CIRCLE Alliance Launch Event

[00:00:04] USAID CHIEF CLIMATE OFFICER GILLIAN CALDWELL: We are here today to talk about plastic pollution. An estimated 11 million metric tons of plastic enter the Earth every year—a rate that is expected to triple by 2040 without urgent action. This is a problem that calls for all hands on deck. Which is why it is so fantastic to have the government and our NGO partners and our private sector partners here with us in the room today. We’re going to kick off with remarks from our Administrator, Samantha Power, and some of our leading congressional champions in tackling the crisis—Senators Whitehouse and Sullivan. And after that, the Senators and the Administrator will depart. And we’re going to have a really interesting panel with EY and Unilever, who are our corporate partners in our CIRCLE Alliance which we are launching today. So without further ado, let me welcome my friend and colleague, Administrator Samantha Power, to the stage.

[00:01:19] USAID ADMINISTRATOR SAMANTHA POWER: I really want to thank Gillian [Caldwell] for her leadership at USAID and that of the team. You know, this is unfortunately a growth area, an urgent growth area for development. And Gillian has really taken up the charge, and with her team shown tremendous hustle, ensuring that our impact goes well beyond even the programs that we are managing at USAID. So really grateful—grateful for the partnership with the State Department, of course, as well. And really want to give a big shout out at the start to Senator [Sheldon] Whitehouse, who is here, Senator [Dan] Sullivan, who will be here shortly.

You know, there are issues that generate leadership up here on Capitol Hill. And then there are issues where you can see that the members that you are engaging with are completely seized with the finest details about how resources are being expended, about the impacts that are being had, who traveled the world to try to see this work up close, and come back and offer feedback and try to help us iterate. I would really put Senator Whitehouse in that latter category when it comes to plastics. I sympathize, Senator, with your family, because I suspect you spend a lot of time talking to them about plastic pollution—so seized are you with this.

I also want to give a shout out to Tim Rieser, who is here with us, dressing down for the occasion, as always. But Tim is a person who has dedicated his life to finding creative solutions to being ahead of his time, helping America be ahead of our time, and really just brings the human dimension to all discussions of policy, resourcing, and development. And so many of the programs that we’ve inherited at USAID came about because Tim Rieser, Senator [Patrick] Leahy, and others champion them up here.

Senator Sullivan, maybe I’ll wait to give a proper shout out to, but I did just want to note that he has been a stalwart champion in ensuring that these issues are bipartisan. Those people who are affected by plastic pollution certainly are not thinking about party affiliation, aren’t thinking about politics. They’re just living the devastating effects of plastic pollution. And it’s really amazing, and when he comes, we’ll get to hear him speak. You know, as a senator from Alaska, just about how personal this is for him and his constituents. So we are grateful to him.

We have with us Unilever Chief Sustainability Officer Rebecca Marmot. Where’s Rebecca? There’s Rebecca. Hi, nice to see you again. And EY’s Global Vice Chair for Sustainability, Amy Brachio. Nice to see you, Amy. And what you’ll hear about today is really a one of its kind public private partnership that we hope is going to expand month by month, bringing in new partners.

We are coming together during Capitol Hill Oceans Week, which is a few days before World Oceans Day. And almost exactly two years since we launched the Save Our Seas Initiative in this very building in either this room or I think the room just around the hall.

Today is also the 80th anniversary of D-Day. And this is a day where we are marking the beginning of the liberation of Europe. And it is a day that we honor our service members, and I do again want to note even though he’s not here, I hope it will get back to him that we celebrate Senator Sullivan and his service. He was just retired as the last actively serving Marine in the U.S. Senate—he just retired a few months ago. And so again, we thank him not only for his leadership on combating plastic pollution and also on Ukraine, I would note but also for decades of military service to our nation.

So bringing us to the issue at hand. I’d like to start by making a request. The next time that you are home on garbage day, and you see that truck outside picture that truck, taking its contents, driving to the beach, and emptying a load chock full of plastic into the sea. Then imagine that just a minute later, another truck pulls up and does the exact same thing. Again and again, every single minute.

