As boating season approaches — although, with the current pandemic, who knows when it will actually start — so does the time to pull the shrink wrap off. And with some 100,000 boats registered in Rhode Island, that could add up to be tons of shrink wrap hauled off to the landfill or thrown into an incinerator.   That figure doesn’t even include the farmers and businesses that use shrink wrap, also known as low-density polyethylene and the most abundant source of microplastic pollution worldwide, to cover farm beds and wrap products for shipping.   “Aside from the boats that are wrapped or the mega yachts that erect huge seasonal plastic houses in the winter, we also see similar applications of this wrap across sectors,” said Max Kraimer, program coordinator at Middletown-based Clean Ocean Access (COA). “In the farming and agriculture world they create seasonal greenhouses in the winter with this plastic wrap, and manufacturers use it to ship products and goods year-round.”   To figure out what to do with all this discarded plastic wrap, Clean Ocean Access partnered with Newport-based 11th Hour Racing to create a shrink-wrap recycling project.   “In the realm of everything Clean Ocean Access does, we have kind of a wide range of different grant projects and a lot of them fall under our clean program, which is mainly focusing on eliminating marine debris,” Kraimer said. “And on the other side of our clean ocean program, we’re working on this idea of now creating more of a circular economy with plastic wrap and shrink wrap.”   The shrink-wrap recycling program was born two years ago after China effectively banned the import of plastic trash slated for the country’s recycling facilities. Up until that point, the United States was annually exporting some 700,000 tons of trash to China.   But after China found its facilities unable to handle the growing amount of contaminated recyclables, it stopped buying them and the United States found itself with a problem: what to do with all of its plastic waste. Incineration and landfilling became the leading solutions.   “This really raised the awareness of our recycling streams and how they need to be rethought, so that was kind of the spear behind our program, as well as the fact that it ties into our projects of really working to eliminate useable material that are going into our landfill or worse, into our incinerators,” Kraimer said.   The plan is to collect plastic shrink wrap — be it from boaters, farmers, or manufacturers — and ship it to TerraCycle, a recycling business based in New Jersey, to be turned into pellets and resin.   “The idea there is that we want to take the material and a feedstock of pellets or resin, then provide it to a domestic manufacturer who can make it into a product that can then be sold,” said Dave McLaughlin, COA’s executive director. “So, for example, you can use pellets and resin to make rain barrels, and then we could sell the rain barrels and portion of the profit could be used to cover costs of new recycling processes.”   In the first few months of the project, Clean Ocean Access has collected more than 12,000 pounds, or some 6 tons, of shrink wrap.   “We kind of looked at it this way: shrink wrap is single use; it’s convenient but it comes with a cost, and these costs are hidden, they’re impacting the environment,” McLaughlin said. “So, we were like OK, there is a single-use issue here that we need to think about, do something about.”