you're right, 'con' was far too strong and unfair of a word.
They seem like decent enough people, but completely incapable of running a project like this. Which is what a significant portion of the non-profit world is made up of.
I don't think its all good though if someone donates to keep it alive - there's many FAR more worthy organizations to give money to, be it for plastic or any other cause. And, quite often, those that receive large amounts of funds are far better at marketing (or, worse, playing "the game"), than actually operating
I agree with almost everything, except that it's a problem if someone donates.
Some of the donation game is a competition (for example, applying for grants, or foundation funding), where the dynamic you described dominates. Much of it is not. In many cases, a rich person just cuts a check out of their leisure budget. That's why I compared this to buying a supercar. The rich person learns something, and has something fun to do more constructive than, well, many of the things rich people do.
Money is a social construct; it's just a way of keeping score, and organizing people. At the end, what matters is what you do, and what resources you use. The better question isn't what else the /money/ could be used for, but what else the actual inputs --- the /people, space, and tools/ --- could be used for.
If those same people are making military weapons, optimizing ad clicks, or running cons, that's a negative use of resources.
It's very possible a rich person decides they just want to:
- give a bunch of people space to follow their passion (same as an arts grant);
- view this as a part of personal development (same as giving tuition to a college);
- a research grant (interesting open information will come out, which is perhaps a few steps away from being useful;
- promotion of recycling; or
- just funding this on the off-chance something big comes of it.
The Ocean Cleanup immediately comes to mind. I very much doubt that they're even slightly "sustainable" in a financial sense, but their engineering and logistics efforts seem to be serious, and outcomes meaningful.
And I've seen various cottage industries in the developing world grow out of/highlighted by Precious Plastic - ones who provide perhaps 5-30 jobs in poor and polluted areas of the world. A warehouse, some crude but effective machinery for processing the waste.
I will mention. Ocean Cleanup has a 55 million Euro budget. Precious Plastic is being criticized for having squandered a 100k donation. That 550 times less.
Ocean Cleanup claims to have removed 21,000 metric tons of plastic in its existence.
If we assume linear growth in budget, that's $330M Euro / 21k ton = 15,000 Euro per ton of garbage.
About 10 million tons of plastic end up in the ocean each year, so over their history, they've cleaned up 0.2% of the annual input.
I can't really comment if any of that good or bad, but I thought numbers (even if squishy estimates) would be helpful to inform the discussion.
If I wanted to spend 100k on plastic recycling, I’d start a company with a viable business model. The most probable business model would be shaming big companies into paying me for green washing, so hiring great marketing talent would be top priority. Getting the first companies on board to fund further development would be second.
They seem like decent enough people, but completely incapable of running a project like this. Which is what a significant portion of the non-profit world is made up of.
I don't think its all good though if someone donates to keep it alive - there's many FAR more worthy organizations to give money to, be it for plastic or any other cause. And, quite often, those that receive large amounts of funds are far better at marketing (or, worse, playing "the game"), than actually operating