, and other NextWave members developed the framework, with input from over a dozen external experts.

CPI sources the material from Haiti for its Second Wave® payment cards. Through First Mile, the company gives a portion of the sale of every oceanbound plastic card sold to projects that support collectors, including a relief fund for collectors during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“You have to be open-minded to doing things in a way that you haven’t necessarily done for other supply chains in the past,” says Terra Grantham, vice president, strategy and ESG for CPI Card Group. “For us, that meant working a lot deeper in the supply chain instead of just dealing with your direct supplier.

You have to understand your full supply chain.”

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- DEAN MILLER, HEAD OF GLOBAL RECYCLING INNOVATION AT HP

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HP INC.

IKEA was a lead voice in the need to create the framework. Like other member companies, IKEA has been on a learning journey to shape their understanding and approach to responsible sourcing in the context of informal waste economies. IKEA Social Entrepreneurship has partnered with Saahas Zero Waste, India, on a pilot program to transform the informal waste sector in India, starting with three waste management micro-entrepreneurs.

Through a self-sustaining business model, Informal waste workers will receive formally recognized employment under decent work conditions for the first time. The plastic waste collected will be a source of secondary raw material for IKEA in the region, and the company will provide detailed traceability to the source of the plastics sourced.

“We support Saahas Zero Waste’s efforts to find a replicable model that could improve this sector when it comes to employment and decent work conditions,” says Åsa Skogström Feldt, IKEA Social Entrepreneurship managing director.

ENSURE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY IN YOUR SUPPLY CHAIN Embrace the squiggly path, knowing it’s never a straight line from beginning to end Aim for community-based initiatives that are strong enough to stand on their own Commit to going deep on your supply chain to understand workers’ needs Strive for practices that can scale to other locations Consult NextWave’s social responsibility framework or similar resources available online

The insights from this project and others will be critical to the future development of the NextWave framework, helping more companies to follow in the coalition members’ trailblazing footsteps.

“What we’ve done to set up social standards within NextWave is really formalizing a lot of stuff that we did early on,” Interface’s Mikhail Davis says.

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Visit nextwaveplastics.org to learn more.

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Reaching Scale & Impact CASE STUDY 07

06.01.2022

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Reaching Scale & Impact NextWave Plastics members started with what

they could control-—their own supply chains—but they’ve never lost sight of the goal to create scalable impact and transform how everyone thinks about plastic waste.

Companies that join the NextWave Plastics consortium commit to “turn off the tap” on plastic entering the ocean. Collectively, by the end of 2025 they aim to keep at least 25,000 metric tons of plastic—the equivalent of more than 2.7 billion single-use plastic water bottles—from reaching the ocean.

HP

and Knoll, it was trying out the plastic in an item that was largely behind the scenes, the reusable containers for its operations.

MillerKnoll’s containers were a shrewd pilot use case for ocean-bound plastic. Suppliers use them to ship components to the company and then take them back—the customer never sees them. They’re black, and they don’t need to look fancy, so the design didn’t have to achieve cosmetic perfection. But they did need to withstand the shipping process, making them a good test of durability. Thankfully, the test was successful, and this application has the potential to achieve scale across multiple industries that use similar shipping containers.

A FIRST FORAY INTO OCEAN-BOUND PLASTIC

Every member has found its own, unique path toward fulfilling their commitment. Whether using material from fishing nets once bound to be discarded in the ocean or replacing an existing material for a new ocean-bound plastic, all companies have one thing in common: build for scale and impact. They also recognize that sometimes you have to start with something safe yet meaningful in order to go big.

For HP, it was convincing a key supply chain partner to run a small trial of ocean-bound plastic for ink cartridges that were already using recycled PET. Today, HP has launched more than 300 new products around the world made with ocean-bound plastic.

