Plastic recycling: A Know-How

Plastics is one of the most extensively used products of the modern generation. It is widely seen used as a packaging product of almost everything that you can think of, in the making of toys, household goods, making of all kind of cards like credit cards, sim cards, shopping cards, identity cards and so on. Although the use of plastic has many positive influences in our day to day lives they are also known to have a substantial number of health and environmental hazards. There are categories of plastic that can be recycled and that cannot. It is manufactured by the combination of petroleum or natural gas with oxygen or chlorine. This process requires the burning of huge amounts of oil. So more the petroleum we burn to make new plastic products, the more greenhouse gases we release into the air. Plastic takes up of about 10% of the total waste products disposed away into the landfills and only 5% of these are actually renewable.

To curb this alarming rate of growing environmental hazard it is important to create awareness about recycling of plastics with a few contributions to the society on our part. Recycling plastics can save a lot of energy in the form of reduction in oil and petroleum consumption and save a considerable amount of space in our landfills. Plastics require a more complicated processing for its recycling as compared to glass and metals. They are made up of higher molecular weight polymer chains for which application of heat itself is not sufficient. There are two major hindrances in efficient plastic recycling. One is that, when different plastics are melted together, due to their variable compositions, they tend to separate like oil and water and renewing them into a new plastic only results in the yield of structurally weak polymer blends with a lot of limitations in their application. The other is that, certain additives used in the manufacture of plastics like dyes, filters and so on are too difficult to be separated or removed and proves to be a costly affair.

The most easily degradable plastics are soda and water bottles, medicine containers, milk and oil containers and so on. The most toughest ones are plastics containing polyvinyl chloride like plastic pipes, shower curtains, medical tubing, grocery bags, plastic used in Tupperware and so on. Plastic articles are numbered according to its feasibility to be recycled with numbers ranging from 1,2 and so on known as the plastic identification code. Thus we as concerned citizens of a threat prone environment should make efforts to categorize the plastics accordingly from the collection of junk in our houses. Call the local recycling facilities in your area or search for the same on the internet. Remove miscellaneous attachments to your plastic products like a metal top for bottles or labels on the bottles that might not be of the same rank of viability to recycling with the plastics that you sort out. Crush plastic containers to save space in your recycling bins.

In some countries like Israel, recycling of films obtained from mixed municipal wastes is successfully practiced resulting into its re-manufacture into useful household articles like buckets. Many clothing industries have also come up with applications of recycled plastics into creating a blend with certain fabrics and other materials to produce polyester fabrics that are used to make durable and strong products like jackets, coats, shoes, bags, hats and other accessories.