Among the emerging environmental issues within Sub-Saharan Africa is the haphazard disposal of plastic waste, some of which end up downstream in the marine environment leading to negative effects. Notably there have been cases of humpback whales getting entangled in ‘ghost’ fishing nets, and endangered turtles ingesting plastic wastes in Watamu beach in Kenya. The aim of the current study was t...

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...

the purpose of this study was to evaluate effects of nano-clay particles and oxidized polypropylene as compatibilizer on the decay resistance of wood plastic composite against coriolus versicolor fungi. in order to provide oxidized polypropylene as compatibilizer, polypropylene was oxidized in the presence of air oxygen in 2 hours by internal mixer. afterwards, wood fibers, polypropylene, nano-...

The temperature profile of infectious laboratory waste being autoclaved was examined relative to the type of containers used in the process. A standardized waste load (1,750 +/- 4 g) placed in the container was evaluated by using a direct readout thermocouple. The sensor of the thermocouple was placed within an unused and outdated agar plate, centrally located about 5 cm from the bottom of the ...

microspectroscopy which allows for analysis of particles down to the µm-range (Supplemental information). We found the majority of plastic particles at the north shore of Lake Garda with 483 ± 236 macroplastic particles/m ² and 1,108 ± 983 microplastic particles/m ². At the south shore, extrapolations revealed 8.3 macroplastic particles/m² (only one replicate contained macroplastic) and 108 ± 5...

The disposal of non-biodegradable plastic waste without further upgrading/downgrading is not environmentally acceptable and many methods to overcome the problem have been proposed. Herein we indicate a simple method to make high-value nanomaterials from plastic waste as a partial solution to the environmental problem. Laboratory-based waste centrifuge tubes made of polypropylene were chosen as ...

Polymer-modified bitumen is used to combat different pavement distresses and to increase the life span of pavement. Unmodified bitumen cannot perform better with the range extreme minimum and maximum pavement temperatures. The polymers commonly used to modify the bitumen are ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA) styrene butadiene styrene (SBS). The aim this study to compare the performance of EVA modifi...

The widespread occurrence and accumulation of plastic waste in the environment have become a growing global concern over the past decade. Although some marine organisms have been shown to ingest plastic, few studies have investigated the ecological effects of plastic waste on animals. Here we show that exposure to environmentally relevant concentrations of microplastic polystyrene particles (90...

The floating plastic debris along the Arabian coast of the Red Sea was sampled by using surface-trawling plankton nets. A total of 120 sampling sites were spread out over the near-shore waters along 1,500 km of coastline during seven cruises performed during 2016 and 2017. Plastic debris, dominated by millimeter-sized pieces, was constituted mostly of fragments of rigid objects (73%) followed b...

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...