The Building Blocks of a Circular Economy: USAID’S Local Systems Approach to Reducing Ocean Plastic Pollution

Ocean plastic pollution has reached crisis level: every minute, more than an entire garbage truck of plastic makes its way into the world’s oceans—roughly 11 million metric tons annually. While plastic waste presents an immediate threat to marine wildlife and ecosystems, this global challenge also has implications for major industries such as fishing and tourism, impacting the livelihoods of millions of people. The drivers and impacts of ocean plastic pollution also contribute to global challenges in food security, human health, and climate change.

USAID’s commitment to addressing plastic pollution and improving waste management supports key U.S. Government policies and initiatives, including the 2020 Save our Seas 2.0 Act, USAID’s Climate Strategy, and the Global Methane pledge.

Most ocean plastic pollution comes from rapidly growing cities and towns along rivers and coastal areas where reliance on single-use plastics and flexible plastic packaging produces high volumes of waste that are not easily recycled, or even recovered. The most effective way to immediately address ocean plastic pollution is to stop it at the source: on land. We must reduce the proliferation of single-use plastic packaging and improve local solid waste management (SWM) systems to capture and recycle waste and prevent it from entering our oceans.

USAID’s Ocean Plastics team has developed five building blocks to guide Agency programming to address plastic pollution. They are based on the Agency’s global expertise in local government capacity strengthening and natural resource governance and lessons learned from USAID’s first programs dedicated to addressing plastic pollution:

• Municipal Waste Recycling Program (2016 – 2021), which worked primarily through locally-led grants to reduce land-based sources of ocean plastic pollution in Indonesia, Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam.
• Clean Cities, Blue Ocean (2019 – 2024), USAID’s global flagship program, which works in Peru, Dominican Republic, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Indonesia, Philippines, and Vietnam.
• Circulate Capital Partnership (2019 – present), a blended-finance partnership with impact investor Circulate Capital to catalyze investment in the recycling and waste management value-chain in South and Southeast Asia.

Together, these building blocks create the foundation for preventing additional plastic pollution. This brief describes each building block, outlines custom performance indicators, and provides examples to address key constraints to develop programs that use a systems approach and consider context-specific mechanisms and tools.

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