Facts on Plastic Recycling
When plastic is recycled, it goes through a process of using scrap or waste plastic and then reprocessing the plastic into useful products, sometimes even into something that does not resemble anything its original form. Every year, an estimated 13 billion plastic bottles alone are thrown away but only 2.7 billion of them are recycled. However, if you recycle one plastic bottle you are actually conserving enough energy to light a 60W light bulb for six hours, reducing the world's dependency on oil and decreasing CO2 emissions caused by use of fossil fuels.
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Plastic Usage
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Plastic is most often used to make bottles for beverages, containers for food, plastic grocery bags, furniture and many other common items we all use every day. Plastic waste takes about 11 percent of our household waste and 40 percent of that waste is plastic bottles. Recycled plastic can be used in many different ways, some of them less than obvious. Besides just using recycled plastic to make new plastic items such as bottles and garden furniture, recycled plastic is also used to make fleece clothing and fiber filling for sleeping bags.
Recycling Plastic
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Before you can recycle plastic items, you need to wash and separate them based on the resin identification codes printed on the bottom of every plastic product. Two of the most easily recyclable plastic types are PET, used to make plastic beverage bottles, and HDPE, used to make containers for milk and plastic bags. They have the resin identification codes 1 and 2. Recycling facilities, however, accept different types, so ask what types of plastics you can recycle in the facility closest to your home. In many facilities, plastic beverage bottles such as water, juice and soft drink bottles are redeemable for cash. Remember to remove the caps from the bottles before recycling because most of the time the caps have a different resin identification number than the bottles. Today, many grocery stores also have recycling bins for plastic grocery bags.
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Advantages
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The biggest advantage in recycling plastic is the need to produce new plastic items is reduced. Oil is one of the components used to make plastic, so decreasing the need will conserve non-renewable fossil fuels, reduce energy consumption and reduce CO2 emissions. In addition, plastic products are bulky and do not decompose in landfills, so recycling them reduces the amount of solid waste going into our landfills.
Challenges
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There are many different types of plastics with several resin identification codes, but only the same type of plastics can be recycled together. Separating different types of plastics can be confusing and not all types are accepted in all recycling facilities. Because of this, new technologies are needed to make some plastic types recyclable. Until these technologies are developed, many plastic products will remain unrecycled. Instead, they are taken to landfills, being incinerated or shipped to foreign countries for recycling. Everyone of us needs to change our consumer habits and that is not an easy task. Using a canvas bag at the grocery store, not purchasing new plastic containers but reusing the ones you already purchased and recycling your plastic beverage bottles are actions we are still learning.
Recycling Process
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The first two steps in recycling plastics are sorting and separating. After this, each plastic type is either melted down and molded into a new shape or shredded into flakes and then melded and processed into granulates. What is made out of the recycled plastic determines which recycling process is used.
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