ITN Marine Debris: Sorting & Sample Preparation

The nonprofit Island Trails Network (ITN) was our first collaborating organization, inviting us on expeditions and providing marine debris samples dating back to 2019 Shuyak Island. Now from our headquarters in Oregon, we are working with that material to develop recycling and recovery markets.

As a service to ITN, last month we broke down the materials from an expedition to Shuyak Island in 2019. By sorting through over 24 sacks of marine debris weighing over 7,700 lbs, we extracted materials for which we’ve been working to develop markets including trawl floats, extrusion blow molding grade HDPE bottles, injection grade HDPE, flexible vinyl, PET bottles, and expanded polystyrene.

A team from Oregon State helping Scott sort marine debris.

The balance of the material consists of a mixture of more degraded plastics and materials for which we have not been able to identify markets, such as polyurethane foams. This mixture of materials will be send to Idaho National Laboratory for a combination of characterization and development of preprocessing techniques to prepare the material for gasification.

From INL, these materials will head north to Canada, where the Canadian company Enerkem processes a mixture of biomass and non recyclable plastics through their gasification process to initially produce syngas which is then converted to methanol by a Fischer Tropsch process.