Funded by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad) and implemented by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Viet Nam, the Ending Plastic Pollution Innovation Challenge (EPPIC) is a three-year project aiming to contribute to the reduction of plastic pollution in the coastal areas of Viet Nam, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

Innovation competitions to tackle plastic pollution are emerging all the time. In fact, technological innovation is often portrayed as a silver bullet to many of the world’s problems. While it is our opinion that innovation will indeed be required to tackle some of the most pressing issues of our time, we posit that it should instead be framed as one single element contributing to the overall alteration of the current system in order to achieve a sustainable impact and move towards a circular economy for plastics.

This Knowledge Brief highlights 15 lessons learned extracted from the EPPIC’s experience in running a competition that looked for scalable solutions to reduce plastic pollution in the ASEAN region under the added uncertainty of the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Read our blog that outlines four useful takeaways from running the Ending Plastic Pollution Innovation Challenge (EPPIC) in ASEAN