Right now, a full garbage truck full of plastic enters our ocean every single minute. And what is worse, as demand for plastic grows, experts estimate that by 2030, this rate will increase to the equivalent of two garbage trucks being loaded into the ocean every minute. And by 2040 at the rate we are on, that will be three garbage trucks every minute. All told, for every human on earth, there are right now about 21,000 pieces of plastic in the ocean. We can see some of the consequences—we see the beaches where the sand has been replaced by a carpet of plastic waste. We see, and our kids bring to us images rightly, of animals tied up in plastic debris who wash up on shore.

But there’s a lot that we can’t see. The microplastics that are now contaminating the food that we eat, the air that we breathe, the water we drink, and unsurprisingly, our bodies themselves. That is why two years ago, we gathered here at the Capitol to launch the Save Our Seas Initiative and to implement the Save Our Seas 2.0 Act. That, thanks to Senator Whitehouse and Senator Sullivan’s leadership, passed both houses of Congress with unanimous support in 2020. Save Our Seas works with local and national governments, with businesses, with civil society, and with other organizations to help countries to reduce, reuse, and recycle plastic. In the past two years alone, these programs have already helped prevent 1.2 million metric tons of plastic from leaking into the environment. That is the equivalent of 127 billion plastic bottles. Today, I’m thrilled to open up a new chapter in the Save Our Seas Initiative and launch the CIRCLE Alliance, a new public private collaboration between Unilever, USAID, and EY. To start, CIRCLE is going to launch in four countries—and these are really important countries when we think about combating plastic pollution: India, Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines. We hope to have the resources to scale to additional countries in the future, and we very much hope as well to bring in new private sector partners and welcome collaboration with our colleagues up on Capitol Hill to do so.

This alliance is designed to take on two major challenges that stand in the way of effective waste management systems around the world. The first challenge is that many companies are of the view that producing a high volume of single-use plastic is simply the most cost-effective way to do business right now. But that is why USAID is working with EY and Unilever to support something called Extended Producer Responsibility or EPR systems, which place the responsibility for the cost of the disposal of plastic waste back onto the producer. In doing so, this incentivizes companies to use less plastic and to make the plastics they do use recyclable. Unilever and EY bring the business expertise we need to design, apply, and scale these policies effectively so that we can create an environment where companies making better choices for their communities are themselves earning better returns.

Many consumers, we know, are troubled by the extensive and unnecessary use of plastics. So we do believe that this is an initiative that is going to actually prove to be good business, and not only good for the environment. We know that consumers across a range of areas are increasingly expressing, with their spending choices, their values, and they are very, very concerned about the growth in plastic pollution. So again, getting the private sector to see this as in their interest to produce in a manner that is environmentally friendly, is a really important next phase of this challenge. The second challenge in many of the countries where we work, the backbone of the waste management system, are informal workers—and many of you have seen these workers up close. Most often they are women, they’re ethnic minorities in their communities—they dominate waste collection, sorting, and recycling.

But because the work is so often stigmatized, underpaid, and undervalued, they lack the resources to improve and to scale their operations. So this is where USAID really can come in, we’ve started a small pilot program, where we offer these entrepreneurs, because that’s what they are, training and equipment to grow their businesses and to help them get their services recognized by local government authorities.

We worked with women like Riza Santoyo. She once spent days pedaling a bike with a cart along the roads in Quezon City in the Philippines, collecting waste, at the same time inhaling pollution from the traffic, and she would earn just a few dollars a day for the long hours of really grueling labor. Then USAID offered her training, and in collaboration with the private sector partners, equipment. Now she has a business, an actual business collecting waste door to door, so she can help collect and sort it before it gets into the environment. She doesn’t have to work the same punishing hours, yet she is managing more waste and actually earning more money—she has doubled her income through this pilot program. This small pilot has trained so far, just 700 women, and it has awarded grants to dozens of women-led micro enterprises to establish or expand their operations. These women, just that small number of women, have prevented an estimated 42.5 metric tons of plastic from entering the environment. That’s about 4.6 million, the equivalent 4.6 million plastic bottles. And that’s just that number of women. Imagine when we scale this sufficiently, given the breadth of the waste collector community, in the countries in which we’re working and all around the world.

