Material Recovery Facility opened in the Maldives

In recent years, the Maldives has been putting in extra effort to protect the small island nation against the adverse effects of climate change. As time goes on and the adverse effects of climate change such as unpredictable and extreme weather conditions, sea level rising and increased temperatures have started impacting more and more countries, especially in the South East Asian region, smaller nations such as the Maldives have started paying closer attention to what they can do in order to reduce such effects.

With this, the Maldives had started taking one major step towards becoming more environmentally conscious with its efforts to reduce plastic usage in the country. Though the ‘Save the Turtles’ movement is what really picked up the need to reduce the usage of plastic in our day-to-day life, for Maldivians the biggest steps towards largely reducing the amount of plastic used started as late as 2020. This initiative, however late it may have started, started getting taken seriously not only by the Government of the Maldives but the citizens as well as some businesses as well.

The initiative by the Government heavily focused on completely reducing and stopping the usage of single-use plastic in the Maldives by banning some products, forcing importers to get goods that are packaged in a more sustainable manner. On a smaller scale, small to medium businesses as well as the citizens of the country have also started slowly moving towards a much greener and sustainable way of life by making some important switches such as moving from plastic bags to paper or cloth bags and replacing plastic straws with paper and metal straws.

And now, this initiative to reduce plastic in the country is being taken to another milestone as the Coca-Cola Foundation in partnership with Maldives Ocean Plastic Alliance (MOPA) has officially opened the first Material Recovery Facility (MRF) in the Maldives. This facility will act as the main hub to collect, recycle and carefully discard plastic in a mindful manner, reducing the negative impacts that it has on the environment. 

MOPA, which is a non-profit, non-government organization which was founded by the previous Minister of Environment and Energy of the Maldives Mr Thoriq Ibrahim, is an entity which is dedicated to working towards reducing, recovering and reusing, repurposing and recycling plastic in the Maldives. In its latest partnership with several Atoll Councils, resorts, Urbanco and the Coca-Cola Foundation, MOPA can finally take some major steps towards managing the plastic waste in the Maldives in a more proper manner. 

Especially due to the large number of support that MOPA is getting on this project, it might prove to be successful as this facility can act as a critical system for managing waste and processing recyclable materials such as PET and selling them as raw materials for new products, therefore preventing environmental pollution and reducing the plastic waste dumped in the environment. 

A large portion of the funding for this project came from the Coca-Cola Foundation which invested a total of USD 150,000 to this project.