Noor Debets
For my final bachelor project last year, I worked on a floating platform made out of recycled plastic out of the Maas in Rotterdam. The platform was partly designed to make use of the masses of plastic found in the Maas and partly to create a greener environment in the Rotterdam Harbour by placing trees on the platform. I liked this initiative to do something with the plastic pollution and wanted to investigate whether this was possible or not. It appeared to be more difficult than thought, why?
The Recycled Park is, as the webpage of the project tells, a proposition to catch the plastic pollution in the Maas just before it reaches the Northsea. This collected plastic will be re-used or recycled to assign a new value to the river. If we translate this, the idea will prevent the plastic waste disappear directly into the incinerator, although part of the plastic is also suitable for other types of recycling.
The ‘disappear directly into the incinerator’ shows that the platform of recycled plastic only prevents the plastic waste to directly disappear. Since the plastic material will be recycled into a product that can only be burned in the next stage. In other words, this has nothing to do with recycling, it’s about down cycling. The term recycling make people think, but in a wrong way. The recycling we actually mean, is about upcycling. About the positive and endless cycle of a product, re-using it over and over again. On the contrary, discussing recycling, the most attention goes to this down cycling. A lot of our focus is on recycling, but the actual recycling of good quality is about the recycling of a material into a material of the same quality. These days, this can only be done with PET-bottles. While a lot of plastics are still shreddered and turned into, for example, roadside bollards which have to be burned after use. And then, the actual problem is extended but not solved. The quantity of the recycling is still a problem.
In sum, there are many good initiatives, like the recycled park, that make people aware of their waste and try to provide proper solutions. But still, the most challenging part remains the same; how to keep the products away from the incinerator. To make a first step; let’s be honest to the users and explain clearly the difference about up- and downcycling. Only in such way we can make it to a real circular economy.
http://www.recycledpark.nl/
image: versbeton.nl/2015/10/was-getekend-plastic-in-de-stad/