Friday, March 11, 2022

Why is plastic pollution control imminent?

 On March 2, the resumed fifth session of the United Nations Environment Assembly passed the "Resolution on Ending Plastic Pollution (Draft)". The resolution aims to advance the global fight against plastic pollution, one of the most ambitious environmental actions worldwide since the 1989 Montreal Protocol.

What exactly does this resolution contain? How serious is plastic pollution in the world right now? Will our daily waste classification, recycling and other environmental protection consumption concepts be just a drop in the bucket for plastic pollution control?

1 Global focus on ending plastic pollution

The prevention and control of plastic pollution is the focus of this meeting, and a total of 3 draft resolutions are related to plastics. Rwanda and Peru proposed a draft to address the "full life cycle" pollution of plastics from production to waste management, and form a legally binding international agreement on plastic pollution; Japan proposed to establish an international negotiating committee to address the issue of marine plastics ; India proposed to focus on the pollution of plastic products such as single-use plastics.

US scrap plastic exports continue years-long decline

 U.S. scrap plastic exports fell by 12% in 2021, even though some countries, such as India and Mexico, brought in a whole lot more material.

The U.S. exported 1.21 billion pounds of scrap plastics in 2021, down from 1.38 billion pounds the year before, according to an analysis of U.S. Census Bureau export data. Data for the fourth quarter of 2021 was recently released, allowing Plastics Recycling Update to calculate full-year 2021 numbers and compare them with prior years.

The downward move last year continues a years-long decline in plastic exports. In 2017, the year China’s National Sword campaign was first announced but had not yet gone into full effect, the U.S. exported 3.68 billion pounds.

Since National Sword, there has been a distinct shift in where material is flowing, alongside an overall decrease in exports.

The following shows total U.S. scrap plastic exports over the past five years (story continues below chart):

US Scrap Plastic exports

Thursday, March 3, 2022

EXCLUSIVE UN plastic treaty to tackle production, packaging design - draft resolution

On March 2, the resumed session of the Fifth United Nations Environment Assembly in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, adopted the "Resolution on Ending Plastic Pollution (Draft)". The legally binding resolution aims to advance the global fight against plastic pollution.

UN Resolution

Heads of state, environment ministers and other representatives from 175 countries approved and signed the resolution, according to information provided to the media by the United Nations Environment Programme after the meeting. The resolution states that an intergovernmental negotiating committee will be established to reach an internationally legally binding agreement by 2024, covering the entire life cycle of plastic products, including their production, design, recycling and disposal.

The UN Environment Programme said the resolution will drive a fundamental shift in how plastic is produced, consumed and managed. "Today we have made history and we should all be proud of it," said the chairman of the assembly, Norway's environment minister, Espen Barthe-Eder.

Statistics from the agency show that world plastic production has soared from 2 million tons in 1950 to 348 million tons in 2017. Ed said that if no immediate action is taken, the harm of plastic pollution will further expand and threaten human existence. "If plastic is included in the circular economy system, plastic can be recycled completely, and it is time to introduce a legally binding resolution to end the plastic pollution crisis."

Inge Annoson, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, said that the resolution is the most important international multilateral environmental resolution since the Paris Agreement.

The United Nations Environment Assembly is the highest decision-making mechanism for global environmental issues. Its predecessor was the United Nations Environment Programme Council. The United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution in 2013 to upgrade the council to a United Nations Environment Assembly attended by representatives of member states. The first UN Environment Assembly was held in Nairobi in June 2014.

The first phase of the fifth session of the United Nations Environment Assembly will be held in February 2021, and the resumed session from February 28 to March 2, 2022 will be the second phase. 

Monday, October 25, 2021

How does plastic get into the ocean?

Even if you live a few hundred miles from the coast, the plastic you throw away will end up flowing into the sea. Once it enters the ocean, the decomposition of plastic is very slow, and it will be broken down into tiny particles, the so-called microplastic.

Plastic get into the ocean

How does plastic get into the ocean?

Plastic is killing marine life

The harm to marine life is incredible. 80% of the plastic in our oceans comes from land, but what does this mean?

Plastic is choking our oceans. Sir David Attenborough told us during "Blue Planet 2", "We dump 8 million tons of plastic into the ocean every year." ,

Tortoises eat plastic bags and mistake them for jellyfish. People found that the stomachs of seabirds are full of plastic products. Plastic fragments will stay in the corals and affect the health of the coral reefs. Animals such as plankton consume microplastics and bring the problem back. In the food chain. Plastics have been found in the deepest parts of the ocean and even in the distant Arctic sea ice. This is a sober example of our footprint on the earth. As our plastic consumption will increase sharply, it is clear that urgent measures are needed

How does plastic get into the ocean?

