Companies are under growing pressure to reduce the amount of plastic they produce and consume, as the plastic waste choking the oceans continues to horrify consumers, anger activists and worry investors.

But for some companies, there is only so much plastic they can realistically remove from their operations for the foreseeable future.

A restaurant can stop offering customers straws, coffee cup lids and carrier bags. But what about the food packaging that extends a product’s shelf life?

Companies can offset unavoidable plastic use by investing in projects that tackle plastic pollution. This is known as plastic offsetting.

The first organisation to offer companies a plastic offsetting service was Seven Clean Seas, the brainchild of former financial advisor and shipbroker Tom Peacock-Nazil, who founded his firm in 2018.

The Singapore-based company, which is already profitable after less than two years of operations, offsets the plastic a company cannot eliminate by removing an equivalent amount of plastic trash from beaches and waterways around Southeast Asia.

So, should plastic offsetting be subject to the same sort of scrutiny as carbon offsetting, which critics say allows big corporate polluters to buy their way out of responsibility for the environmental damage they’ve caused?

Hailin Pek, manager of Singapore-based waste reduction non-profit Zero Waste SG, said that she thinks that plastic offsetting is “feasible” as part of the transition towards the circular economy, but companies should still look to reduce the plastic they use first.

In this interview with Eco-Business, Peacock-Nazil talks about the challenges of scaling up plastic offsetting, his concerns about companies using offsets to greenwash their plastic footprint, and why the buzzword “circular economy” is still more marketing than reality.

Read the full article about plastic off-setting by Robin Hicks at Eco-Business.