Plastic how much is recycled

Humans will pick between 20 and 40, on a good day. The machine is intended not to replace humans, but to augment them. The benefits of automation, Smith says, are twofold: more material to sell and less waste that the company needs to pay to have burned afterwards.

S mith is not alone in putting his faith in technology. With consumers and the government outraged at the plastics crisis, the waste industry is scrambling to solve the problem. One great hope is chemical recycling: turning problem plastics into oil or gas through industrial processes. The idea found its way to Griffiths, a former management consultant, by accident, after a mistake in a Warwick University press release.

Intrigued, Griffiths got in touch. He ended up partnering with the researchers to launch a company that could do this. While the global mood has turned against plastic, Griffiths is a rare defender of it. If you use more glass, more metal, those materials have a much higher carbon footprint.

Eventually, Griffiths hopes to sell the machines to recycling facilities worldwide. There is cause for optimism: in December , the UK government published a comprehensive new waste strategy , partly in response to National Sword. They hope to force the industry to invest in recycling infrastructure at home.

Meanwhile, the industry is being forced to adapt: in May, countries passed measures to track and control the export of plastic waste to developing countries, while more than companies have signed a global commitment to eliminate the use of single-use plastics by Recycling rates in the west are stalling and packaging use is set to soar in developing countries, where recycling rates are low.

P erhaps there is an alternative. Since Blue Planet II brought the plastic crisis to our attention, a dying trade is having a resurgence in Britain: the milkman.

More of us are choosing to have milk bottles delivered, collected and re-used. Similar models are springing up: zero-waste shops that require you to bring your own containers ; the boom in refillable cups and bottles. Tom Szaky wants to apply the milkman model to almost everything you buy. The bearded, shaggy-haired Hungarian-Canadian is a veteran of the waste industry: he founded his first recycling startup as a student at Princeton, selling worm-based fertiliser out of re-used bottles.

That company, TerraCycle, is now a recycling giant, with operations in 21 countries. The product launched at the World Economic Forum in Davos and was an immediate hit. The result is Loop , which launched trials in France and the US this spring and will arrive in Britain this winter.

The items are available online or through exclusive retailers. Customers pay a small deposit, and the used containers are eventually collected by a courier or dropped off in store Walgreens in the US, Tesco in the UK , washed, and sent back to the producer to be refilled. Many of the Loop designs are familiar: refillable glass bottles of Coca-Cola and Tropicana; aluminium bottles of Pantene. But others are being rethought entirely.

Even the deliveries come in a specially designed insulated bag, to cut down on cardboard. Tina Hill, a Paris-based copywriter, signed up to Loop soon after its launch in France. What I like about it is that they have things I already use: olive oil, washing pods. By combining Loop with shopping at local zero-waste stores, Hills has helped her family radically reduce its reliance on single-use packaging.

In future, Szaky anticipates that Loop will be able to email users warnings for expiry dates and other advice to reduce their waste footprint. The milkman model is about more than just the bottle: it makes us think about what we consume and what we throw away. This process — known as chemical recycling — has been explored as a viable alternative to conventional recycling for decades. So far, the stumbling block has been the large amount of energy it requires. This, combined with the volatile price of crude oil sometimes makes it cheaper to produce new plastic products than to recycle existing plastic.

Some plastics that could be recycled end up in landfill because of poor facilities, or confusion about what is and isn't recyclable Credit: Alamy. Every year, more than million tonnes of plastic is produced worldwide. That's about the same as 2,, blue whales — more than times the weight of the entire blue whale population.

Much of the plastic that could be recycled — such as polyethylene terephthalate PET , which is used for bottles and other packaging — ends up in landfill. This is often due to confusion about kerbside recycling or contamination with food or other types of waste. Other plastics — such as salad bags and other food containers — find their way to landfill because they are made up of a combination of different plastics that can't be easily split apart in a recycling plant.

Litter dropped in the street and lightweight plastics left in landfill sites or illegally dumped can be carried by the wind or washed into rivers by the rain , ending up in the ocean. Chemical recycling is an attempt to recycle the unrecyclable.

Instead of a system where some plastics are rejected because they are the wrong colour or made of composites, chemical recycling could see all types of plastic fed into an "infinite" recycling system that unmake plastics back into oil, so they can then be used to make plastic again.

The way plastic is currently recycled is more of a downward spiral than an infinite loop. Plastics are usually recycled mechanically: they are sorted, cleaned, shredded, melted and remoulded. Each time plastic is recycled this way, its quality is degraded. When the plastic is melted, the polymer chains are partially broken down , decreasing its tensile strength and viscosity, making it harder to process. The new, lower grade plastic often becomes unsuitable for use in food packaging and most plastic can be recycled a very limited number of times before it is so degraded it becomes unusable.

The emerging industry of chemical recycling aims to avoid this problem by breaking plastic down into its chemical building blocks, which can then be used for fuels or to reincarnate new plastics.

The most versatile version of chemical recycling is " feedstock recycling ". Also known as thermal conversion, feedstock recycling is any process that breaks polymers down into simpler molecules using heat. The process is fairly simple — take a plastic drinks bottle. You put it out with your recycling for collection.

It is taken, along with all the other waste, to a sorting facility. There, the rubbish is sorted, either mechanically or by hand, into different kinds of materials and different kinds of plastics.

Your bottle is washed, shredded and packed into a bale ready for transportation to the recycling centre — so far, the same as the conventional process. Then comes the chemical recycling: the plastic that formerly made up your bottle could be taken to a pyrolysis centre where it is melted down. Next it is fed into the pyrolysis reactor where it is heated to extreme temperatures. This process turns the plastic into a gas which is then cooled to condense into an oil-like liquid , and finally distilled into fractions that can be put to different purposes.

Chemical recycling begins the same way as ordinary mechanical recycling, with collecting and crushing plastics and taking them to a plant Credit: Alamy. Chemical recycling techniques are being trialled across the world. UK-based Recycling Technologies has developed a pyrolysis machine that turns hard-to-recycle plastic such as films, bags and laminated plastics into Plaxx. This liquid hydrocarbon feedstock can be used to make new virgin quality plastic.

This pricing represents what is being paid for post-consumer recyclable materials in a sorted, baled format, picked up at most major recycling centers. You can also contact Christina Boulanger-Bosley at [email protected] or Prices for most recycled plastics continue to rise. Posted in News , Top stories Tagged markets. Subscribe today for weekly updates. Name First Last. In addition to our e-newsletters, Resource Recycling Inc. This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.