Plastics are much more complicated to recycle than other materials like paper, metal, and glass, in large part because of the many thousands of different types of plastics on the market. for plastics recycling to work, manufacturers must be able to cost-effectively collect and sort plastics for these markets. For communities to create recycling system to recycleevry possible type of plastic packaging that exists now (and will be created into the future), it is not only daunting, expensive, and inefficient, it places all the responsiblity and cost on the costumer.
For many years, communities and recyclers have struggled to create recycling programs for plastics with little success because of these issues:
- Collection is time-intensive, so expensive
- Sorting of mixed plastic waste is difficult – contamination is inevitable.
- Removing labels, print, all but impossible at 100% success rate
- Contamination of any sort compromises re-use in “hi-tech” applications (a carbonated water bottle is a pressure vessel – a failure is unacceptable to the supermarkets that sell them)
- PET and PVC have many problems with cross contamination as the two polymers appear very similar to the naked eye and share the same specific gravity so cannot be separated by conventional float-sink techniques used in the plastic recycling industry.
- The correct separation of plastics is extremely important. Just one PVC bottle in a batch of 10,000 PET bottles can ruin the entire melt!
- Reclaiming the energy stored in the polymers can be done through incineration, but this can cause environmental damage by release of toxic gases into the atmosphere.
No comments:
Post a Comment