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TRASH AND BURN

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BIG BRANDS STOKE CEMENT KILNS WITH PLASTIC WASTE AS RECYCLING FALTERS

Consumer goods giants are funding projects to send plastic trash to cement plants, where it is burned as cheap energy. They’re touting it as a way to keep plastic out of dumps and use less fossil fuel. Critics say it undercuts recycling efforts and worsens air quality. One said it was “like moving the landfill from the ground to the sky.”

The global consumer goods industry’s plans for dealing with the vast plastic waste it generates can be seen here in a landfill on the outskirts of Indonesia’s capital, where a swarm of excavators tears into stinking mountains of garbage.

Read the full story here: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/environment-plastic-cement/

Trafficking of plastic waste is on the rise and criminal groups are profiting, report says

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via LA Times

Americans like to think they are recycling their plastic takeout food containers, cutlery and flimsy grocery bags when they toss them into those green or blue bins. But, too often, that waste is shipped overseas, sometimes with the help of organized crime groups, where it litters cities, clogs waterways or is burned, filling the air with toxic chemicals.

A report published Monday by the independent Swiss research group Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, whose members include current and former law-enforcement officials, sheds new light on how this waste winds up in poorer countries that had agreed not to accept it.

Read the full story here: https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2021-11-08/report-trafficking-of-plastic-waste-is-on-the-rise-and-criminal-groups-are-profiting

Activities at PVC market should be stopped till fire-safety arrangements made: Delhi Fire Service

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via Outlook India

Terming a recent fire incident at the PVC market as the most “intense and widespread”, the fire department said, “It has been observed that the scrap is spilled outside the plots, covering almost the entire stretch of the road, and at some points, it is mixing with the scrap of other plots too. The situation is highly alarming from the fire safety point of view as it helps in propagation of fire at a rapid rate.”

The move comes after a massive fire broke out at an open godown in the PVC market in the Tikri Kalan area on July 11. According to the fire department, it took more than 200 fire-fighters over 10 hours to douse the blaze as PVC materials in huge quantities were stocked up at the spot and since the godown did not have a boundary wall, the risk of the fire spreading to the adjoining areas was high.

Read the full story here: https://www.outlookindia.com/newsscroll/activities-at-pvc-market-should-be-stopped-till-firesafety-arrangements-made-delhi-fire-service/2129182

Partnership to study chemically recycling plastics from ASR

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via Recycling Today

plastic scrap recycling

Eastman, Kingsport, Tennessee, has announced that it is collaborating with Padnos and the United States Automotive Materials Partnership LLC (USAMP) on a concept feasibility study to recycle mixed plastic scrap recovered from automotive shredder residue (ASR). USAMP is a subsidiary of the United States Council for Automotive Research LLC (USCAR).  

ASR consists of mixed plastic and other materials and currently end up in landfills or in waste-to-energy technologies. Under this initiative, Padnos, Holland, Michigan, will supply ASR as a feedstock for Eastman’s molecular recycling process. The company operates auto shredders in Holland and Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Read the full story here: https://www.recyclingtoday.com/article/padnost-eastman-usamp-studing-chemically-recycling-asr/

New plant-based plastics can be chemically recycled with near-perfect efficiency

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via Academic Times

German chemists have developed two sustainable plastic alternatives to high-density polyethylene that can be chemically recycled more easily and nearly 10 times as efficiently, thanks to “break points” engineered into their molecular structures.

Derived from plant oils, the new plastics were presented in a paper published Wednesday in Nature as low-waste, environmentally friendly replacements to the conventional fossil fuel-based plastics that enter natural ecosystems at a rate of millions of tons per year.

Read the full story here: https://academictimes.com/new-plant-based-plastics-can-be-chemically-recycled-with-near-perfect-efficiency/

Degradable plastic polymer breaks down in sunlight and air

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via PNAS

Plastic trash chokes shorelines and oceans, in part because plastic polymers do not easily decompose. But a new kind of environmentally degradable plastic could help change that: It breaks down in about a week in sunlight and air, according to a recent study in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS). Chemical characterization using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and mass spectroscopy, among other techniques, revealed that the plastic decomposed rapidly in sunlight from a petroleum-based polymer into succinic acid, a naturally occurring nontoxic small molecule that doesn’t leave microplastic fragments in the environment.

Read the full story here: http://blog.pnas.org/2021/07/degradable-plastic-polymer-breaks-down-in-sunlight-and-air/

plastic scrap

‘Preventing more, picking up less.’ Proliferating plastic pollution sparks change in approach

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via Phys.org

As plastic pollution soars—filling waterways, air, soil and living things with the material—some in St. Louis are joining efforts to confront the crisis through new approaches.

Experts hope the shifting strategies—which include harnessing crowd-sourced data to learn more about what kind of waste accumulates and where—could result in better policy interventions and ultimately help spark widespread reevaluation of who shoulders the burden of plastic waste. That means potentially pushing greater responsibility toward producers, instead of leaning on consumers to constantly clean up the mess as disposable, single-use plastic proliferates.

Read the full story here: https://phys.org/news/2021-06-proliferating-plastic-pollution-approach.html

NGOs and Governments Push for World Treaty on Plastic Waste

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via The Maritime Executive

The push for a global coherent strategy to tackle ocean plastic pollution is gaining momentum amidst failure by some of the world’s biggest polluters to endorse a United Nations-led process to enact a treaty.

Following shortly after World Ocean Day, environmentalists, conservationists and some countries have renewed calls for a global treaty on plastic pollution. Their hope is that a treaty could help contain the growing menace of plastic waste, which is clogging oceans and having adverse impacts on the environment, marine life, human health and economic activity.

Read the full story here: https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/ngos-and-governments-push-for-world-treaty-on-plastic-waste

Eyesea enlists shipping industry help to track plastic pollution

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via Ship-Technology.com

Non-profit organisation Eyesea aims to track global pollution and maritime hazards in the form of a map with help from the shipping industry. The company recently completed testing its solution with two commercial vessels and has plans for more testing later this year. We spoke to Eyesea to find out more about the technology as well as how the app came to be.

About 71% of the Earth’s surface is covered in water meaning that protecting the oceans is paramount to the well-being of our planet. Meeting the demands of a growing population has led manufacturing companies to produce increasing numbers of products for consumers which ultimately results in more waste being produced and ending up as ocean pollution.

Read the full story here: https://www.ship-technology.com/features/eyesea-enlists-shipping-industry-help-to-track-plastic-pollution/

Genetically engineered microbes convert waste plastic into vanillin

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via Chemistry World

Scientists in the UK have genetically engineered Escherichia coli to transform plastic waste into vanillin. ‘Instead of simply recycling plastic waste into more plastic, what our system demonstrates for the first time is that you can use plastic as a feedstock for microbial cells and transform it into something with higher value and more industrial utility,’ says Stephen Wallace from the University of Edinburgh. The biotransformation ‘isn’t just replacing a current chemical process, it’s actually achieving something that can’t be done using modern synthetic methods.’

Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is one of the most widely used types of plastic. Most existing recycling technologies degrade PET into its substituent monomers, ethylene glycol and terephthalic acid, then repurpose them in second-generation plastic materials. Wallace and Joanna Sadler, also at the University of Edinburgh, want to upcycle these monomers into alternative products.

Read the full story here: https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/genetically-engineered-microbes-convert-waste-plastic-into-vanillin/4013767.article

plastic scrap