In the business of dirty oceans: The emergence of business models for marine plastic management

The issue of marine plastic weighs heavy on the minds of citizens, researchers, ocean advocates and policymakers. This concern has led to top-down government regulations, such as plastic bag and microbead bans, alongside bottom-up actions, such as community-led cleanups and widespread citizen science campaigns. Given the political and societal attention, managing marine plastic has become an opportunity for entrepreneurs to exploit. Many innovative business models have emerged to capitalize on this opportunity in the last five years. These new and understudied business models are capturing value in unique ways and providing benefits for their customers, but also for marine ecosystems. This study systematically analyzes over 35 marine plastic management (MPM) business models to understand the value capture and creation mechanisms unique to this emerging industry. We utilize content analysis supplemented by eight interviews with experts and entrepreneurs, and propose a typology of four overarching categories of MPM; preventing, collecting, transforming and monitoring. We also highlight two pathways that have the potential to widely scale up MPM. The first pathway is joint-ventures between stakeholders in the value chain, which has been used to monetize collection, treatment and upcycling of abandoned fishing gear to create luxury products. The second involves decentralized technological diffusion, referring mainly to the design and dissemination of low-tech, open-source recycling techniques. Our results suggest an abundance of business models that create products with recovered PET or recycled fishing nets, and a shortage of business models targeting monitoring, collecting and prevention at key leakage points.