Recycling Plastics

Due to the growing need for plastic bags and containers in places such as grocery stores and retail stores, plastic is now one of the most used materials in today’s society. When it comes to an increase in soil and water pollution, plastic waste is the largest contributor. While recycling may seem like an easy task to most it is not recycled nearly as much as it should. Plastic recycling is the act of parting waste plastics and used scrap to recover materials that are usable for the manufacturing industry. Plastic contains many fibers due to its large amount of layered chemical structures and resins that have been melted down to get the smooth surface as you can see on grocery bags.

Recycling plastic is far more difficult than steel or paper. Many challenges await the plastic recycling industry when doing these procedures. The main principle that should be followed before is that there are a variety of plastics which cannot be interbred before recycling. To identify plastics of different resin composition and polymer structures they use standard codes which contain several dyes, additives, and fillers. This is what makes the recycling of plastic not so easy.

By using an elaborate monomer process where the polymer undergoes an inverted polymer regression of what was used to produce it, the obstacles of recycling can be achieved. At the end of the procedure you get a chemical makeup that forms the initial polymer, then is further synthesized and purified to create a renewed polymer of the same type. An additional resolution to this problem is that the use of thermal de-polymerization process, which basically converts diverse polymers into petroleum. Any kind of polymer may be mixed during this procedure.

Plastic recycling is useful for recycling many types of plastic containers, grocery bags, sacks, and even toys that contain certain plastics. Some of the more common recycled plastics are juice, milk, and water bottles.

Tagged as: Plastics, recycling