Conversion of Marine Litter from Venice Lagoon into Marine Fuels via Thermochemical Route: The Overview of Products, Their Yield, Quality and Environmental Impact

Plastics floating in ocean gyres are a popular topic within pollution discussion; however, no simple solution exists to deal with marine litter. Overcoming limitations in collection, and perhaps even more in the environmentally, technically and economically acceptable use of the collected material, is of paramount importance. This paper presents initial results from converting plastic marine litter processed as-is, without pretreatment, and sorting into marine gas oil (MGO) compliant with the ISO8217 DMA standard via a pyrolysis and distillation process. Yields, composition and key properties of products along with levels of eight environmental contaminants potentially generated by the process are presented. More than 100 kg of actual marine litter from the Venice Lagoon, including polyolefins packaging and polyamides fishing nets, were converted into products at approximately 45 wt% yield of which approximately 50% (V/V) was MGO. By our knowledge, this is the first report of chemical recycling of real marine litter targeting the production of standardized marine fuels beyond laboratory scale, outlining coarse but realistic figures finally available as an initial benchmark. The process supports the concept of circularity in the blue economy and could be employed to tackle difficult terrestrial plastic waste to help prevent marine litter generation.