TOMRA supports Clean4Change initiative 

TOMRA has completed its participation in the Clean4Change campaign, a global clean-up initiative created to inspire citizen participation through community action, awareness and education.

Throughout September, we encouraged all our Resource Revolutionaries in the TOMRA team to participate in locally organized clean-up events or to go out on their own or with friends and family to collect litter.

We set ourselves an ambitious target and the campaign ended on a high with us recording 76,560 pieces of litter in the Litterati app, which is used for tracking the type and location of litter collected. The amount of litter collected, and our impact was greater than what was recorded, and we are happy the environment is the big winner here.

In addition to local clean-ups, two underwater diving clean-ups were also organized in Spain and Norway, and the result was startling.

In Norway alone 2760kg of trash was recovered in Vollen from the Oslo fjord, close to our Asker office, where two dive clubs cleaned the local coast and marinas for two days, with one day of the clean-up sponsored by TOMRA and joined by TOMRA staff. The two days of clean-up recovered included 70 plus car tyres, 12 car batteries, four garden chairs, 12 cell phones, 15-20 pairs of sunglasses and dive masks, 5-6 fishing poles, many beer cans, many PET bottles and lots more.

Unfortunately, many of us did not have to go far to find litter. However, there was some positive news during the campaign, with an announcement by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and the WWF to launch a business coalition for a global plastics treaty. TOMRA will be an active member of this coalition, believing a UN (United Nations) treaty on plastic pollution will address the plastic pollution crisis at scale.

We are enormously proud of the impact the TOMRA team has made in cleaning our planet, and through our actions we have also highlighted the need for well-designed extended producer responsibility (EPR) schemes to keep litter and valuable resources out of the environment. Small local efforts can result in a large global impact.

Another positive outcome from this campaign is that TOMRA will plant 3,700 trees on behalf of the top 10 litter-pickers among its team and in the countries of the top-3 locations and through this we continue the cycle of taking care of the planet.

See our team in action in the video above.