Offshore Conceptual Plastic Waste Collection and Treatment Towards Clean Ocean

Cleaning Up without Messing Up: Maximizing the Benefits of Plastic Clean-Up Technologies through New Regulatory Approaches

“…However, the environmental, social, and economic viability of these solutions needs to be carefully assessed and will depend on the country or location of deployment, as there will be differences in factors such as access to customers, favorable regulatory conditions, and waste management infrastructure. , Today there are limited economically and environmentally sustainable end-of-life solutions for recovered plastics. , Recovered litter represents a diverse mix of materials, with plastics dominating, that is difficult to separate, clean, and recycle. , Utilizing waste in energy recovery is an option, as incineration and pyrolysis can use degraded and mixed plastics as feedstock. However, these processes come with economic and environmental challenges, including a contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions and release of atmospheric pollutants in jurisdictions where appropriate incineration facilities are lacking. − Relying on such solutions could also lead to a technological lock-in, which does not address the many problems created upstream in the plastics life cycle. In many cases, landfilling may be the best or only option, but this requires that the landfills have high environmental standards to avoid the leakage of chemicals and litter into the environment.…”