How Ecover plans to create the Ocean Bottle

It is a world first for packaging: creating a bottle out of waste marine plastic, rHDPE and sugarcane-based plastic. But is plastic debris from the ocean still usable as a recyclate?

Chris Dow, CEO of Closed Loop Recycling, and one of the three partners Ecover is collaborating with on the Ocean Bottle project, says: “This plastic has been lying in the water for long periods of time, so it is slimy and dirty.”

Already the first tonnes of plastic fished from the sea have entered the premises of the company’s Dagenham recycling facility in East London. Dow adds: “Any floating object that you can imagine in plastic is coming here.”

Ocean-derived plastic

Last March, Ecover pledged to develop the most sustainable packaging possible as part of their campaign ‘Message in our bottle’. At the moment, all of Ecover’s bottles are made out of rHDPE and sugarcane-based plastic, delivered by Braskem, the Brazilian specialist in sustainable plastic.

Now, Ecover is ready to take it to the next level and incorporate ocean-derived plastic into their bottle. In the last years, marine litter has been rapidly attracting more attention, since Captain Charles Moore put this problem on the map after discovering a ‘Plastic Soup’ in the North Pacific gyre (i.e. vortex).

Over one million seabirds and more than 100,000 marine mammals die every year from ingesting plastic waste, according to the United Nations Environmental Programme, while research from the Marine Conservation Society shows that 60% of all litter found on British beaches is made out of plastic.

Special trawls

To develop an ocean bottle, it is first of all necessary to fish the plastic out of the sea. “Waste Free Oceans organises the waste plastic collection,” says Clare Allman, Ecover’s UK head of marketing.

This foundation has been set up by the European Plastics Converters to reduce floating marine debris, as well as campaign against littering while emphasising the value of used plastic as a resource. “They work with the fishermen in European waters to collect the plastic,” explains Allman.

Boats outfitted with special trawls, that only catch plastic and not fish, collect between two and eight tonnes of waste per trawl. This is delivered to different ports in France, Belgium, Spain, The Netherlands, Cyprus and Denmark.

From there, it is send to Closed Loop Recycling where part of the waste marine plastic is turned into pellets. Logoplaste will perform trials with this material to get the right mixture of ocean plastic, rHDPE and sugarcane-based plastic for the new bottle.

Covered with algae

Ecover has chosen Closed Loop Recycling because it is the only facility in the UK that is equipped to recycle both PET and HDPE into food-grade plastic, meeting EU and US FDA standards.

Normally, they take in discarded soft drinks and water bottles made from PET and milk bottles made from HDPE – in total about 35,000 tonnes of bottles each year. “The ocean plastic also contains lots of water bottles,” says Dow.

However, that seems to be the only similarity between normally collected plastic and what is fished out of the ocean since that plastic is covered with slimy algae. “It is not so much degraded, but it requires careful attention and a lot more cleaning than plastic that is collected through a kerbside system,” explains Dow. (...)

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