3. Main sources and movement pathways for plastic in the marine environment. 6 4. Proportion of post-consumer waste in EU-27, Norway and Switzerland according to function, 2008. 7 5. Composition and numbers of marine litter items found on beaches within OSPAR network. 8 6. Changes in composition of marine items found on beaches within OSPAR network 9 7. Algalita Research Centre monitoring 10 8....

Washed up: Litter found on a beach near Tromsø, Norway. (Photo: © Bo Eide.) In the 18th century, when James Cook explored the Pacific on the Endeavour, there were large islands still unknown to European civilisation for him to discover. When Darwin visited the Galápagos Islands with HMS Beagle in 1835, a wealth of biological diversity awaited scientific analysis. The most recent expedition sett...

Polypropylene (PP) makes up a large share of our plastic waste. We investigated the conversion PP over industrial Fluid Catalytic Cracking catalyst (FCC-cat) used to produce gasoline from crude oil fractions. studied transport limitations arising larger size polymers compared oil-based feedstock by testing components this separately. Infrared spectroscopy and confocal fluorescence microscopy re...

With the purpose of assessing the environmental impacts and benefits of the current municipal solid waste management system and two modified systems, EASEWASTE, a life-cycle-based model, was used to evaluate the waste system of Hangzhou city in China. An integrated model was established, including waste generation, collection, transportation, treatment, disposal and accompanying external proces...

The separation of pure polyolefins, polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP), from post-consumer plastic waste is of increasing interest in the last years according to market requirements for their further recycling. In this paper new analytical inspection strategies, based on HyperSpectral Imaging (HSI) in the VIS-NIR and NIR fields (400-1000 and 1000-1700 nm, respectively), have been investig...

Disposal of plastic waste is a serious concern in India. New technologies have been developed to minimize their adverse effect on the environment. Currently worldwide accepted technology used for the plastic disposal is incineration.However, the incinerators designed poorly, releases extremely toxic compounds (chlorinated dioxins and furans) therefore, facing strong opposition from various non-...

Float fraction of float/sink process of car shredder light fraction was received from RAV (The Netherlands) in the frame of the W2Plastics (http://www.w2plastics.eu/) EU7 project (magnetic sorting and ultrasound sensor technologies for production of high purity secondary polyolefins from waste). The differently coloured plastic waste particles were manually separated and after determining the m...

Separation of plastic from various types of waste streams represents one of major problematic process in energy recovery through different thermochemical processes. The sorting of plastics is a very essential step in different waste management technique. Manual sorting is suitable when plastic component are present in large amount but it is a labor intensive process. In automated sorting techni...

Petroleum-based plastics have replaced many natural materials in their former applications. With their excellent properties, they have found widespread uses in almost every area of human life. However, the high recalcitrance of many synthetic plastics results in their long persistence in the environment, and the growing amount of plastic waste ending up in landfills and in the oceans has become...