A joint report published in April 2025 by the World Resources Institute and GRID-Arendal, the Norwegian environmental data centre affiliated with the United Nations Environment Programme, has identified what it describes as a "systemic data integrity gap" at the heart of the voluntary plastic credit market. The report — Uncounted: Informal Collection and MRV Failures in the Plastic Credit Supply Chain — finds that 78 per cent of plastic collection volumes credited through projects across South and Southeast Asia is sourced from informal sector workers whose activities are systematically undercounted in current monitoring, reporting, and verification frameworks.
The research reviewed 47 active credit projects across India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Bangladesh, and Vietnam, examining the data collection methods used at each stage of the collection supply chain. It identifies two primary structural gaps. The first is the near-total absence of digital weight records at the point of initial collection: the vast majority of informal waste pickers sell their materials to intermediary dealers using manual beam balances or no weighing equipment at all, with quantities recorded — when they are recorded — on paper ledgers that are rarely retained beyond the immediate transaction. The second gap is a systematic undercount at formal aggregation points, where project MRV systems typically begin, missing the collection activity occurring earlier in the supply chain.
The report estimates that weight estimation errors across informal collection stages range from plus or minus 15 to 25 per cent, depending on material type, collection method, and the distance between the collection point and the first verified aggregation node. For flexible plastics — notoriously difficult to weigh accurately due to their low density and tendency to retain moisture — errors at the upper end of this range are common. The implication is that credited tonnes may not, in a meaningful number of cases, correspond to plastic that was verifiably collected and diverted from environmental leakage pathways.
The WRI and GRID-Arendal authors are careful to stop short of alleging systematic fraud. The discrepancies are attributed primarily to structural limitations in project design and to MRV frameworks modelled on formal sector supply chains without adequate adaptation for informal collection realities. "The gap is a design problem, not primarily an integrity problem," the report states. "But the consequence for credit credibility is the same."
The report proposes a cluster of technology-enabled solutions. Digital weight tickets — generated via mobile application at the point of sale between waste picker and dealer — are identified as the single highest-impact intervention available at current technology readiness levels. GPS-enabled collection tracking, logging route data and timestamps to corroborate volume estimates, is recommended as a complementary measure. Mobile payment integration, which creates an auditable financial transaction record for each collection sale, provides a third data layer that is independently verifiable without dependence on project self-reporting.
Two pilot programmes are highlighted as proof of concept. Plastic Bank's blockchain-based digital ledger, deployed across 35 collection hubs in Indonesia and the Philippines, has demonstrated a reduction in weight recording variance to plus or minus four per cent in randomised field audits, compared with the 15 to 25 per cent baseline documented in the wider study. CleanHub, the German-founded plastic collection platform, has reported comparable improvements through its mobile app-based collection logging, now active across 120 collection communities in India and Indonesia.
For credit buyers, the report carries a direct and actionable implication. Due diligence on project MRV infrastructure should form a standard element of credit procurement practice. Buyers should request documentation of digital collection records, third-party MRV audit findings, and evidence of payment traceability through the supply chain before committing to purchases from projects in markets where informal collection is the primary sourcing mechanism. Projects unable to demonstrate digital collection infrastructure should, the authors argue, be subject to higher uncertainty discounts in credit pricing — a recommendation that, if adopted by major buyers, could accelerate the transition to verifiable data systems across the sector.