We are scaling this program by combining the specific comparative advantages of each partner in the CIRCLE Alliance. And this is really the key takeaway for today: you bring together USAID’s experience in empowering women in plastic waste value chains, and our long standing local relationships with national and local governments—and of course, with civil society. That’s what we bring. Unilever has unrivaled knowledge of, and an unrivaled role in, the plastic supply chains. EY brings experience in providing professional support to help businesses grow and thrive. So this is an incredible foundation for the CIRCLE Alliance, it’s a triple win. It is going to help families rise out of poverty and drive inclusive economic growth for their communities. It helps companies create more local, efficient circular supply chains with reduced carbon footprints. And it stops the flow of plastic into our oceans, improving the health of our marine ecosystems, as well as our communities worldwide.

What’s more CIRCLE is leveraging roughly three private sector dollars for every single $1 that USAID invests—and that is what we at USAID are trying to do more and more of, which is to leverage the resources that the taxpayers, through the Congress, are generous enough to provide to us and turn one into much, much more. CIRCLE is a brilliant use of taxpayer dollars, and one I’m honored to be a part of launching here in our nation’s Congress.

I want to thank you all for being part of this extraordinary initiative.

And now that Senator Sullivan has joined us I want, Senator, to do what I did earlier once again, which is given that today we are celebrating D-Day, to thank you for your longtime service as a Marine, as the I think only recently retired Marine up here on Capitol Hill. And to thank you and Senator Whitehouse for your leadership on this. Thank you so much.

[00:15:12] USAID CHIEF CLIMATE OFFICER GILLIAN CALDWELL: Thank you so much, Administrator Power. At this point, I’m very pleased to introduce Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, one of the original co-sponsors of the Save Our Seas Act of 2020. Senator Whitehouse is a leading global voice when it comes to tackling plastic pollution and a true partner in this effort. He co-founded the bipartisan Senate Oceans Caucus with Senator Murkowski to find common ground in responding to issues facing oceans and coasts, which is precisely what makes initiatives like this possible.

Senator Whitehouse, with the deepest admiration and gratitude, over to you.

[00:15:48] SENATOR SHELDON WHITEHOUSE: Thank you. It is good to be with all of you and with Administrator Power. Let me point out that it’s actually my family—not me nagging my family— about ocean plastics, but I’m actually married to a very talented marine scientist. So I’m on the receiving end, and try to amplify here.

In addition to recognizing Administrator Power, I want to recognize Tim Rieser. He was the Staff Director on the Appropriations Committee when we first got the financial support for USAID here. So he had a big hand in getting that done. Dan and I went in together to testify in front of Senators Leahy and [Lindsey] Graham to get that accomplished. It was a very happy day when it worked.

Dan and I did [Save our Seas] 1.0 together, which was a pretty minor bill, but it was our intention to test the proposition that the Senate could actually legislate in a new area, marine ocean plastic waste. So we were testing that proposition and it worked. And, when we actually got it done, in came USAID to say, just this signal powers us up to do more.

And, as a State Department brat, I had grown up around USAID, and I’m very fond of USAID. So, to have USAID come in and run with that so rapidly was very reassuring to me. So that’s been great, and that encouraged us to go back and do SOS [Save Our Seas] 2.0, which actually put some oomph into the ocean plastics work. And you guys launched based off of that again.

Dan has really been terrific here. Mary Eileen is his staffer. Next to Marilyn is Mariah Pfleger, who’s mine. That’s the deadly duo that makes the two of us look good. I also just want to recognize Kris Sarri, who we hope will be at the State Department quite soon.

Dan and I are working on [Save our Seas] 3.0, so we haven’t completely locked it down, but it’s going to operate, I think, mostly in the recycling space, because we know quite well that recycling is mostly phony. Like, 6 percent of what goes into the blue bin actually gets recycled, and 1 percent of what goes into disposable plastic is recycled. But we’re still working on that because we took an interlude from Ocean Plastics to do a bipartisan international ocean fisheries enforcement bill, which we hope to get into the [National Defense Authorization Act] NDAA and which I think you’ll all be proud of and excited by.

I will close with a couple of things. One, a bunch of us had to go up to Ottawa to complain about the State Department’s position in the plastics treaty. It would be great if that could improve in the weeks and months ahead. I really don’t see any reason for the U.S. to be laggard in that space. And two, I really appreciate our private sector partners, Ernst and Young and Unilever, for participating in this. In particular, I have admired Unilever since they stood up at the Oslo Our Oceans conference, and announced that for every pound of plastic they put out into the world, they were going to recover a pound of waste plastic and bring it back out of the world and see that it was properly disposed of.

