RFP: Plastic Upcycling Market and Economic Analysis

TL007/SA/PUA

Background
Like many countries around the world, Timor-Leste faces the urgent challenge of finding waste management solutions for plastic. Currently, plastic is burned in trash piles, clogs critical drainage infrastructure or washes up on the country’s once pristine beaches, which causes risks to human health and jeopardizes the potential of the nascent, but promising, tourism industry. The Plastic Upcycling Alliance (PUA) initiative is a three-year program aimed to improve the natural beauty of Timor-Leste while protecting the health and safety of its people by catalyzing the creation and growth of a plastics recycling industry. The program’s goal is to support Timor-Leste on its path to ‘plastic neutral’ status whereby unnecessary plastic use is curtailed and replaced, and up to 20% of Dili’s plastic waste is collected and recycled into locally sought-after products. The three Activity Objectives of the program are:

(1) Reduce Plastic Use;
(2) Increase Plastics Recycling; and
(3) Improve Plastics Management.

Utilizing market-based solutions, the program seeks to establish a value chain for used plastic that will add to Timor-Leste’s small manufacturing base, bring a measure of diversification to an oil-dependent economy, and expand valuable employment and entrepreneurship opportunities. At its core, the program takes a market systems development approach which empowers private sector actors to invest resources into income generating opportunities around plastic waste collection, sorting, processing, and product development, marketing and sales, while simultaneously stimulating market demand for products made from recycled plastic. To achieve that, it co-finances key risk-mitigation elements and activities, such as gathering market information, research and development of new product lines and applications, and potential investment in plastics collection and processing technologies. PUA aims to create enabling conditions for private investment and enduring partnerships between public and private actors, as well as the communities they serve. Key measures of success are:

(a) Citizens see the economic benefit of recycling plastics like the well-established waste metal market; and

(b) The price and quality of products produced by recycled plastic are better than competing alternatives in the local market.