Marine Litter Waste Management

 Millions of tons of floating marine litter is in our oceans. The litter is mostly plastic. It has pushed the need for effective waste management. The team at UPV/EHU's Materials have made good progress.

Cristina Pena is a lecturer in the Department of Environmental Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering, Gipuzkoa. (UPV/EHU). The work was published in the journal Waste Management Bulletin. She is author of the paper and explains, "We assessed a practical approach: the possibility of integrating plastics collected from the sea into the urban waste system. This pioneering study, which is part of a Ph.D. thesis, explores the possibility of managing this waste efficiently in current urban recycling infrastructures."

Maine litter does not have a systemized management program. It is managed on a very ad hoc basis. It is included into the framework of a few very specific projects.

Amaia Mendoza is a researcher in the UPV/EHU's Materials and Technologies research group. She reports, "It is important to bear in mind that this waste, having been at sea, has a level of degradation that is significantly different from, for example, a bottle deposited in a yellow container under normal conditions. So our starting point and key question was precisely this: Does this level of degradation of marine waste prevent it from being classified in an urban waste management process?"

She continues, "In this work, we used identical PET plastic water bottles of the same brand to access the effects of various environmental conditions. We divided the bottles into two batches: the first batch was left in the open air for nine months, simulating exposure on a beach or rocky coast, and the second batch was submerged in the sea for the same period. We saw that the submerged bottles underwent increased chemical degradation, while those exposed to open air on the 'shore' remained in a better state."

This research showed the team how each type of waste responds in different environments. It also allowed them to analyze how the degradation process varies.

The team compared bottles that had not gone through degradation to see if the automatic separation equipment in a waste treatment plant would separate the plastic bottles of marine origin. 

Mendoza reports, "To find out, we conducted tests using an optical separation system, a type of technology that automatically classifies materials according to their composition, and we saw that the effectiveness of separating the bottles of marine origin-both those exposed to the open air and those submerged at sea- was very high, comparable to that of bottles from urban waste."



The researchers summarize, "These results indicate that the treatment of marine bottles in these plants is feasible and could be successfully implemented. The state of degradation is crucial when determining the feasibility of subsequently recycling them."

Pena stated, "If we manage to find practical applications and encourage the industrial development of these materials, collecting them will also become attractive. The more efficient and viable the management of this litter is, the greater the incentive to use it and, consequently, the greater the interest in collecting it from the sea."


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mike Giradi from Stereotimes commentary on Holostage Room Treatments

I have been  friends with Mike Giradi for a few years and he has helped me test numerous designs .    I was so honored a few weeks ago when he agreed to give these Holostages a few words.  From. Mike G. The sound was a little closed in at first, but then it really opened up to prove it is another great audio product. The noise floor is greatly reduced. I am hearing details I've never heard before. When it's in the recording, the soundstage widens in all directions. The timbre of each instrument is spot on. The six Holostages installed in my room aided in the C13 alignment of air molecules to a far greater extent than the Bybee IQSE devices I had previously been using. Every instrument had greater depth, pop and presence. Listening to classical music on movie soundtracks is incredible now. The Holostages installed on my BACCH4MAC and monoblocks was the answer to what was needed. The noise floor dropped significantly in both cases resulting in greater clarity and music...
Read more

Queen Bee 🐝

Image
  Bees hide an interesting secret. When the hive loses its queen, who alone is able to give life to the colony and maintain order in a perfectly organized society, all seems lost. The life of the hive slows down. Without new eggs, the future is lost. In a few weeks, the colony may be doomed. But the bees do not panic. Nor do they expect salvation from outside. Demonstrating extraordinary collective intelligence and profound instincts, they trigger spectacular emergency procedures, almost unimaginable in a world dominated by insects. --- ◆ The transformation begins with a simple but essential choice The worker bees choose common larvae - those who would normally be mere workers. They are nothing special. They are not born different. But their fate changes completely. They are chosen to receive a special food: royal jelly. A rare substance, produced by healthy bees, rich in proteins, vitamins and bioactive compounds. This is royal food in the purest sense of the word. The larvae fed ...
Read more

Novel Acoustic Wave Discovered

Image
  A new diffraction phenomenon was researched and published on January 14, 2025. The team was led by Tohoku University with collaboration from the Japan atomic energy agency and the RIKEN Center for emergent matter science. Surface acoustic waves (SAWs) are elastic vibrations. They travel along the surface of materials, not unlike ripples on a pond. SAWs are an important part of frequency filters used in every day devices like our cell phones. These devices change electrical signals in vibrations, or ripples. This occurs because of the piezoelectric  effect and it enables efficient signal processing. During this experiment, the team created a periodic array of magnetic nanoscale materials. The magnetic array is a sort of specialized grating that the waves passed through. The scientists were surprised. Instead of the usual symmetric defraction, the team saw something different. They observed a completely new, asymmetrical diffraction of SAWs called ‘non-reciprocal defraction’....
Read more