And I gather that that is already being accomplished in a number of countries already. And I think the go date is very soon for that actually to be live. So, that moved the industry standard way forward. Most companies have not met that yet, but I really appreciate Unilever’s leadership making that announcement all those years ago.

And I think with that, I’ve said everything that I cared to say. Other than what a pleasure it has been to work with Dan Sullivan on this. It is a lot easier for me to round up unanimous consent for ocean plastics bills, than it is for Dan. And Dan will come up now and you will see what sort of [a] nice, thoughtful, helpful, kindly person he is. But then he switches into that marine colonel mode. And in that mode, that’s how we got unanimous consent on his side. Thanks very much.

[00:20:30] USAID CHIEF CLIMATE OFFICER GILLIAN CALDWELL: Thank you so much, Senator Whitehouse. And now we will indeed hear from either the kindly person or the colonel, I don’t know. Senator Sullivan, who is, of course, one of the initial co-sponsors of the Save Our Seas Act, which really launched USAID’s work on ocean plastic pollution. And every time we hear him speak so viscerally about his own experience encountering plastic pollution in Alaska, we are reinvigorated to make this a priority.

Thank you so much, Senator Sullivan and welcome to the stage.

[00:21:06] SENATOR DAN SULLIVAN: Thank you Gillian. I want to begin by thanking Administrator Power for her great leadership on this. USAID’s focus really underscores one of the reasons I think this is such a powerful and important initiative, because this initiative is very uniting. What I mean by that is when you look kind of politically here, Capitol Hill, this unites Democrats and Republicans, Senate and House, [and] executive branch. You know the Trump administration was key in helping us launch this and design it. Then the Biden administration ran with it just as much.

Again, USAID has been great on this, grabbing elements of this and taking it to a new level, particularly at the international level. And then the stakeholder alignment, the private sector, as Senator Whitehouse mentioned, that is also a really, really important component. So again, I want to also commend and thank EY and Unilever—Rebecca, Amy, for being here. [I] really, really appreciate your guys' leadership. So, this is, from my perspective, what you get when stakeholders unite. It’s a real big challenge, but it’s a solvable challenge. You know, the estimates are, you know, we’re certainly not perfect, the United States on this, but about, over 60 percent of all the plastic waste in the oceans in the world comes from about ten rivers in Asia and Africa. So that’s a targeted thing that we can focus on.

And I also really appreciate the Administrator’s comments about leveraging this, in how $1 on the federal government’s side can be at least $3 on the private sector side. That is just another element about this, which makes it uniting. People like to see that kind of smart use of federal taxpayers’ dollars.

So, I think some of you have heard the kind of work that Senator Whitehouse and I have done. You know, we’re kind of an odd couple here in the Senate. He’s a liberal Democrat, and I’m not, right. But we work on a lot of stuff together, and I wanted to say this before Sheldon left, but we even took a CODEL together, a couple years ago to Normandy and kind of did a staff ride with the Army War College on D-Day and everything.

So that’s particularly memorable, given today that we’re celebrating the 80th anniversary of the Normandy invasion. And so, I want to thank him. He’s been a great partner. We work on a whole host of things that deal with oceans and other areas on foreign policy and national security. He’s been a great partner, a great friend.

And I think it’s important for people to see that you still have these kinds of relationships up here. There’s a lot of things we don’t agree on, but we kind of put those aside and get to work in the areas that we can make a difference on.

So I’ll just give an update, as Senator Whitehouse said, Save Our Seas 2.0 was considered the most—we actually checked this with the Congressional Research Service, so I can say this factually—[it] was considered the most comprehensive ocean cleanup legislation ever passed by the Congress, and it was comprehensive. And then the fact that USAID has come in and made this a big part of initiatives that you’re doing, Administrator Power, it amplifies that comprehensiveness.

So again, I want to thank you and your team on this. We have a move forward. Some of you know that the Save Our Seas 2.0 established a congressionally chartered Marine Debris Foundation. This is really exciting. It’s actually super exciting because they decided to headquarter it in Alaska, in Juneau, Alaska. This is a public private partnership foundation.

