Description

Plastic recycling is the process of recovering scrap or waste plastic and reprocessing the material into useful products.Plastic recycling can reduce dependence on landfill, conserve resources and protect the environment from plastic pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

Increasing public awareness of plastic pollution has raised demand for plastic recycling, but it remains challenging from a technical and economic standpoint, causing it to lag behind the recycling rates of materials like aluminium, glass and paper. In general, there are many types of plastic and these need to be segregated from one another prior to recycling as they give a poor-quality product if mixed. Even when properly sorted and cleaned, the most common form of recycling in which plastic is re-melted and reformed into new items, usually results in polymer degradation at a chemical level, so that quality cannot be maintained. More advanced technologies which may mitigate this degradation suffer from high capital costs and are more energy hungry. Thus, even though recycling rates are improving, much of this activity merely delays rather than prevents the eventual disposal of plastic as waste. Regardless, life-cycle assessments show recycling in its various forms to be a net good for the environment.

Since the beginning of plastic production in the *0th century, until ***5, the world has produced some 6.3 billion tonnes of plastic waste, of which 9% has been recycled—only ~1% of total plastic has ever been recycled more than once. The global recycling rate in ***5 was *9.5%, while *5.5% was incinerated and the remaining *5% disposed of to landfill. Only ~2% was recycled in a sustainable closed-loop manner.As of ***9, due to limitations in economic viability, there is little incentive for companies to make a meaningful contribution to the plastic recycling supply chain.[8] The plastics industry has known since the ***0s that recycling of most plastics is unlikely because of these economic limitations. However, the industry has continued to lobby for the expansion of recycling programs while at the same time increasing the amount of virgin plastic being produced.