15 Facts About Recyclable plastic

Recycling is necessary because almost all Recyclable plastic is non-biodegradable and thus builds-up in the environment, where it can cause harm.

For example, approximately 8 million tons of waste Recyclable plastic enter the Earth's oceans every year, causing damage to the aquatic ecosystem and forming large ocean garbage patches.

Waste Recyclable plastic can be burnt in place of fossil fuels as part of energy recovery.

Globally, Recyclable plastic waste was almost entirely disposed of via landfill until the start of the 1980s when rates of incineration increased.

However, much of this was low quality mixed Recyclable plastic which was hard to sort and recycle and ended up accumulating in landfills and at recyclers, or being dumped.

Related searches

Europe and North America suffered from extreme waste stream backlogs, and waste Recyclable plastic ended up being exported to other countries mostly in South East Asia like Vietnam and Malaysia, but to places like Turkey and India with less stringent environmental regulations.

Total amount of Recyclable plastic ever produced worldwide, until 2015, is estimated to be 8.

Many Recyclable plastic items bear symbols identifying the type of polymer from which they are made.

However, in some countries citizens are required to separate their Recyclable plastic waste according to polymer type before refuse collection and for this RICs are very useful.

Sorting plastic is more complicated than any other recyclable material because it comes in a greater range of forms.

The majority of Recyclable plastic waste is made of thermosoftening polymers, which can be re-melted and reformed into new items in a practice known as mechanical recycling.

In closed-loop, or primary recycling, used Recyclable plastic is endlessly recycled back into new items of the same quality and sort.

In open-loop recycling, known as secondary recycling, or downcycling, the quality of the Recyclable plastic is reduced each time it is recycled, so that the material is not recycled indefinitely and eventually becomes waste.

Depolymerising, purifying and re-polymerising the Recyclable plastic can be energy intensive, leading to the carbon footprint of feedstock recycling normally being higher than that of mechanical recycling.

Millions of tonnes of Recyclable plastic waste are generated annually, and this has led to numerous solutions being developed, many of which operate at a considerable scale.