The plastics we use every day end up in the ocean mainly through three ways:

1. Throw plastics into the trash bins when they should be recycled

The plastic we put in the garbage bin ends up being landfilled. When transporting waste to a landfill, plastic is usually very light and therefore will be blown away. From there, it may end up cluttered around drains and enter rivers and oceans in this way.

2. Littering

Littered garbage will not be left on the street. Rain and wind will bring plastic waste into streams and rivers, and lead to the sea through drains and drains! Careless and inappropriate waste disposal is also an important reason-illegal dumping of waste has greatly increased the plastic tide in the ocean.

3. Wasted products

Many products we use every day are flushed into the toilet, including wet tissues, cotton swabs and sanitary products. When we wash clothes in a washing machine, the fine fibers are even released into the water. They are too small to be filtered out by wastewater plants, eventually consumed by small marine organisms, and eventually even enter our food chain.

Plastic in the Oceans

Plastic Ends up in the Ocean

But what can we do?

We need to take immediate action, there is no time to waste.

Plans such as bottled wine are a good starting point, but we rely heavily on plastics, so we need to do more to wean ourselves from plastics.

A comprehensive plan to ban the use of avoidable disposable plastics (such as plastic cups and tableware) by 2025 may have a real impact on protecting our planet. We also need companies to take this problem seriously, because some already exist-do supermarkets have plastic aisles, companies looking for alternatives to plastic packaging, or companies like Sky that provide customers with solutions.

As individuals, we can also help by changing our lifestyles, such as recycling more resources or drinking from reusable water bottles. You may think that your contribution is small, but our collective actions are always powerful.

YBY hydroponic system

How much plastic is recycled

According to statistics from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. produced 35.4 million tons of plastic in 2017. If people want to reduce plastic pollution, recycling may be an easy solution. But when you dump these plastic containers into the recycling bin, what will happen and how much plastic is recycled?

How much plastic is recycled

However, waste recycling does not always give new life to plastic waste. On the contrary, human beings are gradually being overwhelmed by plastic...

How much plastic is recycled?

Unfortunately, the end result of plastic recycling is not as simple as many people imagine. John Hocevar, a marine biologist at Greenpeace in the United States, said that recycling is unlikely to give plastic products new life. In fact, only 8.4% of plastic waste is eventually recycled. It is not because consumers do not take the initiative to recycle or they have not initiated recycling measures, but because the United States does not have the infrastructure to match plastic recycling.

Hocevar said: "In most parts of the United States, many plastic wastes are not recyclable." Recently, a Greenpeace report investigated 367 plastic waste recycling facilities in the United States and found that only plastic bottles are regularly recycled. For disposal, many plastic packages are usually landfilled or incinerated.

Recycling Numbers

It should be noted that not all plastic products are the same plastic. If you look at the bottom of transparent plastic bottles (for example: plastic bottles for food and washing powder), you will notice that there is a number in a triangular recycling symbol. If it is "1", it means that plastic product is made of a material called polyethylene terephthalate (PET); some opaque plastic bottles (for example: plastic bottles for milk), the triangle symbol number is "2", which means it is made of high-density polyethylene (HDPE). In the garbage recycling treatment plant, plastic waste is classified according to these numbers (a total of 7 numerical levels), which indicate the degree of recyclability of the plastic.

Kara Pochiro, director of the American Plastics Recycling Institute, said that relatively speaking, plastic items of recycling number 1 and # 2  can be recycled. These plastic wastes are shredded, melted into balls, and then sold to manufacturers for reprocessing. Recycled plastic can be used to make carpets, clothes, plastic packaging and other products.

How about plastics above the recycling number 2?

He also pointed out that the recycling and processing of plastic products with higher digital levels is more complicated. According to statistics from Greenpeace, this type of plastic waste accounts for 69% of our daily use of plastics. Disposing of them is more complex than processing plastic products No. 1 and No. 2. It requires higher costs and consumes more energy. In the past few years, many garbage collection agencies in the United States sold mixed plastic waste to Asian countries, but two years ago, these countries banned the import of foreign plastic waste.

For this reason, garbage collection agencies have to adopt new garbage disposal channels, but most attempts have failed. For example, the Los Angeles Garbage Disposal Center still does not process plastic garbage above #2. In 2019, the Guardian reported that some garbage collection agencies are dumping garbage into landfills or incinerators.

