Ocean Recovery Alliance

Ocean Recovery Alliance is an NGO focused on creating innovative solutions and collaborations to improve the health of the ocean. Its network of organizations, entrepreneurs, and innovators, particularly related to plastic sustainability and circularity, but also dedicated to broad ocean governance and new thought leadership, and helps to create engaged and active dialogue where gaps often occur between entities that often do not have a history of working with one another. The group creates purposefully designed activities to educate, build awareness, and provide solutions that inspire positive societal change at the community, national, and international levels.

Ocean Recovery Alliance has been working in Cambodia for six years with some of the floating and stilted villages along the famous Tonle Sap Lake. Programs include the Inland Ocean Festival which happens in June, before the waters of the lake rise, the Water Falling Festival, which happens in November, and is ongoing throughout the year, is the innovative Harvest Plastic Program which focuses on the recovery of plastic from village households which have no waste management options.  This immediately helps to avoid dumping in waters and burning of material, bringing community engagement and societal change to the way plastic is dealt with and recovered for much better use in recycling, as it is collected without food waste and other contamination.

The Harvest Plastic program was initiated by Ocean Recovery Alliance and NGO2 Bambooshoot Foundation in Cambodia during the pandemic in 2020 and is now being replicated successfully in Lombok, Indonesia, thanks to one-year funding from Google via AVPN.  The programs are active in village communities and are now showing proof of how the group’s Jurisdictional Upswell movement brings about positive societal change across entire communities at one time, but they also need continued support, as the local governments endorse this work, but local funding resources are not available.  Focusing on plastic of all types from households before it is allowed to be contaminated by other waste materials, allows for scaled recovery of material, with quality, which helps initiate and inspire recycling solutions and fit-for-purpose technologies that expand this plastic feedstock into broader circular economy markets.

Here’s a video of the Harvest Plastic Program in Lombok, and the innovative Harvest Plastic Rewards program.

Within the six months of our Harvest Plastic program in Lombok in five village communities, they have engaged over 4,500 people with bi-monthly collections, recovering over 6,000kg (6 tons) of plastic each month.  The goal is to expand this program to new jurisdictions, within Lombok, and the Tonle Sap region of Cambodia, as well as into new countries where replication can take place.

The Inland Ocean Festival was established in Cambodia by Ocean Recovery Alliance and its partner NGO2 Bambooshoot Foundation in 2023 to celebrate Cambodia’s “Inland Ocean” – the Tonle Sap Lake.  The event was organized in collaboration with a traditional local monk festival to celebrate the rising waters of the lake and the pending monsoon season, with over 10,000 local community visitors in attendance. The festival includes a large parade from Kampong Phluk to the shores of the lake with over 150 local high school students who participated in a baby puppet lantern-making workshop to create illuminated lanterns that represent the wildlife of the lake.  The event celebrates water appreciation, and pride for the outdoors, and engages the community in programs for reducing plastic pollution via the Harvest Plastic Program.

The 2nd annual Inland Ocean Festival was held on June 8th, 2024, (also the UN’s World Ocean Day), and is part of the annual Water Rising Festival, honoring both the seasonal change in water levels.  The success of last year’s event brought extra support in the 2nd annual event from Smart and government departments for the environment and tourism.  With over 180 villages in the lake area, the goal is to spread communication, education, and awareness about water protection and the importance of reduced plastic pollution.  ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Click here to watch a video of the Baby Lantern Puppet Parade and Night Aquarium.

**The founder of Ocean Recovery Alliance, Douglas Woodring, was awarded the prestigious 2018 Prince Albert Prize for Innovative Philanthropy for his work with the ocean (the 2019 prize was awarded to Mr. Paul Polman, former CEO of Unilever for his sustainability work). Two of the group’s international programs were launched at the Clinton Global Initiative in 2010, the Global Alert platform, and the Plastic Disclosure Project.  Mr. Woodring is a United Nations Environment (UNEP) Climate Hero for his efforts, as well as a Google Earth Hero. Mr. Woodring has been on the advisory board of the XPrize, and The Economist’s World Oceans Summit, and in 2011, he co-authored the United Nations Environmental Program Yearbook chapter on the danger of plastic in the ocean.

The group is one of the first NGOs in the world to have worked with both UNEP and the World Bank on plastic pollution and ocean issues and is the founder of the Plasticity Forum, first launched at the Rio+20 Earth Summit and has since been held in 13 cities around the world, with the 2019 event co-hosted with UNEP in Bangkok at their Sea of Solutions Conference. The conference is one of the few that solely focuses on the future of plastic, and where the leaders are going with solutions, innovations, and opportunities, for a world with a reduced waste footprint.  A video of the virtual event, held this past November, with UNEP and Vietnam, can be seen here.

Ocean Recovery Alliance works with companies, governments, multi-lateral institutions, universities, and with education programs.  Its recent UNEP-funded report which scored 580 global commitments on plastic pollution has now been turned into a new organization called the Commitments Accelerator for Plastic Pollution (CAPP), which now has three flagship nations as its partners – Fiji, Curacao, and Seychelles.  This is an ongoing program, which now includes work with India, and is intended for a wide variety of stakeholder involvement across countries, companies, and community organizations.

Currently, among some of its projects, Ocean Recovery Alliance is working with the UNEP in Malaysia and Thailand, as part of the Swedish-funded Sea Circular program, to train 10 companies and two municipalities in each country about using the group’s Plastic Disclosure Project (PDP) footprinting methodology.  This work is ongoing and will be replicated in Ladakh, India, with the help of Anant University, and a local partner, where three cities will undergo the same footprinting analysis.   This type of work will be replicated where possible, including a program along the coastline of Kenya, with a local partner which will start early 2021, modeled roughly after the Cambodian type of program it has initiated.

Ocean Recovery Alliance is a registered charitable organization based in Hong Kong, with tax-free status under Section 88 of the Inland Revenue Ordinance.