By empowering and engaging communities, Renew Ganga aims to reduce plastic waste in India’s most sacred river and the world’s ocean.

Each Alliance partnership will test the viability of an idea to determine whether it can be turned into a reality and applied to other regions, cities and towns. Initial grants are being awarded to organizations, such as Renew Oceans, whose work focuses on places that are home to some of the most significant sources of unmanaged plastic waste.

The Renew Ganga project is based in Varanasi, one of the seven sacred cities of Hinduism and one of the oldest continually inhabited places in the world. Located in India’s northern Uttar Pradesh state, the city sits at the confluence of two tributaries of the Ganges. Choosing to base Renew Ganga there is both symbolic and strategic, says Renew Oceans Founder and CEO, Priyanka Bakaya, who was born in India and raised in Australia, and whose grandparents’ ashes were spread in the Ganges at Varanasi.