Photo by Hareyuki Yamaguchi

We have previously shared the story of Dutch entrepreneur Boyan Slat’s plans to rid the ocean of plastic waste. Now, the 20-year-old student and CEO of The Ocean Clean-up has revealed that he will begin the journey to make his plans a reality. Speaking at the Seoul Digital Forum in South Korea, Asia’s largest technology conference, he explained that his design to capture plastic waste ‘passively’ by harnessing the power of tidal currents, will be deployed in 2016.

The likely location for the ‘clean-up’ array will be off the coast of Tsushima, an island located in the waters between Japan and South Korea. The feasibility of this location is currently being researched. The array will span 2000m, thereby becoming the longest floating structure ever deployed in the ocean (beating the current record of 1000m held by the Tokyo Mega-Float). It will be in operation for at least two years.

Meanwhile, engineers at Tsushima Island are evaluating whether the plastic could be used as an alternative energy source. Approximately one cubic metre of plastic pollution per person is washed up each year on the island, which has prompted the Japanese government to seek innovative solutions.

Should the venture prove successful, The Ocean Clean-up will deploy arrays of increasing scale around the world. Within five years, it aims to implement a 100km-long system to clean up half of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, between Hawaii and California.

In other ocean plastic news, it is reported that sportswear giant Adidas plans to follow in the footsteps of G-STAR Raw by using yarn derived from ocean plastic waste as raw materials for clothing and potentially footwear. It will collaborate with innovation group Parley from 2016 to develop suitable fibres.

New interactive map shows extent of ocean plastic waste

There are five trillion pieces of plastic floating in the ocean, according to a consortium of 12 research institutions. This ‘plastic smog’ covering the surface of the oceans has a combined weight of nearly 300,000 tonnes, the equivalent of approximately 1,500 blue whales. You can now see were the concentration of plastic is heaviest via a new map published by Popular Science.

The two oceans of the Northern Hemisphere contain 56% of all floating plastic particles and 57% of the total weight. In the Southern Hemisphere, the Indian Ocean contains 1.3 trillion pieces of plastic, a greater particle count and weight than the South Atlantic and South Pacific oceans combined. By combining coastal population figures with plastic consumption and waste management data, scientists have concluded that the majority of the waste has emanated from China.

“We often talk about the Stone Age, the Iron Age, the Bronze Age… Now, people are starting to refer to this age as the Plastics Age – it’s in everything,” MBA’s founder Mike Biddle explains, speaking in Pharrell Williams’ new film-documentary ‘The Plastic Age’. The film, launched to bring greater global awareness to the plastic pollution issue, sees Biddle join a host of speakers including Markus Erikson and Anna Cummins from not-for-profit organisation 5 Gyres, Tyson Toussant of Bionic Yarn, and Captain Charles Moore, the man who discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch back in 1997.

Speaking about his discovery, Moore explains that he felt compelled to understand how much plastic was there. His expeditions found six times as much plastic as plankton in 1999, which rocketed up to 36 times by 2009. Now, the Ocean Conservancy estimates that there could soon be as much plastic in the oceans as fish.

The 17-minute film begins by taking viewers through the crazy marketing frenzy that surrounded plastics in the 1950s, as ‘convenience’ became the new buzz word, through to the 288m tonnes of plastic now being produced each year. It highlights that much of this plastic, millions of tonnes, finds its way to the oceans.

“You can dip a net into any ocean in the world and find plastic,” says Cummins. “It gets there through storm drains and rivers… It blows out of garbage cans and falls out of dumpster trucks.”

“In the past 50 years, we have ‘plasticised’ our planet,” adds Erikson.

The story continues in Hawaii, the world’s most isolated archipelago, where people including conservationists and surfers regularly find plastic waste that has washed up from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – from as far away as Russia, America and Asia. We also hear how commonplace it has become for humans to have synthetic chemicals flowing through their veins, partially as a result of eating fish that have consumed small particles of plastic in the oceans.

It’s not all doom and gloom, however. The film is cautiously optimistic about humans’ ability to turn the situation around. Speakers consistently point out that the plastic waste in the ocean is waiting to be mined, that we can make use of it to meet our existing needs, without making petroleum-based plastic from scratch.

“The volume of plastic produced annually is the same weight as every man, woman and child on Earth,” says Captain Moore. “Imagine if we recovered and reused it.”

“Humans adapt, we’re creative – that’s what we do so well,” adds marine biologist Dr Wallace Nichols.

The new G-Star RAW ‘Raw for the Oceans’ range of denim clothing, co-created by Williams, illustrates a new way of doing business that protect oceans, according to Parley, the group that helped to catalyse the project.

Indeed, harnessing people’s imagination and innovating through unusual multi-stakeholder collaborations is what we need to tackle this monumental issue, the film concludes.

To view the full ‘Plastic Age’ documentary, please click here.

Five graduates in the Netherlands have developed a recycled plastic filament for 3D printers, made from end-of-life car dashboards. Through their Better Future Factory innovation consultancy, the young Rotterdam-based entrepreneurs have formed a start-up company called Refil to manufacture and sell the filament.

