COViD Plastic Waste

COViD Plastic - Life savers AND an environmental disaster

 While we work as a global society to quickly and dramatically reduce the amount of plastic we produce and consume, we need a way to responsibly eliminate the plastics mess we’ve already made/are making.

Why? Because COViD is unleashing a tsunami of plastic on our planet.

Let’s be honest - modern life is unimaginable without plastics, and it’s obvious plastic plays a critical role in both preventing and treating life-threatening illness.

There are already 165 million tons of plastic circulating marine environments. Before COViD, we were adding another dump truck of plastic to the ocean every minute - about 10 million tons per year. The global pandemic made that problem worse - much worse. COViD triggered 129 billion disposable masks and 65 million gloves being used per month. 

Gloves and masks are choking wildlife, covering sensitive ecosystems like coral reefs, and washing up on beaches around the world. The celebrated vaccine has become a much needed lifeline and represents the best of human innovation in the face of a crisis. It is also poised to unleash billions of vials with plastic components and shipping materials into the waste stream with significant risk of ending up in the ocean, burned, or buried in a landfill. By solving an immediate human health crisis we’ve created a dire environmental problem.

So, how do we balance our responsibility to protect human lives with the need to conduct a quick, wide scale ocean cleanup?

We find ways to dispose of plastics in ways that have the lowest environmental impact while creating critical need products like clean power, and construction material that can be used to build resilient infrastructure.

That’s exactly the focus of SeaChange’s mission, and the reason we chose the Plasma Enhanced Melter technology.

There’s little point in spending the money, time, and resources to conduct large scale ocean cleanup if the plastic collected only goes back into a broken waste management system and escapes back into the environment/ocean.

Our mission is to partner with organizations, companies, and local governments conducting beach cleanups - as well as humanitarian organizations managing refugee camps and other medical relief operations - to provide an end game for plastic pollution.

Putting plastic through the PEM is like dropping it on the surface of the sun.

The 18,000°F plasma arc completely breaks apart its molecular structure and lets us pull off organics like hydrogen for clean power. Remaining solids like minerals are melted into a non-toxic, inert glass that can be used for coral reef restoration, or to build more resilient infrastructure that can withstand the more frequent and intense storms caused by climate change.

Our ultimate goal is to harness forces of nature to protect life as we know it on this planet.