The Plastic Odyssey travels the seas in search of solutions to reduce plastic pollution. The laboratory boat is equipped with machines to transform waste into construction materials or furniture. The ship stopped in French Polynesia, where the pearling industry uses this material in quantity.
After tourism, but before fishing, pearl farming represents the second income of this French territory in the Pacific Ocean. The sector recorded 50 million euros in revenue and exported 9 tonnes of pearls in 2022.
The Plastic Odyssey stopped at Mangareva, the main island of the Gambier archipelago. In the lagoon there are around ten cabins on stilts: this is the Devaux pearl farm. The company extracts 4,000 pearls every day. Oysters grow in plastic nets which have a lifespan of two to three years. “There are times when we find ourselves with too many nets, which can remain stored on land for months. We don’t really know what to do with them. But we need this material to work,” explains Magali Devaux , farm manager.
On dry land, his father, Dominique Devaux, the founder of the operation, goes behind a shed where several hundred kilos of waste are piling up. “For two years, we have been repatriating our waste to Tahiti”, indiwhat is he. The waste will be buried on the capital island of French Polynesia, more than 1,600 km from Mangareva.
“Previously, some burned them. Fortunately, I had a lot of space to store them. I had no solution. The only thing I knew was that we had to keep all this waste” , specifies Dominique Devaux.
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Recycling of waste
The Plastic Odyssey teams collected samples of used equipment from the farm to try to recycle them. Plastic waste is crushed on board the boat and transformed into parts for building or daily life. The machines used were developed at lower cost and in a simple manner to make the transformation accessible.
Maxime Thirouin, recycling engineer on the Plastic Odyssey, presents the result to Dominique Devaux: “We did tests with the mesh from your pearl farm. We obtain a shredded plastic that is quite different from the one we usually obtain “It’s a little more fibrous. For us, it’s much more easily usable. We can put it directly into the extruder to transform these old meshes into new finished products.”
A political world to convince
This result gives hope to the pearl grower. “It’s very good. There are solutions. We must hope that our elected officials are sensitive to the need to develop this sector, especially on the islands,” he declares.
Civil servant Thomas Trophime, environmental technician at the Directorate of Marine Resources of French Polynesia (DRM), pursues precisely this objective: “We are looking for reliable revaluation techniques, so that we can present them to different industrialists in order to show that “a revaluation sector is possible in French Polynesia. The next step will be to convince these industrialists and politicians of the interest of investing in this sector”, he explains.
Since the development of pearl farming around sixty years ago, the DRM estimates that farms have produced 90,000 cubic meters of plastic waste.
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Radio report: Margaux Bédé
Web adaptation: friend
