Samsara turning the tide in fight to tackle global plastic crisis

"If you can't solve the plastics crisis, you probably can't solve the climate crisis," says Samsara co-founder and CEO Paul Riley.

It’s often difficult to put the scale of the growing 70-year environmental crisis of plastic into context.

Each year eight million tonnes of plastics leak into the ocean, which is equivalent to dumping the contents of one garbage truck into the ocean every minute. This is expected to increase to two per minute by 2030 and four per minute by 2050, resulting in discarded plastic in the ocean outweighing fish at that point.  

Hoping to put a stop to increasing levels of plastic pollution is enviro-tech business Samsara Eco, which has developed a revolutionary technology in collaboration with the Australian National University (ANU) that allows for the infinite recycling of plastics.

The cost-effective and energy-efficient technology breaks down plastic (polymer) waste into its original building blocks (monomers) for reuse to manufacture new food-grade plastics and polyester.

“There's still only an incredibly low proportion of plastic recycled in Australia, even with the sophisticated waste management streams we have in place,” Samsara co-founder and CEO Paul Riley told Business News Australia.