Toxic Legacies / Filtering the Truth
The concept of recycling has gained immense popularity as a sustainable approach to waste pollution and is embraced as a potential solution to our escalating environmental crisis. However, not all recycling practices – especially when it comes to plastic – are necessarily environmentally friendly. In many cases, claims to recyclability are merely greenwashing, a marketing strategy used by companies to position themselves as environ- mentally conscious without implementing actual changes in their production practices. My master project aims to investigate the greenwashing behind recycling and how the concept of recycling can tend to justify the production of waste in a consumer-based system.
The concept of recycling has gained immense popularity as a sustainable approach to waste pollution and is embraced as a potential solution to our escalating environmental crisis. However, not all recycling practices – especially when it comes to plastic – are necessarily environmentally friendly. In many cases, claims to recyclability are merely greenwashing, a marketing strategy used by companies to position themselves as environ- mentally conscious without implementing actual changes in their production practices.
My master project aims to investigate the greenwashing behind recycling and how the concept of recycling can tend to justify the production of waste in a consumer-based system.
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
MPI: testing levels of toxicity
The knowledge that the cigarette butt itself is very harmful
along with not having extracted any of the chemicals in my
production process, generates the question how many chemicals
are in fact still present in these new materials. Thanks
to Professor Dr. Karola Dierichs and her position at the Max
Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam, I was
lucky enough to be able to apply the gas chromatography
mass spectrometry method to my materials in order to determine
the levels of toxicity still present after handling this
form of waste without the help of any preliminary extraction
processes. Mass spectrometry is an analytical technique
that is used to identify and quantify unknown compounds
by measuring the mass of a molecule and elucidating their
chemical identity or structure. 64 With the help of Mariella Gabler,
a PhD student in the department of biomaterials, I was
able to conduct a series of tests that took the dyed cotton,
paper and wax and compared the chemicals present in these
to the chemicals present in the individual elements of the unprocessed
cigarette butt itself. Cotton, paper and wax were
soaked in toluene, hexane or acetone over a time period of
two hours before being filtered and transferred to the GC-MS
Masshunter System.
Setup at lab (MPI)
100
Change language