Norner champion: «When walking my dog this month, we took on the challenge. The result was more than 500 pieces of litter removed from the environment. I call it a win-win walk!”

Plastics are, and will continue to be, a vital part of modern life and a major contributor towards a circular economy, helping to achieve a more sustainable and resource efficient future for all. But when not properly managed, they may harm our health, biodiversity and ecosystem services. The problem of plastic littering has been growing, and the costs mounting, particularly for the marine environment.

Our common target is a world that is free of plastic waste in the environment and protection of our natural resources and ecosystems which communities everywhere depend on, especially in developing countries. This calls for global cooperation and coordinated actions across all industry sectors to develop solutions that will help solve the plastic waste challenge that we face as a society. 

We need to unite industry, governments and intergovernmental and nongovernmental organisations to develop and invest in projects that harness their collective resources and technical expertise to develop solutions that will prevent the leakage as well as recover and create value from plastic waste.

In order to enable the waste management systems to work, we also need a change in people’s behavior and attitude to littering. Even in countries where advanced waste management systems, deposit schemes and modern infrastructure are in place – littering is still a major challenge to be solved. 

Clean-up campaigns has proven to be a successful way to engage people around the world to remove litter and debris the environment. These actions help to identify the sources of the litter, but also contribute to changing the behaviors that cause pollution through direct involvement of individuals in local communities all over the world. In order to increase our impact in 2020, we are proud to have partnered up with the Alliance to End Plastic Waste (the Alliance) in the world-wide All_TogetherGlobalCleanup campaign, a global initiative to remove litter, one piece at a time from the environment.

Starting at World Cleanup Day 2020 (3rd weekend of Sept.) and continuing for a whole month, we encouraged all our employees, friends and families to pick litter as individuals and in small groups to show how we can have a major impact when we work towards the same goal.

The pickup efforts and results were monitored in the world’s largest open accessible litter-database by using mobile phones and the inspiring Litterati app, which everyone can use when they are outdoors. The free-to-use app allows immediate registration of the litter-items being picked up by just taking a picture with a mobile phone. Litterati uses artificial intelligence to interpret the images and identify the litter. By geotagging the results, the data are made available in a world map and an openly accessible database where details about the littering can be analysed. The Litterati app allows for pickup efforts to be monitored with concrete data, which in turn makes it possible for changes of lasting impact—from behavioral shifts, improved waste management systems, changes in corporate packaging changes and more.

We are proud to see that the joint effort through the All_TogetherGlobal- Cleanup-campaign initiated cleanups by a wide range of companies in the plastics value chain in 78 countries all over the world, and helped the Litterati community to reach a total litter pickup of more than 1 million pieces of litter during the campaign period.

In Norner, we managed to remove more than 3100 pieces of litter from the environment. That is more than 3100 reflections of how and why resources end up in the environment, but most importantly, how can we prevent it in the future. We believe we can solve this challenge – piece by piece!