Sustainable Plastics - October 2021 - 6

newsround
Acquisition completed
HOUSTON-BASED Westlake
Chemical Corporation completed
the previously announced acquisition
of Dimex LLC, from Grey
Mountain Partners, a private equity
firm, the company said in a
10 September statement. The acquisition
'underscores our longstanding
commitment to stewardship
of the environment and
recycling', according to Robert
Buesinger, Executive Vice President,
Vinyl Products of Westlake
Chemical Corporation. Based
in Ohio, USA, Dimex produces
a variety of consumer products
made from post-industrial-recycled
polyvinyl chloride, polyethylene
and thermoplastic
elastomer materials, and has annualized
sales of approximately
$100 million.
The acquisition significantly
expands Westlake's portfolio of
environmentally friendlier products,
which currently includes
GreenVin, a caustic soda produced
with renewable energy
by its Vinnolit subsidiary, and
Aspire Vinyl, the first phthalate-free,
bio-based compounds
with more than 35% renewable
content. Westlake is also
exploring a one-pellet solution
to incorporate post-consumer
resin while maintaining material
strength, as well as participating
in the EU Circular Flooring
Project to enable post-consumer
PVC flooring recycling.
Berry Global joins PP recycling coalition
BERRY GLOBAL GROUP has
joined The Recycling Partnership's
Polypropylene Recycling
Coalition, which aims
to increase recycling access
in the US for polypropylene.
The cross-industry initiative
includes steering committee
members Keurig Dr Pepper,
Braskem, NextGen Consortium,
and the Walmart Foundation,
along with other members
of the polypropylene
Ahoy there
IN NEWS from The Ocean
Cleanup, which is currently
testing its redesigned System
002 cleaning platform: it does
what it is supposed to do. By the
second week of September, the
first six - of in total 12 - weeks
of testing System 002, the follow-up
to its previous experimental
platforms, System 001
and System 001/B, had been
completed and the results look
promising. The crew returned to
port with a catch of 8.2 tonnes
of plastic from Great Pacific
Garbage Patch. The following
weeks will see tests also being
carried out with tagged plastics,
to test the eff iciency of the system,
according to Boyan Slat,
the CEO of The Ocean Cleanup,
as well as some 'longer duration
tests'. The result will hopefully
be a 'system just completely
filled with plastic'.
Ocean Cleanup is a non-prof6
October
2021
it organization founded in 2013
and based in the Netherlands.
It is focused on developing advanced
technologies to rid the
world's oceans of plastic. The
newest iteration of the experimental
platform, nicknamed
'Jenny', is designed to create an
artificial coastline, to concentrate
the plastic. It is comprised
of a long U-shaped barrier that
will guide the plastic into a retention
zone at its far end. Once
full, the retention zone is hauled
on board a service vessel to be
emptied.
The Great Pacific Garbage
Patch is in the Pacific Ocean
between Hawaii and California.
It covers an approximate surface
area of 1.6 million square
kilometers - an area twice the
size of Texas and three times
the size of France. It contains
anywhere between 80 and 100
thousand tonnes of plastic de8.2
thousand tonnes of debris were hauled up during the first trip.
bris. Microplastics account for
8% of the total mass but 94%
of the estimated 1.8 (1.1-3.6) trillion
pieces floating in the area,
while a recent study found that
approximately 50 percent of
the waste is made up of fishing
industry waste, including socalled
" ghost " fishing nets. The
Ocean Cleanup's floating systems
are designed to capture
plastics ranging from in size
from millimeters to these ghost
nets, which can be tens of meters
wide.
By 2040, Ocean Cleanup
hopes to remove 90 per cent of
floating plastic from the oceans.
value chain.
To date, the coalition has
contributed $4.2 million in
grants to 13 recycling facilities
and has given financial
awards across the United
States to increase polypropylene
recovery by 13 million
pounds annually. Other
activities include supporting
targeted consumer education
eff orts and infrastructure improvements.
Sustainable Plastics - October 2021

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