There’s not many of these. Congress does not often say, hey, we’re going to put our stamp on a foundation. There’s actually quite a few of these. So, think about, [the] Fish and Wildlife Foundation, American Legion, Boy Scouts. It’s not a big universe. So the fact that we got that done is important. And with the private sector here, that foundation is able to take federal and private sector dollars.

So we think that is going to be a really exciting leading part of this initiative. There’s so many organizations in the private sector that want to help. We think we can build out this foundation in a really exciting way, and it’s very focused on innovative solutions. It has what’s called a genius prize. One of the things that we are looking at, with regard to this, is [for] our private sector to look at the possibility, hopefully someday—which would be great for the private sector, great for whoever comes up with it, but really, really good for the environment—[of] full biodegradable plastics. Right. If a plastic bottle does end up in the ocean, that could fully biodegrade, think about what that could do. So this is what this foundation is focused on. It’s up and running, finally, in Juneau, Alaska. So we’re excited about that.

And then talking about Alaska, this is a really important issue for my constituents, for my state. Senator Whitehouse isn’t here anymore, so I don’t normally do the size jokes about Rhode Island and Alaska, but we are 491 times bigger than Rhode Island. And, in terms of shoreline, Alaska has more coastline than the rest of the lower 48 [states] combined. I don’t have the number, but I think it’s 45,000 miles of coastline.

So, as you know, a lot of the marine debris, ocean debris, comes over across the Pacific. And a lot of that ends up on the shores of my state. And this, of course, is really hard to clean up. We have remote, rugged areas. When we have volunteers, they use boats and helicopters and front-end loaders. [These are] big operations.

But, of course, it impacts the environment, impacts our economy. We’re very proud that Alaska is what I refer to as the superpower of seafood. Over 60 percent of all seafood harvested in America comes from Alaska’s waters. It’s actually almost two thirds. And we’re very proud of our very sustainable, well-managed fisheries. Probably the best managed fisheries in the world.

But this has a hugely negative impact on sustainable fisheries as well. So, we are really pleased that the latest USAID effort on the CIRCLE Alliance is going to redouble what you’ve already been doing Administrator. And, again from the Alaska perspective, the first four countries—the Philippines, Vietnam, India, and Indonesia—were chosen as part of that. That’s exactly the [origins of] the kind of debris that washes up in Alaska.

And I also think from a global perspective, the CIRCLE Alliance is a model for creative public private partnerships. I already mentioned the leveraging of federal dollars, tailoring support for specific countries. And again, that private sector aspect. Unilever and EY, you guys are a really critical, important component of this.

So, we want to thank you again. This is a great partnership that we have all worked together on. It’s a uniting initiative, as I mentioned, both politically and [with] the private sector, public sector, and international elements. When the stakeholders come together like that, you can get really big things done on a big issue.

You can probably see on the Senate side, there’s a lot of motivation to continue working with all of you. And we are looking forward, as I mentioned, to continuing the bipartisan efforts here. But to be honest the government can only do so much. And, that’s why our private sector partners are so critical here. That’s why the Marine Debris Foundation in Alaska is going to be a huge opportunity for more partnership with the private sector and other organizations.

So we’re off to a great start and USAID’s partnership and focus on this has been a tremendous component of what we all want, which is cleaner, more sustainable oceans. And we’re going to get it done with this kind of great partnership and work and initiative. So thank you again, everybody. Appreciate it.

[00:30:39] USAID CHIEF CLIMATE OFFICER GILLIAN CALDWELL: Thank you so much, Senator Sullivan. Fantastic to see this bipartisan support, and to note as well that we are working across the U.S. Government on this issue. The State Department, for example, has a newly launched program called the End Plastic Pollution International Collaborative, or EPIC, which is intended to be really an incubator of innovative ideas and a convener of governments and NGOs and the private sector to advance action towards the circular economy.

We really see CIRCLE and EPIC as complementary programs, and as providing a menu of options for that private sector engagement. So very much excited to deepen our collaboration with the State Department in that area. Next up we’re going to have a panel. We’re going to hear from the private sector partners who have been mentioned so many times, Rebecca Marmot from Unilever and Amy Brachio from EY.

