ValuCred is a consortium led by Yunus Environment Hub, Nehlsen & Rodiek, and BlackForestSolutions. It is one of the first projects promoted by PREVENT Waste Alliance, with funding from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and the Röchling Stiftung. The aim of ValuCred is to design an internationally applicable system to finance sustainable plastic waste management services. Plastic waste is widely regarded as a pressing environmental problem, with only around 9% of all plastic waste ever created having been recycled, according to UNEP. This is a particularly concerning issue in less developed countries, where estimates show that over three billion people do not have access to adequate waste management services. Though the discussions of plastic pollution usually focus on the environment, it is important to highlight the humanitarian impacts too, which are not borne equally between different groups – whether that is age, gender, or wealth.
Plastic credits have evolved as a financing tool, however, the fast-developing plastic credit market shows a lack of central methodology and governance framework. To overcome this gap, ValuCred developed and tested a standard process model (SPM) to streamline and harmonize the activities of global market stakeholders. Core elements of the SPM are accounting, waste tracking and documentation. To achieve structured accounting and documentation purposes, ValuCred developed a mobile application. For data collection, ValuCred offers the flexibility to connect to existing solutions in the market.
Over the past six months, the ValuCred SPM and its mobile application have been tested with four partner organizations in the informal and semi-formal sectors in India, Vietnam, Ghana and Angola. For waste data tracking purposes, ValuCred collaborated with the Berlin-based tech start-up CleanHub, which specialized in data tracking in informal waste sectors. The key results of our pilot testing are a constantly increased interest of informal waste sector stakeholders to participate in co-financing opportunities and their understanding of compliance with governance and the need for data collection. Along with this goes a higher interest in digital literacy. Furthermore, our testing phase confirmed the need for collaboration between international plastic credit market players, including agreements on requirements for data tracking as well as reporting procedures. The ValuCred consortium intends to take this further in an upscaling project and understands these efforts as the transition towards operational EPR standards.