Pochiro pointed out that what the United States currently needs is to have the infrastructure to process other types of plastics. But Hocevar envisions a different solution: the really simple answer is that we must stop manufacturing so many single-use plastic products. In other words, does plastic recycling make sense? For No. 1 or No. 2 plastic bottles, the answer is "yes", but more and more plastic products labeled #5, which is a kind of flexible plastic, including yogurt boxes, are increasingly being recycled. For plastic products of other recycling numbers, it is important to check the restrictions and regulations of the local recycling system.

Hocevar's answer is simpler: for plastic products 3, 4, and 5, their recycling costs are higher, and the benefits of recycling outweigh the disadvantages.

How much plastic is in the ocean

- How much plastic is in the ocean?
- It can almost wrap the entire earth!

Plastic Ocean

We consume plastic products frantically and ignore plastic waste, which means that this huge amount of man-made substances has already left dirty marks on the earth. Today, approximately one-third of the nearly 300 million tons of plastic produced annually are thrown away immediately after use. Most of the waste plastic will be incinerated in landfills, and there is likely to be a residue; and most of the remaining part will eventually flow into the sea. The scientist Jan Zalasvich of the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom said: "If all the plastic made in the last few decades was clingfilm, there would be enough to put a layer around the whole Earth." This sounds suffocating.

Plastic Waste in the Ocean

Some of the plastic that flows into the ocean will be washed up on the coast, and some will be eaten by wild animals, but most of it will remain in the ocean and be broken into small pieces there. We don’t know how much plastic waste is in the ocean; we don’t know what potential impact these plastics have on the health of marine life; and we don’t know how long it will take for these plastics and their impact on the ocean to completely disappear.
Plastic in the ocean

How much plastic is in the ocean?

In 1997, when American oceanographer Charles Moore crossed the Pacific Ocean from Hawaii to California, he found a huge ocean area with floating rubbish-this area is now called the "Super Pacific Garbage Strip." Soon after, the same rubbish concentration zone was also found in other sea areas. As a result, the problem of marine rubbish entered the public eye.

These marine garbage patches are created by ocean currents and eddies on the surface of the ocean: just as foam gathers in the center when coffee is stirred, anything caught by these currents will be dragged to the center of the vortex. They circulate between the coasts on both sides of the equator. It is clockwise in the northern hemisphere and counterclockwise in the southern hemisphere. In the Indian Ocean, the North Pacific, the South Pacific, the North Atlantic and the South Atlantic, there are five largest marine debris concentration zones. This year, Moore said that he had found an area in the Pacific Circulation, where a large amount of garbage was gathered, so much that "people can walk on it."

Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Great Pacific Garbage Patch

How serious is the marine litter problem now? Looking at the blue planet, 70% of the garbage in the ocean is plastic products, said Richard Thompson, a marine biologist from the University of Plymouth in the United Kingdom. Marcus Eriksson of the Five Circulation Research Institute led an international team who intercepted and counted the trash on the sea through the barrier behind the ocean research ship. Most of these garbage are water buckets, bottles, plastic bags, disposable packaging and plastic waste such as polystyrene foam. The research team collected data 24 times in 6 years and found that the area with the highest density of plastic waste has about 10 kilograms of plastic per square kilometer of the sea surface-equivalent to about 800 plastic beverage bottles. From this they estimate that a total of 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic garbage with a total weight of more than 260,000 tons are floating on the ocean.

To what extent will this situation develop? According to data from the Plastics Industry Association, plastic production increased from an average of 1.5 million tons in the 1950s to 299 million tons in 2013. The proportion of recycled parts is very low, and most of these materials are directly discarded after use. For example, in 2012, only 9% of the 32 million tons of plastic waste generated in the United States was recycled.

Plastic Particles in the Ocean

Surprisingly, the data collected by the Erickson team showed that the total amount of plastic waste in ocean currents did not increase significantly with the increase in the total amount of plastic flowing into the ocean. Oceanographer Carla Ravendlaw from the Woods Hole Marine Education Association in Massachusetts, USA, also came to the same conclusion. He combed out the voyage data in the North Atlantis Sea and the Caribbean Sea in recent decades. , Although the amount of directly discarded plastic has greatly increased, the total amount of marine debris in the world is fairly constant. So, where did all the plastic go?