[00:31:37 - Transition to Panel Discussion]

[00:31:47] USAID CHIEF CLIMATE OFFICER GILLIAN CALDWELL: I’m going to start with you, Rebecca. A lot of people talk about innovation, and I think Unilever is really on the forefront on that front, both in terms of your approach to producing and managing the products that you’re generating and in terms of your engagement in the policy terrain. So can you talk to us about concretely what it means for you to innovate at Unilever when it comes to plastic pollution?

[00:32:25] UNILEVER CHIEF SUSTAINABILITY OFFICER REBECCA MARMOT: Thank you Gillian and thanks, everyone. It’s really exciting to be here. I feel slightly like I’m in the West Wing coming as the Brit into Washington. So it’s really important. I think actually the fact that we have such a diverse audience and as we’ve heard, we have representation from across the political spectrum, from the private sector, the NGO audience. I think we’re all aligned very much on how important this is as an issue.

So when it comes to innovation, I really can split that into different approaches. So there’s a classic approach to innovation which is about research and development. Unilever has a dedicated team based around the world and in different countries looking at new materials, new packaging solutions, and how can we make progress.

So that means using less plastic altogether. So we’ve reduced our virgin plastic use by nearly 20 percent over the past few years. It means using better plastics. So moving to PCR, to recyclable plastic materials. So, for example, here in the U.S., Dove and Hellmann’s brands are made totally with recyclable plastics. And then, actually the really exciting part is how do you use no plastics. How do you get out of plastic materials altogether? Because ultimately we all are aiming towards zero plastic waste. So if you think back, for example, over the years, you used to buy a big box of powder detergent. Now, in places like Brazil, we’ve removed that and we’re now using liquids in brands like Omo, using 70 percent less packaging because they’re much more concentrated. We’ve moved to laundry sheets that’s just in a small cardboard box. Again, recyclable.

So I think that innovation through an R&D lens is hugely exciting and it leads to better formats and better packages. But I think we also need to think about innovation from a business model perspective as well. And I think that’s where the systems approach has really come in. So whether that’s things like the partnership we have already existing with EY and the UK Government, TRANSFORM, where we’re investing in social enterprises to look at how do we promote circular economy approaches. So, for example, in Nigeria we work with refuse collectors to collect packaging and we sign an offtake agreement to then buy back that plastic, and we put that PCR into our packaging. So I think that’s super important. I think innovation from an advocacy perspective as well.

And we had the senators talking about the plastics treaty. So Unilever is one of the co-chairs of the UN Plastics Treaty because we’re pushing for a couple of key things. One is to make it mandatory to have these guidelines in place across countries. So not just a suggestion, but make it law, because that reduces the uncertainty for the private sector. And where you’ve got a standardized approach to packaging formats into recycling, you see much greater progress and much quicker progress. And I think we have seen [that] just leaving it to a voluntary basis hasn’t curbed the problem. It also helps in terms of things like EPR programs that we heard Samantha Power talking about. So one standardized system for EPR. So to make sure that actually the onus comes back on the private sector to design for actual recyclability, not just technical recyclability. So I think that’s hugely, hugely important.

And then I think the last thing, if we think about innovation, is also the role that we can play in the private sector on behavior change. So really encouraging all of us to think about our actions when it comes to recycling and to reuse.

So we know when we trialed programs, for example, it’s hugely important for us to partner with the retailers, actually to encourage people to get used to refilling and reusing their bottles rather than what we’ve all gotten used to, which is the convenience of chucking something into the trash. So yeah, I’d say one is R&D. The second part is innovative approaches to advocacy. And then the third is around behavior change.

[00:36:13] USAID CHIEF CLIMATE OFFICER GILLIAN CALDWELL: Very comprehensive and succinct. Thank you. We’re having to make up a little bit of time, so I just combined three questions and she answered six. Thank you so much for your leadership.

And I do want to note that it’s often the companies that really lean forward and get progressive on these issues that face some of the toughest criticism. You’re putting your head above the parapet and you don’t always get rewarded for that. So I want to acknowledge Unilever and its long standing leadership in this and so many other areas. Thank you.

