One Mans Trash Can Make Another Man's Home: How The One Movement Are Repurposing Ocean Plastics

The One Movement is on a mission to repurpose plastic waste to better the lives of the most marginalised people, with every purchase of The One-Bottle helping transform ocean plastics into homes. Founded by actor Petrice Jones from Netflix’s Locke and Key last year to support projects making a positive impact on the environment. The One Movement recently worked with Plastics for Change to build houses in India, using repurposed plastic and are committed to making genuine change and highlighting the importance of reducing consumption and waste by making conscious decisions in your day to day life and continuing their work with like-minded charities to maximise their impact.  

MR: What inspired you to start The One Movement?

PJ: I think the key thing was that I saw how difficult it was to really do something meaningful on a day to day basis, and that was the goal of The One Movement - to make it easier and simpler to have a genuine and measurable impact on something in the world that we believe in. You know, plastic pollution is an undeniable issue and I wanted to find a way to make it easier for people to make a difference in something that seems far too big to tackle. When you hear about 8 million tons of plastic surging into the ocean, it kind of seems unmanageable so the goal was to simply make impact simple, which is our hashtag #ImpactMadeSimple. To help make those small life changes, and through those purchases begin to undo the damage we had already done in this world.

MR: What have been some of the ups and downs you have encountered while building The One Movement? 

PJ: Where do I start, the challenges have been immeasurable. I think one of the key things that stand out is the challenge of navigating COVID-19, in a world where there has been, for lack of a better word, a lot of chaos. It's been hard to rise above the noise and get a meaningful message out there about what it is you are trying to do, and what it is you are trying to achieve. Furthermore, with COVID-19, just the manufacturing phase and shipping phase of making a product has been really difficult, and frankly, the Trump/Biden election in 2020 was a very tumultuous time, particularly on social media. The kind of content that was being put out and the kind of things that were being politicised, the environment being one. I always had the standpoint that the environment itself is not a political subject for leveraging in your campaign although it has become a prevalent part of the conversation and therefore has some political standing. This comes with its issues because when you politicise the environment you politicise the language around it and not being able to use certain words like 'single-use plastic' on Facebook in advertising can stand as a big problem for someone who wants to get their products out there. Many companies suffered from this issue, not just us. Not being allowed to use a certain language and having to get creative about how we navigated around this. But at the same time there have been upsides, our team has continued to increase and the belief and support in the project we are making has grown exponentially. On top of this, we built our first house last year and it was incredible. It has running water and electricity and a family of 5 living in it including children so it's really one of the biggest achievements we've had. To see that come to life -  a waste collector and his family living in a house built of recycled ocean plastic - that's probably been the biggest 'up' to date and the next one we will be launching very soon.

MR: Do you have any exciting projects coming up?

PJ: The most exciting thing we have coming up is the official launch of The One Movement website. This will be in early November, we are very excited to get the ball rolling and just before that will be our pre-launch, which will consist of a big giveaway, lots of great eco-friendly prizes from some of our brand partners. You can check this out at https://theonemovement.co/. We will also be considering another round of ChangeMakers in the future, maybe in the new year but not quite sure yet. That's about it, we are heavily focused on getting the structure of our business together and getting our online business up and running.

MR: What advice would you give to someone who wants to live a more sustainable life?

PJ: The first thing that really comes to mind, naturally, is to get yourself a reusable water bottle like the One Bottle, but the truth is, reusables are not the thing that makes people sustainable. The everyday choices are the things that make people more sustainable and those everyday choices come from a perspective of oneself and how we see ourselves, it determines the kind of decisions we make and once you fall out of love with the idea of being cool, to me, you will be truly sustainable. You know, it's nice to have the freshest clothes and the newest crepes, and it can be hard to make the decision to not follow trends and be a part of this thing that we are all so accustomed to being a part of, that just racks up footprints left, right and centre. We need to be aware of this! Even I have to maintain being aware of that, and commit to buying less and asking myself, do I really need this? Also, taking pride in making those sustainable decisions and standing by them and finding your self-esteem and your adequacy in the decision you make to be a good person and to make choices that benefit not just you but the people around you, the environment and the animals around you. It's a fundamental part of that and I personally see a very big correlation between self-esteem and consumerism. It’s fairly obvious for anyone that is looking and structurally obvious for marketing, which is quite deliberate, which is why it’s a hard habit to break, arguably one of the toughest addictions, especially once the dopamine hits and you find things that make you feel good about yourself but maybe don't necessarily serve you or anyone else in the long run. So navigating that and finding that adequacy and finding that being a good person to me is one of the first steps to living a more sustainable lifestyle, it does become easier but it's a process, something you commit to and it's a journey to be enjoyed and not forced, just take everything one step at a time.

