Oblynx
commented
1 year ago “Green plastics” is a generic term and does not come with an exact scientific definition.
Plastics referred to as “green” are generally plastics with a reduced or minimised environmental impact when they are produced, used, recycled, upcycled, disposed of, when they decompose, etc. They exhibit one or more of the following properties: source renewability; biodegradability/compostability after end of life; possible to process in an environmentally friendly way.
Equally, a process that makes plastics greener would also fall under “green plastics”, for example a form of chemical recycling that makes PET greener by enabling it to be recycled more efficiently and minimising waste.
As “green plastic” is not a specific material but a way to look at the whole lifecycle of a material, we ask participants to include an explanation of their intended approach to solving the code challenge (see rules of competition “Proposals for solving the challenge” and “Submissions of solutions to the code challenge”). This explanation should clearly indicate what aspects of green plastics are included in the proposed solution to the code challenge. For further background information on the kinds of plastics, materials and processes that may be considered for inclusion, please consult the publication Patents for tomorrow’s plastics.
As a consequence, we have not set any definition of sub-classes and that is left to the creativity of the participants.
It turns out that we don't have a precise definition of "green plastics", but we must research and propose some. @MikeDoes can you copy the email response?
We can create a list of potential definitions of green plastics. After, we could use an Information Retrieval engine like https://github.com/ec-jrc/Patents4IPPC (fine-tuned in our area) and ask it each of our definitions.