While policymakers struggle to find a global cure for plastic pollution, an ecosystem of investors and philanthropists in Asia is taking matters into its own hands — using catalytic capital to turn off the plastic tap at the source. We can all agree it’s a bad thing that single-use plastics end up inside turtles and other ocean inhabitants, as we did after watching Sir David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II documentary in 2018.  But what we do about it depends on the means at our disposal and our perspective on the problem we’re trying to fix. Entering our oceans at a rate of 11million tonnes a year, plastic waste poses a threat to the lives of thousands of living creatures. It also wrecks ecosystems, endangers human health, and does severe damage to coastal communities and economies, notably to fishing and tourism.  But if we think about the role of plastic in our everyday lives, even just the throwaway kind, we quickly realise a problem of this scale takes a lot of fixing.   The United Nations sought to provide a ‘systemic’ solution to the many problems caused by current levels of’ plastic production (400-460 million tonnes a year). In 2022, it proposed a Global Plastics Treat...