Coastal Cleanup Day
Written by Arno Tourè
With economic development, inevitably, comes a certain amount of pollution and some of this pollution has a terrible impact on our oceans and its animal and plant inhabitants. The type of pollution is plastic pollution. A huge part of the human population is living, playing, working or vacationing along the coasts, increasing unintentionally the already massive amount of plastic detritus polluting the oceans.
According to the Ocean Conference of the United Nations held on June 2017 in New York, “Plastic waste kills up to 1 million seabirds, 100,000 sea mammals, marine turtles and countless fish each year. Plastic remains in our ecosystem for years, harming thousands of sea creatures every day.” At this rate, the oceans could be saturated with our plastic waste in only 30 years, carrying a mass of plastic greater than the mass of fish. Nevertheless, seabirds still need to eat, and 99% of them will have absorbed plastics harmful to their health by 2050.
To counter this disastrous phenomenon, the Arcata Recycling Center in California began running beach cleanups in the mid-1970s, searching for recyclable material while cleaning the beach. The center was then led by Wes Chesbro who served later a long career in the California State Legislature.
The “Plague of plastics” has been known for a long time.
This precursor action paved the way for current beach cleanups and cleared a lot of debris washed up on California beaches that would otherwise have ended up in the ocean, certainly in the mouth of a marine animal.
Nowadays, California Coastal Cleanup Day welcomes every year more than 60,000 volunteers determined to pick up hundreds of thousands of pounds of trash and recyclables from beaches, lakes, and waterways. Their objective is to talk about the marine litter problem based on concrete actions by providing a community event involving directly the population living near these beaches.
Feel free to join the movement to protect marine wildlife while connecting to people from different communities and backgrounds on September 21!
As the American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead once said “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
At Ivaldi, we agree with Margaret Mead on this point, and we also think that companies of all sizes can help on this global fight to protect nature. That may sound off-base coming from a company that amongst other things prints parts in plastic, but here is our CEO, Espen to explain:
“Ever since I won a writing contest as a teenager to participate at the UN World Summit on Sustainable Development in Joburg South Africa, it’s been very clear to me that political change alone won’t sustain our planet. We need to find comprehensive solutions that are good for both the planet, people, and profit in order to generate effective change. Fundamentally, I don’t believe that the world needs another plastics manufacturer – but you don’t change an industry by ignoring it. At Ivaldi, we see our role as disruptors: by turning what is essentially a hardware problem – the production and dissemination of physical goods – into a software and services solution (ie point of use on-demand manufacturing), Ivaldi is able to drastically impact CO2e emissions of goods distributed through our platform while also reducing costs and time to delivery.”
Indeed, our PRaaS system is meant to reduce the need of a long supply chain thanks to digitization. If you deliver products more efficiently, it reduces your carbon footprint and possible plastic waste. Ivaldi’s parts are printed directly in the field with our Local Manufacturing Centers (LMCs). Pollution generated by transport is almost reduced to zero.
Learn more about our digital solutions for spare parts management, and if you want to know what it’s like to set foot on a cargo of several thousand tons, take a look at our Live from the Sea series! Finally – don’t forget to participate in the Coast Cleanup Day!
Sources:
California Coastal Cleanup Day Video
California Coastal Cleanup Day website
Ivaldi’s Part Replacement as a Service