It is focused on helping river-adjacent communities build waste infrastructure to keep plastic out of the water.

Renew Ganga is the inaugural project of Renew Oceans and is sponsored by the Alliance to End Plastic Waste.

Renew Ganga is one of the many programs being developed and funded by the Alliance, a non-profit established in 2019, by a group of nearly 40 global companies that make, use, and recycle plastics.

It aims to divert 100,000 pounds of plastic waste from the Ganges in 2019 and one million pounds in 2020. It is based in Varanasi.

Renew Ganga is concentrating on plastic waste transported by the Assi Nala, which is so thick with trash that it is almost impossible to see water.

The Renew Ganga model is dubbed “The 3 C’s”—collection, conversion, and community:

The approach involves manual clean-up efforts and the installation of physical barriers (Renew Oceans’ prototype Re-Fence) to collect and divert soft and hard plastic waste on land and in the water.

Bio-fence technology will be used to divert plastic waste as currents flow through rivers.