Amy. So EY, of course, is the kind of business acumen, the strategy in the mix when we talk about this, and that’s so important when we talk about the informal sector and the waste pickers, so many of whom are women, the opportunity to empower and improve their businesses, and in turn, the economy, and the return, the results. Can you talk to us about what it means in concrete terms? What are you actually doing in this partnership? Give us some concrete examples.

[00:37:18] EY GLOBAL VICE CHAIR – SUSTAINABILITY AMY BRACHIO: Absolutely. So I’ll try to be equally concise, and I’ll talk through briefly three different things. So first of all, why do we get involved in things like that? And then what excites us about this CIRCLE alliance, and a couple of examples to bring it to life.

And so we’ve been purpose driven for over a decade, and our purpose is building a better working world. And so being able to engage in activities like this really helps bring it to life. And why it’s important for us is because we’ve got a strong corporate social responsibility commitment. Our aim through our Ripples program is to impact a billion lives by 2030, and we have an employee base that really wants to use their skills to be able to give back, going beyond the work that they do on a day-to-day basis. So this is an amazing opportunity to do that.

And so what excites us about the CIRCLE Alliance is that it really taps into the strengths of the private sector and the strengths of the public sector. And it allows us for these amazing impact entrepreneurs, to help with that match between supply and demand. And so they’re going to be able to get access to the skills that we can help contribute. But they also know that they have a customer on the other side that is going to be able to use their product. Right.

And so what we bring to the table for the CIRCLE Alliance is really two things. One, we’ve got amazing professionals around the world, like I mentioned, that really want to use their skills and capabilities to help. So we help the impact entrepreneurs to scale their business through coaching and mentoring of their leadership teams, through doing pro-bono consulting programs that allow them to better scale their organizations. And then we also help with bringing together more partnerships. We’ve got an amazing customer base, and so we’re able to talk to our other like-minded clients about how would you like to contribute to the CIRCLE Alliance.So we’re actively working together to bring more organizations in.

And so then lastly, to maybe bring it to life with a couple of examples. Through TRANSFORM, that Rebecca mentioned, it’s a similar alliance that we’ve worked on together with the UK Government. We helped this impact entrepreneur, they’re called Trashcon, and what they do is they help with picking the waste in India. And that’s one of the biggest issues with respect to recycling.

And they’ve developed this technology, they call it the trash bot. What the trash bot does is it helps to sort. And that’s another big part of the problem. So it sorts the materials that they collect. And then they generate fibers that can be used to do things like shipping pallets. Or one of the things that I was really excited about when I heard about them was—I’m from Minnesota, my o’s normally give me away—Target is one of the organizations that purchases from them, and so they use it for outdoor furniture. And so to be able to see how we’re helping this female-owned impact entrepreneur out of India collect trash, right, and make it into something that can be used by these amazing companies around the world was just really inspiring.

And then, super quickly, I’ve also seen it come to life on the impact that it can have, particularly on women. And so another organization, Gemini Corp, they are a waste management organization and they help bring trash pickers again in India into the formal economy. And I got to visit one of the locations where it was, you know, it was clean, it was powered by women, it was operated in a compliant manner. And then I got to visit another, similar operation that was not compliant. And to see the difference of how the private sector coming in and helping can make a huge impact on lives.

[00:41:33] USAID CHIEF CLIMATE OFFICER GILLIAN CALDWELL: Thank you both so much for this. We are at time. But just the deepest gratitude and admiration for your work and, as was mentioned by Administrator Power, we are keen to invite and include many more private sector partnerships in this relationship. I’ve had conversations with the CEO of Gemini and several other members of his senior team, and I know we’re already looking at what the opportunities are for partnership in India. And I believe there may even be some other prospective partners in the room. So please do come up and find us.

I also want to acknowledge our team. Could the USAID staff here please stand so that we can all see who we are? I mean, everybody, Jamille [Bigio] and Jeff [Haeni] and Ali [Syverson]. All right. Thank you. So you can grab any of these people if you want to learn more. Monica [Bansal] and Clare [Romanik] right over here, are deeply expert in these areas. So thank you so much for your time today and I hope you have a fabulous conversation. We do have the room for a bit longer so that you have an opportunity to connect with each other. Thank you.

[00:42:45 - END]