For Trek, it was rethinking something in their full control—the Bontrager water bottle cage—and then expanding to other products. And for MillerKnoll, a collective of design brands including Herman Miller PG.1

Ocean-bound plastic, composed of resins that have been used for decades, is not exactly a novel material. But from a manufacturing perspective, it might as well be. Because of its exposure to nature, without the proper controls, there can be

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GABE WING, DIRECTOR OF SUSTAINABILITY AT MILLERKNOLL

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Technologies. Dell has expanded its use of oceanbound plastic from its initial test case with packaging to components in products such as laptops.

“Scale not only brings flow-through, but that flow-through brings stability,” Lessig says. “And— particularly in recycled markets—stability is valuable.”

After its initial commitment in 2016 to use oceanbound plastics from Haiti, HP has reinvented its supply chain, used more than 110 million oceanbound plastic bottles to make new HP products— including ink cartridges, printers, and the world’s first displays, notebooks, mobile workstations, enterprise Chromebooks, consumer notebooks and conference room systems containing ocean-bound plastic—and created more than 1,100 new income opportunities for the people of Haiti. During the pandemic, HP increased its order with its Haitian supplier to convey its unwavering commitment to the community.

inconsistencies in texture, color, strength, and sheen.

Through its experiment with reusable packaging containers, MillerKnoll established that the material could perform physically. From there, the company began to evaluate how it could be used in customerfacing products—including Herman Miller’s iconic Aeron Chair.

“It wasn’t just, ‘Oh, we’ll put the recycled material in and everything will be the same,’’’ said Gabe Wing, MillerKnoll’s director of sustainability. “It was working through all of those variations to deliver a product that’s going to satisfy our customers.”

MillerKnoll purchased about 6 metric tons of oceanbound plastic as a starting point when it began using the material for containers in 2018. Today, the company diverts an estimated 234 metric tons of ocean-bound plastic annually.

Unwavering commitment Companies that buy ocean-bound plastic—and help build the supply chains to do it—are creating a market that didn’t exist before. This helps both the planet and the people who collect the material, in locations ranging from Haiti to Chile to Indonesia.

“A steady, substantial volume of ocean-bound plastic use ensures regular income for raw material suppliers, who can then invest in improvements,” says Romi Lessig, program consultant for sustainability with Dell PG.2

- ADRIAN SOLGAARD, FOUNDER OF SOLGAARD

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Even though HP has invested in ocean-bound plastic and created impressive momentum, the company recognizes there is more to do—not only in continuing to expand its efforts but in helping others do the same, described Ellen Jackowski, chief impact officer and head of sustainable impact at HP. “NextWave has created this community of people who can learn from each other,” Jackowski says. “It helps all of us scale faster and then collectively bring more awareness to the issue—as well as to the solutions that we’re all innovating together.”

This sentiment is shared by emerging companies as well. Sustainable, design-driven travel goods company Solgaard has already integrated oceanbound plastic into multiple products, and it plans to keep going. “The next goal for us is to be able to scale our operations as much as possible, says founder Adrian Solgaard.”

The idea is to expand the impact that results from growth. Solgaard explains that the company is hoping to open up their supply chain to NextWave members and beyond, “allowing what we’ve learned, the hard way, to be more accessible to others that are wanting to use ocean-bound plastic.”

ACHIEVE IMPACT THROUGH SCALE Choose a low-risk initial use case Define desirable product attributes and work toward them Commit to a price and volume of material to support market stability Set realistic benchmarks and steps for achieving them Take a long view

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The Power of Story CASE STUDY 08

06.08.2022

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The Power of Story Strong images and meaningful data can help

audiences understand the impact of and potential for using ocean-bound plastic.

“Every company has to tell a story. That’s the starting point. What do you want your story to be as a company? Do you want to be somebody that brought about positive change or not?”—Stefan Berggren, Trek In one sense, the goal for members of the NextWave Plastics coalition is simple: Stop plastic waste from entering the ocean. But actually recovering oceanbound plastic and using it in products while also maintaining social responsibility is complex. The effort can evoke questions within industry and across the spectrum of end consumers. What is oceanbound plastic, exactly? Where does it come from?

What does it mean if a product contains it? What is its value to the people who collect it? Answering these questions takes deft communication skills, and NextWave members have become experts.

