February 2024 / VIDEO

Case Study: The Plastic Waste Reduction-Linked Bond

A discussion with Tongai Kunorubwe, Head of ESG, Fixed Income on an innovative bond market transaction.

Tongai Kunorubwe, Head of ESG, Fixed Income

Transcript

Hello. I'm Tongai.

I'm head of ESG for fixed income at T. Rowe Price.

The World Bank plastic reduction bond is an innovative bond market transaction, which not only provides capital towards meeting the World Bank's sustainable Development goals, but also very excitingly provides upfront capital to two projects in Ghana and Indonesia specifically focused on plastic collection and recycling in those two jurisdictions.

At T. Rowe Price, we're very excited about the sustainability and impact outcomes related to this bond.

There are a number of primary, secondary and tertiary benefits and co-benefits.

The first is, of course, around nurturing a circular economy that has a lot to do with the collection and recycling of plastic waste.

In parallel with that, there are a number of social co-benefits associated with this project.

These include, of course, job creation in Ghana and Indonesia, impacting often vulnerable communities.

In addition to very clear human health benefits, we're very excited about this transaction because at trial price, we believe it not only evidences our client centric commitment to sustainability, but also has real implications not only for our impact strategies, but there is potentially very compelling economics which some of our more conventional fixed income strategies tend to benefit from.

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