MR: Your company repurposes ocean plastic and turn it into low-cost housing, can you tell our readers a little bit more about the process? 

PJ: So for every bottle purchased from The One Movement, we can remove and transform the equivalent of 2000 single-use plastics and transform the weight of that into construction material. We all know that plastic is very robust, which is often kind of the issue we are facing when it comes to plastic pollution, it really sticks around which is why we turn it into plastic bricks, panels and other building materials for a house. So we take the lowest quality plastic, low-density polyethene, which is number 4 on the recycling scale. We compress and compact it down very tightly and turn it into a very large panel. So these panels are made of your snicker wrapper and your crisp packets and stuff like that, that's the building material that we are using to construct our houses. The first house was built in Mangalore, India, which is one of the sites by our partners, Plastics For Change, who have made this all possible. They have boots on the ground dealing with plastic pollution and are the intermediary that helped make project Namma Manne, we work with them to find locations for the houses. We've identified the location and now put the first house on it and are working towards the next 20 houses on the same site, but have the ultimate goal of building 100 houses for 100 waste collectors and their families

MR: I love how sustainable your company is, what inspired you to use repurposed materials?

PJ: Well for us, or me personally, it was about telling stories. The story of plastic pollution is now being sufficiently told. The coverage of plastic pollution has grown exponentially particularly the 'Hydrate Like' and the 'Stop Sucking' campaigns by Lonely Whale, which really highlighted plastic waste. It's important to remember that it’s not just a plastic pollution crisis, regardless of the narrative that these large conglomerates would like to put out, there is a plastic issue from the top of the chain all the way through to disposal and the toxic emissions it creates. We were heavily focused on how this was affecting people and the untold story about plastic trash. There are 100/1000 containers being shipped overseas full of recycling from many countries in Europe, Canada, the USA and Australia. All this rubbish is often shipped to China who is very capable of dealing with it and turning it into something useful, being the manufacturing capital of the world. However, with their increasingly stringent rules on them receiving imports of rubbish and recycling, the most recent of which being National Sword, which banned all imports of all recycling for new materials and new goods, all that waste has to be shipped somewhere else, so it ends up in other countries like Indonesia, Vietnam or India that lack the infrastructure to process it and it's often shipped illegally which is growing into a large problem. The human side of this problem sees people in places like Mangalore, India waking up and seeing our rubbish on their doorsteps, in their towns, their waterways and seas. It's like dumping all your rubbish in your neighbours garden and telling them it's now their problem. In our opinion, this is very unjust and seeing the level of the homeless crisis in India, of which so many are waste collectors, which is vital and pivotal work, the last line of defence against ocean plastic. It didn't sit right with us to just watch this happen, we wanted to do something about it and tell that story and that's where project Namma Manne came from. We wanted to be part of that process in helping some of these people who are doing such important work.

MR: Can you tell me a little more about your plastic bottle initiative?

PJ: The plastic bottle initiative was very similar to our Namme Manne story, it was really about making a simple impact. Follow us on Instagram, sign up to our email list, do any number of actions and remove single-use plastic from ocean bound waterways. It was really about holding evident the idea of doing something simple to create an impact, that's really all there was to it, we wanted to display that idea of - you make a choice, you make an action and there is a reaction, there is something that happens, an impact that can be made.

MR: What has been the most alarming plastic pollution you have seen with The One Movement?

PJ: I think the most alarming part of the entire thing is how normalised it has become. It's normal for us to throw away any number of plastic items, or any non-recyclable items that we decide are no longer holding value, and give no thought to where they end up. And equally, it’s been normalised for many people in the global south to be living in other people's rubbish and to be surrounded by it and suffer the toxicity of the air when that trash gets burned. That is to me, the most shocking part, that it's all very normal because there are very few people out there saying "This is not normal" and it's not OK and it's a huge issue.

MR: POC are often left out of conversations that concern them and affect them directly. You launched your Eco Fund this year that specifically helps fund BIPOC activists. I would love to know more about this initiative. 

