Alaska is very remote with a limited road infrastructure, which makes transportation difficult for people, goods, and especially waste. Without a central recycling program in Alaska, waste found and picked up along the coastline didn't ...See moreAlaska is very remote with a limited road infrastructure, which makes transportation difficult for people, goods, and especially waste. Without a central recycling program in Alaska, waste found and picked up along the coastline didn't have anywhere to go be recycled. In response to Alaska's lack of a central recycling program, Gulf of Alaska Keeper (GoAK) worked with Pyxera Global to pull together an all-star project team; The Alliance to End Plastic Waste, Center for Regenerative Design and Collaboration (CDRC), Dow, and FedEx. Together they worked to develop a sustainable solution to turn ocean trash into a usable product. To see if their idea would work, litter collected by GoAK was shipped to a CRDC facility in Pennsylvania for further exploration. CRDC developed a new technology to reuse historically hard-to-break-down ocean plastics. The material created from this process can be turned into a better, more durable product for bricks, concrete, and other important structural building substances. Due to the success of this experiment, CRDC is now working with Alaska to open a facility that will create this circular economy locally.
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