Plastic decomposes faster than we thought. The answer may be: the sun and the waves grind the plastic garbage into tiny pieces. The disappeared plastic may have become fine particles suspended in the water, and large trawl nets cannot catch these fragments. According to estimates of the total amount of plastic flowing into the ocean, there may be millions of tons of fine plastic fragments in the ocean.

In July 2014, AndrĂ© Scorzal of the University of Cadiz in Spain and a group of international marine scientists calculated that the total number of plastic floating in the ocean was between 7,000 and 35,000 tons. Erickson's team also estimated that there should be 35,500 tons of plastic fragments less than 5 mm wide. But both of these values ​​seem to be low, and the million tons of these fragments should be found in the water.

At present, scientists have realized that, possibly due to the larger grid of the trawl, smaller particles will pass directly through the net. Therefore, a large part of small plastic fragments will be missed in the data collection process.

Erickson also said that in addition to the small plastic particles being missed, there are also some plastic products that may be frozen in the ice and cannot be counted. In July 2017, his team discovered that in the Arctic Ocean sea ice, there are 234 plastic particles per square meter. This is several orders of magnitude higher than the severely polluted ocean current. He believes that when sea water turns into ice, it will carry and concentrate small pieces of plastic, so sea ice will accumulate more pieces of plastic than sea water. When the sea ice area of the Arctic Ocean shrinks to its lowest point, it is only 5 to 6 million square kilometers. From this, it can be inferred that the amount of plastics in it is quite large. If the ice layer melts, these substances will be released into the sea again. Some plastic fragments are heavier than water and will sink, while others will become phytoplankton colonies or gather with other plastic fragments and fall to the seabed like falling snowflakes. Currents help to promote this process.

Recently, Erickson’s team has discovered other areas where plastic is accumulating: a large number of plastic fragments with a density higher than seawater fall like snowflakes and eventually deposit on the seabed. The 12 sediment cores and 4 coral specimens collected during 7 deep-sea expeditions in the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Indian Oceans show that the density of plastic fragments in the sediments here is more than 4 times higher than that in the shallow sea-each square meter contains about 800,000 pieces of plastic fragments.

However, people do not know the specific density of tiny debris in the ocean, because there is no better way to calculate anything less than 3 mm. Tracy Mincer, a marine geochemist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in the United States, has discovered a solution: scanning seawater with a special laser scanning microscope, which can distinguish 2 to 20 millimeters in size of plastic fragments. If this technology is mature, scientists can measure and estimate the number of suspended plastic fragments in the ocean, and these "slippage fish" may have the greatest impact on marine ecology. We know that marine creatures such as seabirds, sea turtles, whales, etc. will eat plastic garbage by mistake, and they are more likely to die from suffocation or starvation due to a clogged stomach. For smaller marine organisms, the impact will be more complicated.

How are plastic bottles made?

We see or even drink from plastic water bottles everday! Ever wonder how are those plastic bottles made? By blow molding! Yes, this is a process used for plastic bottles manufacturing. With the help of gas pressure, the hot melt parison closed in the mold is inflated to form a hollow product. Blow molding is divided into extrusion blow molding and injection blow molding. Extrusion blow molding has lower mold cost, while injection blow molding provides more controllable parameters, such as wall thickness and weight.
How are plastic bottles made

How are plastic bottles made?

Plastic blow molding process includes several standard steps:

  • The parison is installed on the nozzle of the machine, and then put into the mold. The mold is divided into two halves.
  • The hot air passes through the blowing head to form a blank and expand to the shape of the mold.
  • Cooling in the mold for a few seconds, cooling before demolding.
  • Remove the extra material at both ends, and finally complete the product.
Blow Molding Steps
Blow molding is mainly used to produce thin-walled hollow plastic products, such as water or soda bottles, pipes, car bumpers, and so on. Most thermoplastics include PET, PS, PC and other materials can be processed by blow molding, as well as glass. For the production of asymmetric parts, extrusion blow molding is usually used. In the blow molding process, injection molding is done on the parison and then moved to the blow molding machine for injection blow molding process.
Plastic bottles production line

For economy scale, it is necessary to produce hundreds to thousands of pieces of plastic bottles per hour, so blow molding manufacturing is generally mass production. With the improvement of the technology level, the cost of equipment decreases, one worker can control the operation of multiple automated equipment, and the labor cost is thus largely reduced.

Why is plastic pollution control imminent?

 On March 2, the resumed fifth session of the United Nations Environment Assembly passed the "Resolution on Ending Plastic Pollution (D...