Ispectrum Magazine Ispectrum Magazine #09 | Page 30

Test with a 40 meter size boom in Nieuwe Maas river (Rotterdam)
Photo credit:© Bea Nagy (www.beabird.net), The Ocean Cleanup

JK: But if someone went and
used that oil for fuel or for making more plastics wouldn’t that
actually create a carbon footprint?
Boyan: Of course it does, but then
it is equal to the carbon footprint created if that person used
oil derived from crude oil and the
process required to make oil out
of crude is a lot dirtier than that
of making oil out of plastic. And,
there are a lot more valuable ways
in which the plastic could be used.
Probably 20% will be so degraded
that it could only be turned into

Boyan: Interestingly, if you look
at the process of getting oil from
ocean plastic, it has lower emissions than getting new oil from the
ground, so we were actually able to
account for that as a negative carbon footprint according to the carbon footprint analysis standards.
If you don’t include the transport
process the whole cleanup process
is actually carbon negative as we’ll
actually reduce the amount of carbon that would be emitted into the
atmosphere.

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