Waste Management and Recycling • The Ocean Cleanup

2022-03-12 02:51:43 By : Ms. Cindy Lee

Since the beginning of The Ocean Cleanup, we have always planned to do something valuable with the plastic we clean up. We aim to keep this plastic from entering the environment again – either by creating durable new products or processing it otherwise.

By giving ocean plastic a new purpose, we can turn the problem into a solution… and the funds we manage to raise this way will always go straight toward further cleanup.

“There is no such thing as waste – only wasted resources. When you can create value from waste, it isn’t waste anymore.”

In October 2020, The Ocean Cleanup launched the first product made with plastic caught on our mission in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – The Ocean Cleanup Sunglasses.

This served as the proof of concept that we can unlock the value in the ocean plastic catch: the material can be recycled into high-quality consumer products, giving people a tangible way to support us, so we can raise funding to clean more ocean.

The sunglasses are now completely out of stock (as of February 2022). In the future, we no longer intend to create our own products; instead, we will work with partners to develop products using The Ocean Cleanup plastic. This will allow us to focus on our core mission of cleaning up: we aim to scale up our missions quickly and catch exponentially more plastic the more ocean systems we deploy.

The Ocean Cleanup is currently conducting cleanup operations in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and some of the world’s most polluted rivers. The composition of trash extracted from the ocean differs from what we catch in rivers. Only certain types of plastic make their way out to the middle of the ocean; meanwhile, the diversity of trash in rivers is much more significant. Compared to plastic retrieved from rivers, ocean plastic is also much more degraded from years, or even decades, of exposure to seawater and UV radiation from the sun.

The ownership of the catch also differs. The plastic we catch in oceans is located in international waters, making us the legal owners. Meanwhile, trash caught in rivers is mostly owned by the operators of the Interceptor™ Solution.

Due to these factors, our role in creating value for these two streams differs:

River Field Scientist Thomas Mani and Recycling Manager John Verhoeven answer the tough questions about trash – from how it ends up in a…

It is important that our donors, partners, and supporters are provided with transparency when it comes to our catch. That’s why we adhere to the Chain-of-Custody standard for our ocean plastic – certifying its origin, while also verifying our catch numbers from both rivers and oceans.

Currently, there are many products made with ‘ocean’ plastic, but there is little traceability or proof to that claim, and, in some cases, there is only little plastic collected from the ocean in the products. Therefore, we met with DNV . They agreed to create a standard to substantiate the quantities of plastic extracted from a particular origin (in this case, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch). As no such standard previously existed for harvested ocean plastic, DNV and The Ocean Cleanup partnered to create an entirely new one, based on the experience with other well-established chain-of-custody models.

We followed this standard for our first product – The Ocean Cleanup Sunglasses – and we continue to follow it for our catch. Companies using our recycled ocean plastic can therefore be confident that the plastic is sourced directly from the world’s oceans– and they can then assure consumers as to the origin of their plastic.

Now that we’ve proven that we can create value from the ocean plastic with our first product, The Ocean Cleanup® Sunglasses, our Catch Management team is working on improvements related to the sorting of the catch, recycling the various plastic fractions* , and streamlining our work to reduce costs and our carbon footprint . In addition to this, we are investigating various methods to process the non-recyclables safely and efficiently.

Listen to our podcast episode featuring Catch Management Director Stella van den Berg, who walks us through how we are processing the plastic collected in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch by System 002.

Knowledge on how to create value from river and ocean trash is still very limited. As we are continuing our journey on creating value from it, we need help from supporters and experts

Tag a brand you think we should work with to create new products from certified ocean plastic – and help make them aware!

Can you or your network offer suitable processing techniques for our plastic, after reading about the characteristics of our different plastic types? Let us know by reaching out!

By donating, you can help us continue our work of cleaning up plastic in the environment – and to keep it out!

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