Of every 5 kilograms of plastic waste produced globally, 1 kilogram ends up polluting the environment — in rivers, soils, and the air we breathe. Yet countries with strong waste management systems generate around 100 times less plastic pollution per person than lower‑income countries, even though they often use more plastic per capita. If every country managed its waste like today’s high‑income economies, global plastic pollution could fall by more than 98%.
For operations and facility leaders, that insight is simple but powerful: how you collect, move, track, and treat waste is now as strategic as how you manage energy or critical assets. Nextbitt’s platform turns this insight into daily practice, helping organisations connect waste flows with asset management, energy efficiency, and compliance in a single, integrated view.
Data from Our World in Data show that total plastic use is a poor predictor of how much plastic pollution reaches the environment. High‑income countries generate significantly more plastic waste per person, but only a tiny fraction ends up polluting because most waste is collected and sent to controlled landfills, recycling, or appropriate incineration.
In many low‑ and middle‑income settings, less than half of household waste is collected, and even collected waste is often dumped in open sites where it can easily leak into the environment. The biggest driver of plastic pollution is therefore mismanaged waste, not the volume of plastic alone.
For organisations, this means that the most impactful step is to ensure that waste is collected, handled, and routed through controlled, traceable processes — and to make these processes visible and auditable through digital platforms.
The analysis highlights a counter‑intuitive point: the highest impact does not come from futuristic solutions, but from getting the basics right at scale. High‑income countries typically spend around 50 dollars per person on waste management, compared with at most 1 dollar in many low‑income countries. Each unit of investment in basic collection and controlled landfills in these lower‑income settings can prevent roughly 25 000 times more plastic pollution than the same unit spent on advanced infrastructure in already well‑served rich countries.
Translated into an organisational context, this means that consistent collection, adequate containers, safe internal storage, reliable logistics, and verified final destinations will usually do more to reduce your real‑world footprint than isolated high‑tech pilots operating on top of weak processes.
Nextbitt’s platform is designed to strengthen exactly these “basic but critical” workflows, so that everyday operations become the backbone of your environmental performance.
Nextbitt helps organisations manage distributed portfolios of assets and facilities, from hospitals and airports to industrial plants and retail networks. By integrating waste management with asset management, energy data, and compliance in one platform, you gain a single source of truth for risk, cost, and impact.
Below are three concrete Nextbitt use cases showing how this works in practice.
Salsa Jeans manages 86 stores across Portugal and Spain, each with its own maintenance and facilities operations. Before Nextbitt, much of this work was coordinated by email and phone, making it hard to track which sites followed consistent maintenance and operational routines.
Using Nextbitt, the company centralised all maintenance and facilities operations into a single platform. Work orders for internal and external teams now include clear SLAs, locations, and required documentation, ensuring that maintenance and facilities‑related interventions are executed consistently and auditable.
By systematising these workflows, Salsa Jeans improved operational efficiency and brought store‑level practices into alignment with corporate operational and sustainability standards.
Link to the full story: Nextbitt Case Study – Salsa Jeans.
2. Hospitality: DHM Hotels (multi‑site hotel group)
DHM Hotels operates 14 hotels with more than 1,000 rooms, where large volumes of energy and water are used daily. The company uses Nextbitt to centralise maintenance and facilities management across all hotels, achieving a 20% reduction in energy and water consumption while improving operational continuity.
In this context, robust asset and facilities‑management routines are critical for maintaining service quality and optimising resource use. By linking maintenance and facilities‑related interventions and cleaning‑provider activities to the same platform that tracks energy and asset performance, DHM gains visibility into where resource‑intensive patterns coincide with high‑intensity operations.
This makes it easier to drive efficiency at source (e.g., through better‑managed maintenance and resource‑use optimisation) while keeping documentation for operational‑performance and ESG‑ready metrics in a single system.
Link to the full story: Nextbitt Case Study – DHM Hotels.
3. Energy: EDP (multi‑site energy infrastructure)
EDP manages more than 1,000 installations and 22,000 assets across its network, from substations and distribution sites to office buildings and service centres. The company uses Nextbitt to centralise physical asset and facilities management, bringing thousands of assets and tens of thousands of work orders under one controlled platform.
This approach naturally extends to resource and facilities‑related operations: energy‑related activities and consumption‑monitoring in administrative buildings, along with maintenance and facilities‑related interventions, flow through the same ecosystem of work orders, SLAs, and documentation. By tying these tasks to asset‑management records, EDP gains a structured view of how resources are used, how assets are maintained, and how operational performance is recorded across its portfolio.
In sustainability‑driven sectors like energy, this visibility is a key enabler for ESG‑ready data and circular‑economy‑oriented initiatives, because it turns operational data into auditable evidence of controlled, compliant operations instead of ad‑hoc practices.
Link to the full story: Nextbitt Case Study – EDP.
The message is clear: most plastic pollution can be prevented with reliable, basic waste management systems, not just through headline‑grabbing technologies or awareness campaigns. Improving waste management in low‑ and middle‑income countries alone could cut global plastic pollution by more than 98%, and the knowledge and tools are already available
For organisations, the equivalent is to put in place robust, traceable processes for operations across all facilities — and connect them to asset management, energy, and compliance. That is what Nextbitt is built for: turning sustainability commitments into daily operational routines, where every work order, every collection, and every certificate becomes a measurable step towards a world where plastic no longer leaks into the environment.
Learn more about how Nextbitt integrates sustainability and ESG data across your portfolio
Explore our platform for physical asset management and smart, sustainable operations
Talk to our team about mapping your operations — and turn asset, energy, and compliance data into one clear operational view.