It’s hard to run a beach clean-up program when the majority of your clean-up supplies are plastic.
H2Oceans Beach Clean-Up, or H2OBCU, is a beach cleaning service for the Largo Florida area. H2OBCU has been cleaning up beaches in and around Largo since 1999. Sunny Mitchel, head of the clean-up program, started picking up plastic bottles on the beach when she was 11 years old. On a Sunday trip to the beach, she noticed the amount of plastic accumulating with no recycling bins nearby. So, she organized a group of her friends and their parents to return the following weekend and pick up the garbage. And she’s been doing it ever since.
H2OBCU, now officially a non-profit with 23 members, organizes group clean-ups with high schools, universities, corporate, and private groups. The groups are provided with clean-up gear, gloves, trash bags, and a light lunch by H2OBCU.
The Challenges
The groups from the universities are usually environmental science classes or eco-conscious student groups. They were not too happy to be picking up plastic and putting it into big black non-recyclable plastic bags. Sunny heard one of the students saying that it was good to get the plastic off the beaches, but not in these kinds of bags.
Even the lunches H2OBCU offered were causing some fallout. They used plastic cutlery, which they had to throw away and could not recycle.
Recycling Issues
H2OBCU was also feeling the stress of their trash bags at the recycling facility. After they spent a day collecting, separating, and rinsing off the recyclables, they had a two to three-hour drive to the nearest recycling facility. When they arrived, they were told they could not bring in the loads because of the bags they were using. So, they had to move all of the bags out of their pick-up truck, empty them into the truck bed and drive the truck into the dumping area.
To add to that, people who lived near the H2OBCU headquarters started dropping off recyclables that they had collected for Sunny to take care of because they didn’t know where else to take them. Eventually, Sunny had to borrow trucks to get everything to the recycling facility. It was costing a lot in time and gas for the trucks.
“We could never do two-day clean-ups back to back. That would cost us too much to get it all properly recycled,” said Mark Fowler, Sunny’s assistant.
H2OBCU was not able to expand their clean-ups along the west coast of Florida.
One day Mark attended a birthday party with his six year old son and was introduced to a new product. The family had compostable cutlery, plates, and cups for the event. When Mark researched, he found a few brands of compostable products that they could use at H2OBCU.
Composting Issues
They had one of the university groups help them set up a compost station at headquarters. But none of the compostable cutlery they used was composting at all. After digging a little further Mark discovered that all of the brands he chose needed industrial level composting at the correct temperature. That was something he couldn’t achieve with his “home-based” compost.
The Solution
Then Mark found Natrl-Based Biotech cutlery in another online search. He was reluctant to try another compostable product. But it guaranteed that it was “home compostable.” That was something he had not seen before. Mark admitted, “With all of our attempts at composting the cutlery, we weren’t sure if it was the products or us. It turns out, it was a little bit of both.”
Natrl-Based Biotech Composting Assistance
Natrl-Based’s website has tips on how to get the best results in your home-based compost. It walks you through what needs to be added to the compost to help break down the materials faster. There is a certain temperature that needs to be maintained, but it’s nowhere near industrial compost temperature specifications. After following the website instructions, H2OBCU had true compost in a few months. Since H2OBCU first started using the products, Natrl-Based has added the composting instructions to their packaging so their customers would know exactly what to do from the moment of purchase.
Along with compostable liners, Natrl-Based has a division that recycles plastics. They supplied H2OBCU with a line of heavy duty trash liners that are made from recycled water bottle materials. So, the bags are also able to be recycled.
The Results
The Natrl-Based cutlery works really well for the beach clean-up lunches. And the bags are easily accepted at the recycling facility. This allows H2OBCU to cut back on unloading time at the facility and have more time to arrange additional clean-ups. The groups are also happy that everything they are being provided with is either recyclable or made from biobased materials and is compostable. The comments and references on social media by the organizations that work with them have increased their group requests by 35%. H2OBCU is now known as environmentally conscious for more than its beach clean-ups. And that has increased their donations by 45%. More and more companies want to join in to help clean-up local and far away beaches.
*The companies mentioned in this sample case study are fictitious.