Keep Sea Blue tackles marine plastic pollution with Oracle Blockchain

The independent, nonprofit organization in Athens, Greece, has a mission to reduce plastic waste in the Mediterranean Sea and create a more sustainable economy through coastline plastic collection, recycling, and reuse. By bringing collectors, recyclers, packaging producers, and brand owners onto a single platform, the organization helps increase process transparency along the value chain.

To achieve this mission, the organization needed a reliable partner to help build and ensure a trustworthy, collaborative environment. Keep Sea Blue also needed to help stakeholders share valuable information and validate the entire process from waste collection to high-quality secondary raw plastic material, which is then reused for the creation of new products.

Keep Sea Blue chose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) because of the product's well-established reputation.

“Since this is something very new, we needed a reliable partner, somebody to count on and build trust,” says Founder Lefteris Bastakis. “As a technology provider with an innovative solution and a wide portfolio of clients, Oracle also has the potential to further spread the word about our initiative.”

Through the use of its Recovered Seaside Plastic platform, powered by Oracle Blockchain technology and the low code Oracle APEX with Oracle Standard Database Service, Keep Sea Blue has managed to provide stakeholders with a secure digital pathway across the whole plastics value chain.

The nonprofit has been able to deliver on its initial traceability and transparency promise made to partners and stakeholders and collect approximately 150 tons of plastic bottles per month. Plastic waste is then turned into Recovered Seaside Plastic, a valuable raw material.

Thanks to the Recovered Seaside Plastic platform, transactions taking place between stakeholders of the plastics value chain are recorded in a secure, easily accessible, and unaltered way. The increased level of established trust helps consolidate the position of stakeholders and relationships with customers, which benefits not only the Greek economy but also the marine environment.

“The good thing about what we have created is that you can now track and see what is happening with the waste you’ve collected. If a team of volunteers or a local community collects 200 kilos of plastic, they can check where this plastic ends up and how it’s been used to create a new product. And that’s extremely motivating,” says Founder Lefteris Bastakis.

Keep Sea Blue worked with APT Information Systems on the migration. “When we started discussions with Keep Sea Blue, we began reading about Oracle Blockchain and it was a matter of a week or two to understand how we could develop on the platform and how we could put our expertise on Oracle APEX to build the solution,” says Giorgos Ntegiannis, APT operations manager. “Whenever we needed the support of Oracle, our guys had an answer within a business day or two.”