Global plastic production is currently at a rate of 200,000 tonnes per year, and it is projected to increase to 33 billion tonnes per year by 2050. Approximately 10% of the plastic produced is in the seas and oceans. Plastic pollution in marine and coastal environments is a growing concern worldwide. Sources of this waste include shipping transportation, coastal tourism, marine aquaculture, and fishing. It is estimated that at least 14 million tonnes of plastic enter the oceans and seas annually. Furthermore, beach litter, which often consists of plastic packaging, lids, bottles, and cigarette butts, poses significant challenges.
The G20 countries signed an Action Plan on Marine Litter in Germany in 2017, recognizing the urgent need to prevent and reduce marine litter to preserve human health and marine and coastal ecosystems. This highlights the need to reduce the amount of plastic waste in the sea, ocean, and coasts and find solutions to manage the existing waste. Proper management of marine waste can help stop the flow of waste in line with a closed-loop economy.
Reducing and stopping plastic waste from reaching the oceans is crucial for achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The CUPOLA project is the international, interdisciplinary, and intersectoral research and innovation project aiming to find solutions to this global problem. The main goal of the CUPOLA project is to establish long-term research cooperation between institutions with complementary expertise to design and develop carbon-neutral, scalable, and socially acceptable methods to sort and convert plastic waste into valuable chemicals and materials. The originality of CUPOLA lies in the collaborative network among experimentalists, theoreticians, and industrialists. Key technologies in the project include waste sorting and pre-treatment methods. Novel pneumatic systems are developed to separate waste plastics, effectively separating the plastic waste into PET-rich, PO-rich, and PA-rich streams.
The successful separation of plastic waste is crucial for the subsequent mechanical and chemical recycling processes. Thermochemical processes such as catalytic pyrolysis, catalytic gasification, aminolysis, and hydrothermal carbonization are applied to convert feedstocks into valuable chemicals and materials. For instance, the PET-rich stream will be transformed into bitumen additives through aminolysis, while the polyolefin-rich stream will be converted to benzene, toluene, and xylenes (BTX) via catalytic pyrolysis, and to H2 and carbon nanotubes through catalytic gasification. The project will involve process modeling, techno-economic analysis, and life cycle assessment to provide essential information about the economic viability and environmental impact of these processes. Additionally, renewable energy sources and carbon capture technologies will be integrated into the final design of the CUPOLA processes to ensure carbon neutrality. This project has the potential to bring together a wide range of research and industry groups in chemistry, chemical engineering, civil engineering, mechanical engineering, environmental science, and computer science to collaborate on the recycling of marine plastic waste. The success of the project will contribute to the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 3, 12, and 14 by reducing plastic pollution in the oceans and converting waste into value-added products.
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