SETAC - Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry – has their annual SETAC Europe conference in Seville, where Cecilia Askham (Norsus), Waranya Wataniyakun (UiT) and Sigrid Hakvåg (SINTEF) are participating. On Monday Cecilia presented the weighting work she and her co-authors have done during her co-chair role for the Weighting subtask of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Life Cycle Initiative’s Global Guidance for Life Cycle Impact Assessment Indicators and Methods (GLAM). This work has resulted in weighting factors that can be used to weigh different types of damage to humans and the environment based on asking people across the globe about their opinions. She presented the factors that were the result of this research and compared them to previously existing weighting factors.
On Wednesday «The Importance of Material Flow Analysis (MFA) for Life Cycle Assessment of Microplastics” by Simon Saxegård, Cecilia Askham, Valentina Pauna and Mafalda Silva was on display in the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) poster area. The poster shows how MFA can be used to include macro- and microplastic emissions in the data that an LCA is based on; and how currently available data and information can be used to include plastic leakage to nature (litter and losses) in LCA studies. The work also identifies important further research that is needed, such as the inclusion of more of the effects that plastic emissions can have on humans and ecosystems. MFA should be included in the development of better models for how plastic leakage can move through nature and expose many organisms to risk in soil, freshwater and the marine environments, as plastic is a material with a long lifetime in nature.
Waranya is a PhD student at UiT and her poster on Wednesday is about “Metallic Additives Leaching and Extractions from Biodegradable Plastics Used in Fishing Gears and Potential Materials: Are They Truly More Environmentally Friendly?”. The poster aims to answer one of the two most received questions of this project – if biodegradable materials are indeed safer for the environment. While nylon contains the highest number of metals, biodegradable materials still contains a substantial amount of metals, most with no clear functionalities. If this could be eliminated during the processing, biodegradable materials could be the right path forward.
The last poster "Investigations into Ageing of Monofilaments Under Various Test Conditions in the Sea" by Sigrid Hakvåg et al. was on display on Thursday in the poster session 'Beyond Microplastics: Analytics, Environmental Fate and Impacts of (Water-Soluble) Polymers and Biodegradable Polymers'. Hakvåg (from SINTEF Ocean) and colleagues are investigating if and to what degree materials designed to be biodegradable are actually degrading in marine habitats, covering different environmental conditions. A suite of tests is used for evaluating the degradation and physical and chemical integrity of monofilaments.