PJ: I think that we are all guilty of prescribing solutions about what's best for other people when we don't truly know, even with the best intentions. They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions and that is a huge part of the issue that we face, not just in this debate but in many. "Kindly let me help you or you will drown,'' said the monkey, putting the fish safely up the tree, is an old proverb that suggests you don't know what's good for anybody else and often you don't know what's good for you. But who do we listen to when trying to figure out what to do and what solution is genuinely going to be best for the community and the planet? With a keen eye, you will notice when you are doing something that is not only beneficial for a community, but also for the environment. An example of this would be a community garden in an urban area. Not only will you supply fresh fruit and veg to a local community that doesn't have access to it, but you're also creating more local food that has a much smaller footprint on the environment. At the end of the day, if you’re not from the area or don’t live in the community, you are not fully equipped to genuinely understand or provide solutions to the problems they face. So, Change Makers was just about that. About giving opportunities to people who actually understand their communities and the things they want to achieve, create goals that are going to help people. That was the foundational intention of One Movement Change Makers and it's no secret that the vast majority of these areas where they face environmental problems of air quality, food deserts are often communities of colour. It was about giving those people opportunities to do something about it. Which was also a key part of our Namma Manne project. When we tested out the project for the first house, we asked the community what they thought, we offered it to a community leader named Jayakar, who willingly accepted and it has now become something that is sought after and is being asked about. So, it was important to us to present this as an option before we came in and started clearing the land to create these houses for people not knowing if this is what they wanted. We must listen to what their actual needs are because if you don't you're stumbling in the dark and you don't know what kind of issues you are going to be creating by prescribing a solution for a problem you don't fully understand

MR: Greenwashing is such an issue, what advice would you give to people looking to find sustainable companies to buy from or work with? What should they look for? 

PJ: Oh boy, yeah. Greenwashing has increasingly become one of the biggest problems that we face in the environmental and sustainability movement. Everybody’s trying to look like they're doing more than they are and spending more money on their marketing budget to show how green they are.

Greenwashing is something that even good companies who are genuinely trying to make a difference can do unknowingly. It can be very difficult from a marketing standpoint to give your product or your service its best chance and whilst being so careful with the language, and that is fundamental to me, language is the key thing that customers should watch out for. From a dietary perspective, a good example is the term natural, which doesn’t really mean anything in many countries. Naturally flavoured with other natural flavours, doesn't really mean a whole lot. Eco-friendly doesn't always mean an awful lot either, it's a word that we have all come to use and we even use in the One Movement and we know the intention behind it. We understand why our product is more eco-friendly, but the eco-friendly version of the unsustainable toilet paper might not mean anything. It might just be 10% better, which we all know is still nowhere near good enough and nowhere near as good as it could and should be.

So purchase from companies that you believe in. 

And now we all know that greenwashing is a thing to the point where there's actually a word for it, we should all be on the lookout for it and identify greenwashing because it is highly prevalent in your basic supermarket. So, to mildly summarise something that I could talk about all day, you have to pay attention. Pay attention to the language, bio-based doesn't mean the same as biodegradable. These words will lead to making mistakes when you're trying to be more sustainable. So understanding that language is really important. So do your own research so you can understand what to look for. 

MR: You have so many reputable ambassadors, what do you look for in your ambassadors? 

PJ: So, a big part of deciding who we are going to accept is finding people who are trying to head to the same destination, we're not all getting on at the same stop, so it's important to allow people to start their journey from wherever they are, encouraging them to take those positive steps towards a more environmentally conscious and friendly lifestyle. The main thing for us at first was really, “are you willing to make that pledge and start taking steps to live a more environmentally conscious and friendly lifestyle?” We were also aware that we didn't know everything. I'm very new to the environmental space. I am a baby in the world of activism and, and making a change in the world. There are people inside my company, outside my company who have been doing this for many years and understand it much better than I do and who are probably a lot more environmentally friendly than I am, but I'm here and I am trying to do better.

So that was really the requirement that we were asking of people and I reached out to a lot of people that I know from the entertainment industry, people who I believe would understand these problems. People who want to be a part of helping find a solution and want to support The One Movement in doing that. We have a ton of ambassadors and I do think over time we will refine that process of fishing out real talent and people who are making waves in the environmental space and those who are just trying to make waves in the space of personal change by making better choices. Everyone's journey is valid and everybody's journey is important.

MR: Name three things you can’t do without?

PJ: Three things I can't live without - My partner Sophia, my mum Claire and my One Bottle. I know, that was a shameless plug because I can obviously live without my water bottle but you've got to take the opportunities when they are there, haven't you?

MR: Ha-ha absolutely!

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• sustainability
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