As 3D printing takes off – the market is set to reach $16bn by 2018 – there is a risk that more virgin plastic will be consumed and more plastic waste created, adding to the already substantial plastic pollution challenge. Refil’s new ‘refilament’ offers an alternative to virgin plastic filament, in a move that will make 3D printing more sustainable, the company says.

Refil has made its first batch of ‘refilaments’ from old car dashboards, door panels and other ABS parts (creating a 100% recycled black filament) and PET bottles (creating a 90% recycled translucent filament). The recycling process works by shredding scraps into tiny pieces and removing contaminants. The pieces are then melted and turned into 1.75mm or 2.85mm diameter strings that are wound around recycled carbon spools. Importantly, there are no harmful chemicals used in the process.

“We don’t add any toxic dyes to our products and this has been our biggest challenge. After a lot of research, we have developed refilaments that have the exact same quality as ordinary filaments, without adding any toxics,” Refil researcher Laura Klaus tells PSFK.

Elsewhere, US-based start-up Dimension Polymers has also just showcased its new recycled plastic filament. The company shared its creation at the 3D Print Show in New York. Having raised more than $20,000 via an online crowd-funding campaign, it has developed a proprietary recycling system to produce 95% recycled ABS plastic filaments. The team sources the feedstock from waste collection centres and scrap yards.

Refil’s ‘refilament’ recently won the IDTechEx Best Material Development Award at the 3D Printing Europe Awards. To read more about Refil, click here.

To hear how MBA Polymers is helping its JV partner EMR to exceed EU end-of-life vehicle (ELV) recycling targets, please visit our website.

Could you describe your role and responsibilities at MBA Polymers?

I have overall responsibility for quality assurance here at Worksop. I promote and implement systems and processes to guarantee that we satisfy our stakeholders’ needs. That could be in terms of regulatory compliance or material specification, for example. I’m involved right from the approval of suppliers through to product testing and the despatch of finished goods. I also oversee our product development efforts. This includes continuously improving the quality of our products and working with customers to identify or develop products that suit their applications.

How does MBA work with its customers to tailor the characteristics of their products?

We collaborate with customers to understand how they need the product to perform and how they use the plastic in their manufacturing process. We can then develop a solution that best fits their business and run laboratory tests to confirm that we have met their needs effectively.

Could you share an example?

We’re currently working with a large packaging manufacturer on incorporating their re-grind into a compound product that we’ve created for them. We modified the material to meet their requirements and used our thermo-analytical test equipment to confirm that we had delivered the most cost effective solution. We also collaborated with a specialist to achieve an exact colour match.

What plastics recycling challenges do you face and how are you working to overcome them?

Our major challenge is to remove non-target materials and purify the individual target plastics we recycle. We do this in a way that uses the most plastic possible and maximises the benefits to the customer at minimum cost. This means a technical focus on yield, additive cost efficacy and optimisation of material properties.

What do you think of Mazda’s move to introduce bio-plastic for exterior car parts?

It’s interesting. We’re also exploring how vehicle manufacturers can reduce the weight of vehicle parts to achieve CO₂ emission targets – through efficient fillers rather than bio-plastics. According to Mazda, the energy requirements for the production of bioplastics are 30% lower than those of virgin plastics. Recovering plastics at MBA Polymers uses 80% less energy when compared to making the equivalent virgin plastic polymer.

There’s also a question mark over how sustainable it to use agricultural land to cultivate feedstock for bio-plastics. Unless the feedstock is sourced as a by-product of food production, it will compete with the food and fibre crops to feed and clothe the world’s growing population.

After months of uncertainty surrounding the European Union’s circular economy package – a set of laws and policies designed to help accelerate the transition to a more restorative, ‘waste-free’ economy – there is some good news.

Following the 2015 European Circular Economy Conference in Brussels earlier this month, the European Commission has announced that the revised package will be even more ambitious. In particular, it will include country-specific waste-reduction targets and a roadmap to encourage more businesses to adopt closed-loop models. The new package is due to emerge later in 2015.

“Both these aspects – the waste targets review and the roadmap – will come together before the end of this year,” said Karmenu Vella, European Commissioner for Environment, Maritime Affairs, and Fisheries. “The more I look at the two sides – the environment and the economy – the more convinced I become that the way forward is to fully integrate resource efficiency into the way we do business in Europe.”

The new package will also seek to address a range of economic sectors in addition to waste management, according to Vella, who added that the new package will offer an opportunity to “transform Europe into a more competitive, resource-efficient economy.”

First announced in July 2014, the European Commission’s circular economy package featured a proposed 70% recycling and reuse target for 2030. It also included a requirement for member states to recycle 80% of packaging waste by 2030. But in December 2014, the Commission indicated that these plans would be scrapped in favour of something more ambitious.

In 2010, total waste production in the EU amounted to 2.5bn tons, of which only 36% was recycled. The rest was landfilled or incinerated, yet 600m tonnes could have been recycled or reused, protecting the environment and adding value to the economy. Recent research by WRAP indicates that a circular economy could create more than 200,000 jobs in the UK alone.

Vella said that the Commission will continue to promote eco-innovation and investment in clean technologies. This stands to deliver savings of €600bn for businesses in the EU, while reducing greenhouse gas emissions.