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Description
Every year 6 to 17 million tonnes of litter are introduced into the sea; 60 to 90% of it is plastic waste. Due to various reasons, plastic litter is found in more abundance in shallow waters. The SeaRubbish2Cap project focuses on colleting the plastic waste from the ocean floor without damaging the ecosystem and recovering it to new use.
The plastic waste will be collected manually by divers and analysed to determine its nature. Then it can be treated to be incorporated into the production of high value-added products. At the same time a platform will be developed where people can identify litter location for collection, and the life cycle of the litter collected until the final product.
The project aims to benefit the society by tackling plastic pollution. More specifically we expect that the project encourages the creation of a closed circular economy system where businesses as fishery and plastic industry could benefit from a marketplace.
This project was envisioned by 4 partners. JustDive has the experience on diving and locating plastic waste; PIEP as polymer engineering centre has the knowledge to identify the plastic waste and transform it into valuable material and BitCliq brings it experience in creating the app and platform. Finally, Neutroplast, can transform the material provided by PIEP to produce packaging for the pharmaceutical and personal care industries.
Summary of project results
The oceans and seas are facing a significant pollution problem, which has a major impact on marine life, ecosystems and coastal communities. Plastic waste represents 60-90% of the waste that reaches the oceans each year, accumulating in this environment, both on the surface and on the bottom. Various solutions have been developed to recover floating plastic waste, but few for that which lies on the bottom due to the costs associated with the action. The project wanted to develop and implement a circular economy around the recovery of marine plastic waste, economically viable and actively integrate the community.
The project studied the feasibility of reintroducing these recovered materials into the value chain, from the properties of the plastics to the industrial processes required; it developed good practice and pellet formulation guides, and a platform for sharing the geolocation of the waste and the traceability of the materials throughout the process. Relationships have been built with players in the maritime sector and the industry for future activities to develop these circuits. This is important because it will help replicate the project by others zones and understand the costs. We have successfully developed new polymeric materials using a variety of percentages of recycled ocean waste, proving the viability of large-scale recycling. For materials with a high percentage of ocean waste (>70%), the addition of stabilisers is necessary, and they are more suitable for products with thicker walls. More than 13 tonnes of waste were collected, but the utilisation rate, depending on the fishing gear present, is relatively low and the recovery/recycling process is economically very expensive, with a cost superior to 10k€/ton of new material.
Some of the activities done include: State of the Art and Technological Surveillance, which took place throughout the entire project, with research into the information on the general topic and the work in progress; R&D activities on waste recovery and processing comprises five tasks, which were successfully completed. within task 3.1 R&D in the Recovery and Handling of Waste from the Ocean Floor, prospection and collection dives were carried out; for Task 3.2 Cleaning and Material Recovery Processes, the necessary steps were defined for the recovery of waste materials for the cleaning/sorting processes. One of the activities was investigating what had already been done and reported in the literature and start tests and the development of new polymeric materials incorporating up to 70% of material recovered from the ocean and tests on the processability of the materials. in Task 3.5 Development of a Mobile Application for Record and Locate Waste, the important data for monitoring and tracking the materials was defined, as well as the traceability of the materials, as well as the general architecture of the app/platform for communicating this data . finally the platform for sharing this data was built. Processes for cleaning and recovery of materials, the previously established cleaning and recovery procedure (Task 3.2) was adapted for the industrial scale, with R Biente taking responsibility for separation and Sirplaste taking responsibility for the process, following following precise guidelines provided by PIEP. Prototypes were produced according to Neutroplast''s instructions in Tecnolis (task 4.3). The fishing waste collected was characterised in terms of its chemical and rheological composition to ensure that the spectrum of previously identified materials was maintained. After analysing of the pre-treated fishing waste, both the developed composites and the prototypes were characterised. Carrying out and
participation in unplanned project dissemination activities, such as media interviews, participation in matchmaking events and contacts for future steps in the project and meetings with stakeholders and future partners. future partners.
The project was important for the proof of concept of the reuse and application of plastic waste recovered from the oceans in the production of products with economic value without special treatment of the waste so that it can be recycled. This shows that these materials can be used without production problems, with the only need to finance their collection to make it more interesting. This is yet another source of materials to reduce the use of virgin polymer raw materials and increase the circularity of plastics, while gradually recovering marine ecosystems. This project has also promoted relationships with stakeholders from different sectors that will allow us to continue developing the project''s central objective.