Often deemed hard to recycle, beverage cartons are the focus of a new initiative run by Circular Action, a BVRio group company, in partnership with Tetra Pak and Packaging Recycling Organisation Vietnam (PRO Vietnam), which will not only provide a recycling solution, but which will also deliver additional income to potentially hundreds of informal waste pickers.

Since April this year, the second phase of our 'Fishing for litter' project has been supporting 25 families from Ilha do Governador, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to remove waste from Guanabara Bay.

In June, BVRio completed an 18-month-long pilot project in partnership with PREVENT Waste Alliance that benefited ten Brazilian waste picker cooperatives and a Mexican network of collectors through the issuance of circular credits.

In support of this year’s United Nations World Oceans Day, we have looked back on our decade of activities in developing market mechanisms to support initiatives that remove or prevent ocean pollution, and we are celebrating those initiatives on the Circular Action Hub who do the same.

BVRio has today, as part of a group of voluntary standard setters under the PREVENT Waste Alliance and with support from the ValuCred consortium, released a joint statement welcoming the resolution ‘End plastic pollution: Towards an international legally binding instrument’ adopted at the fifth session of the UN Environment Assembly (UNEA-5) in Nairobi.

BVRio’s circular action team has expanded this month with the addition of two new members of staff, who will increase capacity and help further develop services for both producers looking for ways to meet EPR and CSER commitments and local waste management initiatives.

BVRio was in Mexico last month to support a circular economy network registered in the Hub’s project directory, accompanying the proceedings of SGS Audit to the project coordinated by the NGO Entreamigos, under the umbrella of ‘Bahia Circular - Community plastics recycling in Mexico’.

The guidelines on best practices for credit systems related to the circular economy are now available in Portuguese and Spanish, as well as English.

BVRio has signed a commitment this week to support the Circular Plastics Programme in the Americas (CPAP), led by the European Union (EU).

BVRio joined the last meeting of the Firjan Social Responsibility Council in Rio de Janeiro on December 9, led by Fernanda Candeias Guimarães (Ternium Brasil).