MANILA, Philippines - Recycling plastic is a stopgap solution and should be "something of the past," said Maldivian Ramon Magsaysay awardee Shaahina Ali on Wednesday, November 5.

Ali, an ocean conservationist, was speaking at a forum following her official lecture in Manila for the 67th Ramon Magsaysay Awards Festival Season. She leads Parley Maldives, an organization that combats plastic pollution.

"Recycling is a temporary fix," said Ali, after she shared about Parley's partnerships with brands to recycle plastics that her group intercepts. "Recycling has to be something of the past. [The] future is in biochemistry, biochemicals, you know, bio fabrication."

Parley implements the AIR (Avoid. Intercept. Redesign) strategy. "We believe plastic is a design failure -- a symbol of the toxic age we created," Parley's description of its strategy read. "To fix it, we must reinvent the material itself."

The group has collaborated with schools and resorts across Maldives to intercept plastics. Ali had said in a presser last September that working with schools had enabled them not only to teach the next generation, but had given them access to staff and the kids' parents.

Ali's recognition from the award-giving body comes in the same year that world leaders, negotiators, and civil society are trying to hammer out a legally-binding plastics treaty that seeks to end plastic pollution. Plastic treaty negotiations failed again in Geneva, Switzerland, last August. In these talks groups have been calling for a ban on chemicals, the reduction in plastic production.

During her lecture, Ali touched on the public's seeming desensitization to visuals of plastic pollution. She flashed a photo of a boy wading through a water filled with trash.

"You just scroll through it," she said. "It doesn't even talk to you anymore, these pictures. We are so disconnected in a connected world."

Filipino marine scientist Deo Onda joined Ali during the event on Monday, to emphasize the lessons that Filipinos can learn from the Maldivian conservationist.

"Shaahina has made this powerful reminder that we need to rekindle and be reconnected with that identity - that we and the oceans are one," Onda said on Wednesday.

Maldives and the Philippines are both archipelagic countries vulnerable to rising sea levels.

Onda said the loss of identity is "very much reflected in the land-centric policies that we have, in the overall framework of development that we have."

He mentioned communities' disconnection from policies that seek to protect them and the environment: "[Ali] emphasized that they are informed but not engaged. They are observers but not participants. And I would even go further that they are actually included but not empowered."