What Future ?
Eight billion tons of plastic are thrown in the oceans every year, the equivalent of a dump truck every minute. When the plastic splits up, it creates microparticles, and they are so many that the scientists talk about a seventh continent (if you are interested, we wrote an article on this topic here). These huge quantities of plastic wastes start drawing the public opinion’s attention.
Indeed, following the Ocean Cleanup initiative, many projects start growing to reduce the oceans pollution. At the age of 18th, Boyan Slat has been known through a TED conference, where he presented the problem from a different angle. To treat the issue, he proposed a new way to pick up the wastes, and he has been developing with scientists and investors his project since 2012. He is supposed to install it in one of the biggest Pacific plastic vortex by 2018. The concept is to create a natural flow who will bring the wastes in his net. The process is currently being tested in the North Sea (off the Netherlands coast). If this project is revealed efficient, huge quantities of plastic, currently drifting in the oceans could be picked up , .
At the same time, more and more companies are specializing in recycling plastic wastes. Some companies, even big ones like H&M create clothes, shoes, car interiors, and even bags (you can check here our rPET bags or we talk about it here). It has been many years that companies are specialized in recycling plastic, but now, big companies such as H&M, Nike or Adidas start developing some new production processes.
In fact, Adidas in association with Parley for the Oceans, is now producing and selling sports shoes using plastic bottles. The principle is to transform the plastic into fiber, that they use to weave their shoes. Twenty-two bottles are needed to make one pair of shoe. Knowing that a company like Nike sells 25 pairs every second around the world (800 million every year), imagine if only 25% of these shoes were made of recycled material, it would equal to a need of two billion recycled bottles of plastic to produce these shoes. Just enlarge the scale to every shoe-maker in the world, the need of used plastic would tremendously grow. In this way, maybe some companies would invest a lot in oceans cleaning, because it seems to be an unlimited reserve of plastic materials waiting to be recycled.
So, we tried to show you that the plastic wastes are aiming to be considered as real raw material. When one knows how much plastic is used every day in the world, it seems to be an inexhaustible resource. Moreover, using these used plastics can reduce our impact on the environment, because they would not be thrown away in the nature, but recycled.
Here, we talked to you about this subject to try to show all the opportunities that we can make use from the vices of our system. In this precise case, it is about to give a value to our wastes by including them in the production process. That way, we just have to find the more innovative alternatives to transform our bins concerning the waste salvage. At their scale, Direct Imex try to fight against this pollution by proposing concrete alternatives and solutions in order to protect the earth.
Sources:
https://www.theoceancleanup.com/
https://directimex.com/have-you-ever-heard-about-rpet/
https://directimex.com/disposable-plastic-bags-new-stake/