CREATING CONNECTION TO FARAWAY PLACES Interface, a founding NextWave member and commercial flooring company, founded Net-Works to create a market for discarded fishing nets, initially sourcing them from the Philippines and later expanding to Cameroon.

INTERFACE

- STEFAN BERGGREN, TREK BICYCLE

“As a story, it has a really powerful ability to hit both head and heart,” Interface Head of Sustainability (European, African, Asian and Australian) Jon Khoo says of Net-Works, which is now a part of the social enterprise Coast 4C. “The fact that it felt like a human story as much as an environmental story…there’s something quite powerful from a comms angle and powerful from a decision-making angle.”

But most of us have never been to Cameroon or to the Philippines. How did Interface create a connection for their internal staff and business customers to make Net-Works a powerful impact story? In addition to blog posts and photos, Interface invested in highquality video footage shot in the Philippines. Onscreen text with facts about the program complements the footage, which also shows the aftermath of 2013’s Typhoon Haiyan. Interface made sure members of the community who were featured in the video saw and approved the content.

“We really wanted to capture the essence of the project and put the community first,” Khoo says.

“The team worked to ensure that it wasn’t just an emotional ride, that you did see some statistics and facts—and some realities of it not being the most straightforward of things to be doing.”

For NextWave members that have embedded the use of ocean-bound plastic into the company mission, communicating about that mission also reinforces a commitment to what customers want.

“What keeps us going is, we want to make the world a better place. So if the consumers didn’t care, that would be fine, because we’d still keep doing what we’re doing,” says Adrian Solgaard, founder and CEO

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water-, and energy-positive, returning benefits to the environment. The company’s sourcing and numbers achieve additional credibility via a third-party audit.

“It was a priority from the beginning to make sure that everything was really checked out, so we know which components are made out of ocean plastic and which ones are not,” says Jane Abernethy, Humanscale’s chief sustainability officer. “We really try to make sure that when we’re making a claim, we can really stand behind it.”

- JON KHOO, HEAD OF SUSTAINABILITY AT INTERFACE

of luxury lifestyle brand Solgaard. “But the consumers tell us in surveys that they do care. They’re happy that they’re buying products that are made from a different material, products that are doing something to make a difference.”

PROVIDING CONTEXT Statistics and facts have been key in underpinning how Humanscale communicates about the impact of using recycled plastics in products like its Path chair. The company puts sustainability front and center at the organization, and on its website, including a video about Path featuring founder and CEO Bob King. And beyond that, it offers remarkably concrete information about its products.

The product page doesn’t say simply that the Path chair incorporates ocean and ocean-bound plastic, for example. It tells you precisely how much of the chair contains what Humanscale labels reclaimed ocean plastic (fishing nets out of the water by local people) and ocean-bound plastic (material collected within 50 kilometers of coastlines). The Path chair is climate-, HUMANSCALE

An interactive, drag-and-drop slider on the Path chair page shows how the benefits scale in practical terms: one chair saves nearly 10 pounds of ocean plastic— or, as the website says, a penguin’s weight in plastic.

This is another key storytelling point: Helping people visualize and understand what it means to use ocean plastic.

“Often, people have a hard time picturing what some of the numbers mean,” Abernethy says. “It’s easier if you can put that into context for people.”

Overall, these pieces add up to a strong signal both internally and externally at Humanscale that averting plastic waste from the ocean is a long-term commitment. Abernethy likes to imagine a world where this level of commitment is so common that it isn’t really a “story” anymore.

“It’s never been just that we proved a concept or that we made a nice story, and then we’re done,” she says. “The ultimate would be when it’s no longer even interesting, because that’s what everybody does.”

TELL YOUR STORY Demystify ocean-bound plastic with easyto-understand facts Don’t be shy - your customers care about this issue and want to hear your story Use images and videos to bring your story to life Center the narrative of your impact on the people involved Put the numbers into context: What do they mean?

Visit nextwaveplastics.org to learn more.

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