People'S Daily: The Rebirth Of Marine Plastic Waste

On the vast sea, if plastic bottles are thrown into the sea at will and remain in the sea all the time, they will be decomposed into micro plastics, which will have a lasting and permanent adverse impact on the sea, marine organisms and even human beings. How to recycle them into useful resources?

The new "blue cycle" marine plastic waste management model from Zhejiang, China, gives the answer - tracking and monitoring the entire life cycle of plastic pollution through blockchain and Internet of Things technology, covering collection, regeneration, remanufacturing, resale and other links. Recently, the project stood out from 2500 nominations around the world and won the 2023 "Earth Guardian Award" of the United Nations Environment Programme.

How can marine plastic waste get rebirth through the "blue cycle"? The reporter paid a visit to this.

　　 Collection and storage: multiple ways to improve enthusiasm

In the evening, a fishing boat came ashore on the beach of Huangjiao Island, Luqiao District, Taizhou City, Zhejiang Province. This time, the boatman Lao Chen caught a lot of fish. Busy in unloading, he specially instructed the crew to take the used waste fishing nets, foam plastics, plastic bottles, plastic bags, and marine debris salvaged with fish off the ship and deliver them to a nearby place called "Xiaolan's Home".

Lao Chen said that he usually declared the plastic bottles, fishing nets, waste oil and other wastes to be recycled through the "Zheli Office" App. If there is too much waste on the ship when going to sea, report the location and item information in this app, and there will be "Sea Didi" fishing boats coming to recycle.

At the beach, nearby fishermen and volunteers wearing blue vests picked up plastic bottles washed to the shore with clips and put them into plastic bags. The camera on their chest fully recorded the process and location of their picking up. It should be noted that in order to ensure that the bottles really come from within 3km of the coastline, if they cross the boundary, the electronic fence program will prompt.

These plastic bottles will also be sent to the "Little Blue House". There, the recycling price of each plastic bottle is 2-3 cents, while in the general garbage collection station, the price of a bottle is 3 cents.

"Little Blue House" is a collection and storage site for marine wastes, where wastes are classified and compressed. Taking plastic bottles as an example, they will be compressed into bottle bricks and sent to the granulation plant to be made into plastic particles to produce high-value plastic products that are more in line with international ecological and environmental protection concepts. In order to improve the enthusiasm of front-end collection, the income from product sales will be "fed back" to the personnel involved in marine plastic recycling. This is the reason why the recycling price of waste plastic bottles from the sea is nearly 10 times higher than that of ordinary plastic bottles.

At the port of Jiaojiang District, Taizhou City, there is a box shaped warehouse called "Ocean Cloud Warehouse", which is an intelligent processing system that can intelligently classify, temporarily store, deeply purify, and pre treat and reduce the amount of ship pollutants, waste plastic bottles, fishing nets, fishing gear and other wastes. After crushing, the volume of marine waste can be reduced by 90%, greatly reducing the subsequent transportation costs.

Surprisingly, there are not many staff in the "Ocean Cloud Warehouse", but relying on a variety of high-tech technologies such as IoT sensing technology, high automation control technology, digital supervision technology and so on, remote unmanned control has been achieved. In Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, more than 200 kilometers away from the "Ocean Cloud Warehouse", the staff of Zhejiang Lanjing Technology Co., Ltd., as the operator, can remotely control various systems of the "Ocean Cloud Warehouse" and repair equipment through AR glasses.

　　 Regeneration: unmanned workshop plays a leading role

The collected marine wastes will be transferred to Veolia Huafei Polymer Technology (Zhejiang) Co., Ltd. located in Anji County, Huzhou City, Zhejiang Province. The company is one of the members of the public welfare organization "Blue Alliance", and has a marine plastic recycling certification issued by an international certification body.

The reporter saw at the scene that many white bags were neatly stacked outside the plant, with plastic bottles to be treated inside; There was a huge roar of machines in the factory building. In the workshop, several workers observed the running state of the machine. Fu Xianwei, chief operating officer of Veolia Huafei, said that the company has basically realized unmanned production process to ensure product standardization and high quality. Taking plastic bottles as an example, they will be classified, deeply cleaned, melted and granulated here to become finished plastic particles and obtain new life.

In the cold cleaning line of the cleaning workshop, the plastic bottles will be unpacked and cleaned to remove the impurities that may be stained with oil, sludge, dust, etc. The cleaned plastic bottles need to go through the automatic optical sorter to remove impurities with different colors and materials, and cooperate with manual sorting to further remove the impurities. After sorting, bottles with the same material, color and quality are broken to get bottle pieces. After cold cleaning and sorting, the plastic bottle pieces look clean, but there are still some impurities and heteroplasms that have not been completely removed, which requires more refined high-temperature cleaning and sorting.

"After being soaked in seawater for a long time, the color value of marine plastics after recycling is yellow, the sea salt content is high, and the physical properties are lower, which puts forward higher requirements for cleaning technology." Fu Xianwei told reporters that the company has specially improved the pharmaceutical process, the high-temperature stirring cooking process at about 95 degrees Celsius, and fully hot washed the sea salt, fructose, sediment, glue, ink, etc. contained on the surface of the bottle. After the attachment on the surface of the bottle sheet is removed by high-speed friction, the optical sorter performs fine sorting again. Whether the quality of bottle tablets is up to the standard still needs to be strictly inspected. Only bottle tablets with impurity content less than the control value can be screened.

