Everyone has heard about the harmful effects of plastic, as our planet is awash with plastic waste that has been decomposing for thousands of years. But we also know that plastic is versatile and convenient to use, so we can recycle it instead of trying to eliminate it from our lives (which wouldn't be very fast anyway). Since plastic doesn't degrade in any meaningful amount of time, recycling is the best way to go if we don't want to keep making new plastic, increasing pollution. This is why CYCLE uses recycled plastic for its products. Read our article to learn about the types of plastics and their recycling possibilities.
What is plastic?
Plastic is all around us, we see it everywhere in our everyday lives, but what is plastic? Plastics are synthetic or semi-synthetic organic materials that can be moulded into a variety of shapes, usually from fossil raw materials, but they can also be made from renewable sources. They are versatile and cheap to produce, making them a popular, or even indispensable, material in our modern world.
But not all plastics are the same. These are the 6 most commonly used types:
- PET. Also known as polyethylene terephthalate. It is a common base material for soda and water bottles, medicine and food cans, ropes, shopping bags, seat covers, and can also be used as a filler for winter clothing and bean bags.
- HDPE. High-density polyethylene, used to make bottles for shampoo, milk, juice, detergent, and often as a base material for toys.
- LDPE. Low -density polyethylene is a popular raw material in the packaging industry, used to make shopping bags, frozen food pouches and various films.
- There are hard and soft types: soft PVC, for example, is used for insulation parts covering wiring, while the hard type is used for water pipes, window frames and floor tiles.
- PP. Polypropylene plastic is the raw material for food containers, margarine containers, kitchen utensils, nappies, disposable cups and plates, which are also the source of bad puns.
- PS. Polystyrene is a thermoformable material, so it is especially used for disposable utensils (plates, cups, forks, spoons), but also for cream and yoghurt containers. The foamed version is Hungarocell.
In addition to the plastics listed here, there are polycarbonate, polyactide, acrylic and many other types of plastic.
How is plastic made?
The manufacturing process of plastic is quite complex, but it can be illustrated simply with these steps:
- Raw material extraction. Plastics can often be made from crude oil, gas and sometimes even coal.
- Refining of raw materials. Crude oil is processed by the petrochemical industry to form monomers, which are the building blocks of polymers. Simple, isn't it? Crude oil is broken down into its elements by heating to extract naphtha, an important raw material for making plastics.
- Polymerisation. Light olefin gases such as ethylene, propylene and butylene are converted into polymers.
- Processing and compilation. The different raw materials are mixed and then moulded and pressed to the required size and shape.
It can be seen that this is only a very abstract description of plastic production. The process is much more complicated in reality, but since CYCLE is only interested in recycling, let's jump to that.
There are two main ways to recycle:
- Mechanical recycling. The cleaned plastic is shredded and then melted.
- Chemical recycling. Plastic is broken down into its basic components using chemical methods.
How is mechanical recycling done?
Plastics usually have to be sorted manually to avoid contamination in the recycling stream. The whole process looks something like this:
- Plastics are sorted by type
- The sorted plastics are shredded.
- The shredded plastic is washed.
- The clean, shredded plastic is melted.
- The melted plastic is converted into pellets.
- These pellets are then used to create new products.
What is recyclable and what is not?
As mentioned above, there are many types of plastic, but not all of them are recyclable. You might think that if you put plastic in the right bin, you've done your bit for the environment, but unfortunately it's more complicated than that.
What can be recycled:
- PET plastics
- HDPE plastics
- LDPE plastics
- PVC plastics
What cannot be recycled:
- PP plastics
- PS plastics
- other plastics
But what determines which plastics are recyclable and which are not?
Plastics can be divided into two groups:
- Thermoplastics. These can be melted and then moulded into new shapes so that they can be recycled.
- Thermosetting plastics. In these plastics, the chemical bonding cannot be broken by heat, so these types cannot be recycled.
And of course it also depends on other factors, such as the cleanliness of the plastic: if you have a plastic food container full of food, you should eat it first, and the container itself should be thoroughly washed before it can be recycled.
Why is recycling plastic good for us?
Why bother recycling plastic when it is cheap and easy to make new plastic? Well, although there is a lot of hassle involved in recycling plastic, considering that plastic only degrades over thousands of years, it is still a useful solution.
- We can save a lot of fossil fuels that are non-renewable, limited in supply and therefore unsustainable.
- We can also save the energy used to produce new plastics.
- We need to fill landfills with less waste. Some Western countries are exporting all their rubbish to Asia so that they don't have to fill up their own land.
- We can also reduce carbon dioxide emissions by recycling, so it's also an environmentally friendly solution.
If you are interested in the environmental impacts of other materials, glass, aluminium, you can read about them in this article. Recycling plastic is the only sustainable choice when you consider that our planet is slowly drowning in plastic waste. This is exactly the reason why CYCLE products' bottles are made from recycled plastic, so no new plastic is needed to produce them. CYCLE is not only setting an example by producing its cleaning products from biomass, but also by using recycled plastic in its packaging.
We believe that we can all do something to protect our planet!
