Global technology company IBM announced today that it has joined the Alliance to End Plastic Waste as a Supporting Member, and will collaborate with the organization to design Plastics Recovery Insight and Steering Model (PRISM), a new data platform hosted on IBM Cloud to help track plastic waste and recovery globally.

Launched in early 2019, the Alliance to End Plastic Waste is a coalition with over 80 member companies and partners across a wide variety of industries committed to ending plastic waste in the environment.

According to IBM, PRISM will be designed to allow stakeholders to convene and unite various data sets to collaborate and address the challenge of plastic waste through data, with areas of focus encompassing plastic consumption and collection, plastic waste generated and leaking into the environment, and waste management and recycling solutions in place. Additional tool sets will be included the platform is expanded. The company stated that the platform will aim to serve as a single source of consistent actionable data helping inform how NGOs, value chain participants, communities, regulators and other organizations, improve waste management decisions and programs.

Manish Chawla, Global Industry Managing Director, Energy, Resources, and Manufacturing at IBM, said:

“Plastics play an essential role in our global economy, from simple packaging and shipping, to critical, life-saving materials for hospitals and healthcare workers. By harnessing the power of cloud and artificial intelligence we can bring together valuable and disparate pieces of data in secured and flexible environment where everyone from Alliance members to governments and regulators can collaborate to address this global challenge.”

Nick Kolesch, Vice President for Projects, Alliance to End Plastic Waste, said:

“A very significant obstacle we face in combatting the plastic waste challenge is how to bring together the multitude of data that exists in a way that’s verifiable, flexible and actionable. IBM Cloud provides the flexibility to convene stakeholders and value chain participants to securely contribute data, with an easy path for migration, hosting and user access. We are pleased that IBM has joined our efforts, and look forward to their contribution of solutions, advanced technologies and capabilities in pursuit of our mission.”