On the huge drive belt, these bottle pieces are smoothly fed into the extruder for melting. The melt passes through the filter to remove impurities, and finally is cut into recycled plastic particles of uniform size. Before leaving the factory, the laboratory will test and inspect the plastic particles. "Through these links, the quality of marine plastics is comparable to that of plastics from normal channels," said Fu Xianwei.

At present, Veolia Huafei has disposed of tens of millions of plastic bottles recycled from the sea. By adjusting the granulation process, the factory can produce various levels of recycled plastic particles such as food contact.

　　 Product: machine "skillful hand" knitting high-quality fabric

Internationally certified marine plastic particles can appreciate more than twice as much as traditional recycled plastics, while products made from marine plastic wastes have higher added value. In Hangzhou Xinsheng Printing and Dyeing Co., Ltd., a member enterprise of the "Blue Alliance", marine plastic particles will be made into various fabrics, which are mainly exported to some international clothing brands.

How do marine plastic particles become fabrics? According to Fu Xiaoling, marketing director of Hangzhou Xinsheng Printing and Dyeing Co., Ltd., particles can be blended with cotton, linen, wool and other fibers to form staple fibers, or they can be directly pulled into filaments by machines; The fibers are then spun into loops of yarn.

In the pilot plant, the reporter saw that rows of yarns were transformed into rolls of grey cloth under the "skillful hand" knitting of the circular knitting machine. Then, the grey cloth is sent to the dyeing and finishing production line. In several roaring air cylinders, they will be dyed with various colors. After processing, the fabric will enter the constant temperature and humidity test room to complete a series of tests to ensure that the quality meets international standards.

Because the source of marine plastics is not standardized, many technical difficulties need to be solved in the process of dyeing and finishing. Fu Xiaoling said that the yarn made of marine plastics has a high oil content and impurity content, which is easy to cause uneven color pattern, poor color fastness and other problems in dyeing.

To this end, the technical personnel of Xinsheng Printing and Dyeing Company have made a breakthrough. For example, in the dyeing process, the degreaser is selected, the pretreatment temperature is increased, and the dyeing heat preservation time is prolonged by reducing the heating rate of the dyeing vat to ensure the dyeing uniformity of grey cloth.

"We are proud to say that the quality and performance of these marine plastic fabrics and ready-made clothes are no worse than other recycled clothes, and they are also very popular in the international market," said Fu Xiaoling.

　　 Delivery: printed with visual traceability "ID card"

Before the products made of marine plastic leave the factory, there is a final step - printing a two-dimensional code with the words "produced by the Blue Alliance", which is the exclusive "ID card" for each product.

The special feature of this "ID card" is that it records the whole process of marine plastic collection, storage, transportation, regeneration, manufacturing, etc. through the Internet of Things equipment, and uses blockchain technology to generate a unique two-dimensional code to ensure that the product really comes from marine plastic.

On a document bag made of marine waste, the reporter scanned the QR code at the top, and the picture showed that: the document bag contained 6.5g of marine plastic, the consumer's purchase could reduce 0.32 plastic bottles and 8.45g of carbon emissions, and the photo of the collector's head was attached at the bottom of the picture. Click the visual traceability button to see the whole process of the product "from ocean to shelf" on the map.

With this "ID card", the effect is immediate. Chen Guanghui, one of the sponsors of the "Blue Cycle" project and the co-founder of Zhejiang Lanjing Technology Co., Ltd., said that many enterprises at home and abroad are willing to purchase more expensive recycled particles of marine plastics and products to fulfill their social responsibilities; However, it is difficult to identify whether these plastic particles really come from marine plastic waste by traditional means. The company has developed a visual traceability system based on blockchain technology to solve this problem.

Up to now, 237 industrial enterprises and 10200 ships have joined the "blue circle" in Zhejiang, and the elderly, fishermen and volunteers along the coast have actively participated, reaching 61800 person times. The project accumulatively collects and treats 10900 tons of marine waste, including 2254 tons of plastic waste, reducing about 2930 tons of carbon emissions. The front-line collectors increase their income by about 13000 yuan every year, and fishermen get more than 100 million yuan of green low interest financial loans.

For the whole world, the amount of marine plastic pollution is still huge. It is gratifying that changes are taking place along the coast of China. As one of the participants in the "blue circle", Guo Wenbiao, a Zhejiang fisherman, used to see fewer and fewer fish in the sea. Sometimes when he caught them, they were mixed with a lot of waste. "We depend on the sea to eat the sea, and we should also love the sea and protect the sea. Now we are gradually aware of this. Every time we go to the sea and return to the port, we voluntarily bring back the waste, so as not to burden the sea," Guo Wenbiao said.

　　 [Reporter's Notes]

"High income" is used to solve the problem of "no one collecting", "high credit" is used to solve the problem of "low value", and "high feedback" is used to solve the problem of "sustainability"... The Zhejiang "Blue Cycle" project has changed the previous governance model in which the government provides funds for the governance subject and finance. It relies on the digital platform with the "Internet of Things+Blockchain" technology as the core, integrating management departments, the masses, enterprises and other forces.

An important significance of the "Blue Cycle" project is to set an inspiring example for governments, enterprises and communities around the world who want to take action to reduce plastic pollution. At present, the "blue cycle" model is being further promoted in many places in China. It is believed that with more people participating in it, environmental protection and marine protection will become the consensus and practical action of more people.

(Source: People's Daily Overseas Edition)