Recap of the World Economic Forum Congress 2023

Every year, the World Economic Forum comes together with leaders from government, businesses and civil society to address the most pressing problems that the world faces, and to talk about how to implement strategies to overcome them. Plastiks was invited to speak on a panel moderated by ImpactScope, which helps social enterprises to harness the opportunities of web3 tools. The panel, moderated by Esther Val of ImpactScope, focused on the topic of “off-chain impact and on-chain value”.  

We had the pleasure of sharing the panel with Charlie Moore of Chainlink Labs, Lucia Gallardo of Emerge, and Rui Serapicos and Jasper Driessens from Glo. We talked about regenerative finance, how web3 is helping to achieve sustainable development goals, and how to communicate web3 and NFTs to a greater audience. Our CEO André Vanyi-Robin also spoke about Plastiks, our vision, our mission and how recovery projects, artists, and companies can get involved with plastic recovery.

The event was successful, in that the Plastiks team met new faces and impact projects, and attended some very interesting discussions, such as Digitalizing and Open Sourcing Methodologies at Hedera Haus, with Anna Lerner Nesbitt of Climate Collective.

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We believe that for change to happen at a local, international and systemic level to solve some of the problems we now face in the world, such as plastic pollution and carbon emissions, there needs to be transparency, measurable impact and traceability of actions taken. Impact measurement and verification appears to be one of the greatest challenges for impact investment.

The United Nations Development Programme estimates that it will be impossible to achieve the sustainable development goals (SDGs) by 2030 without additional annual investment of "5 to 7 trillion USD per year". However, in its "Investing for Impact: The Global Impact Investing Market" report for 2020, the International Finance Center reported that 2.3 trillion USD was being invested in impact that year alone. More than 27% of this amount went into “measured” impact assets.

Web3 and blockchain can help to measure impact, providing transparency and decentralization of data. Plastiks works with the Celo blockchain, which also offsets any CO2 that it produces from transactions. Our plastic recovery guarantees are also proof of verification, providing proof that plastic has been recovered. By incorporating web3 and blockchain technology, Plastiks can ensure full traceability, transparency and verification for its plastic recovery guarantees on the Plastiks platform.

The world is at a critical standpoint, particularly after Covid-19, and with the current war on the Ukraine. Food and energy prices are soaring, economic growth is stalling in the world’s largest economies, emerging markets are suffering, all the while we are struggling to navigate the climate crisis. We hope to see promises fulfilled to tackle the magnitude of current crises after this year's annual congress, and we hope that our solution to plastic pollution is adopted throughout the globe.  

Our solution in summary, is providing a plastic recovery guarantee marketplace, whereby companies, but also individuals from developed countries can sponsor plastic recovery in emerging countries, and in doing so achieve their ESG goals, contribute to the sustainable development goals, engage with their community and build a stronger brand reputation. Blockchain technology provides us with traceability and transparency, while our strict verification process of recovery project invoices is proof that our plastic recovery guarantees can guarantee that plastic has not gone into the environment.  

You can see snippets of the panel, plus CEO of Plastiks, André Vanyi-Robin pitch our verified solution to plastic pollution in Davos on our YouTube channel.