Plastic Recycling
Plastic recycling is the process of recovering scrap or waste plastic and reprocessing the material into useful products. Since the vast majority of plastic is non-biodegradable, recycling is a part of global efforts to reduce plastic in the waste stream, especially the approximately 8 million tons of waste plastic that enters the Earth’s ocean every year.[1][2]
Compared with lucrative recycling of metal, and similar to the low value of glass, plastic polymers recycling is often more challenging because of low density and low value. There are also numerous technical hurdles to overcome when recycling plastic.
When different types of plastics are melted together, they tend to phase-separate, like oil and water, and set in these layers. The phase boundaries cause structural weakness in the resulting material, meaning that polymer blends are useful in only limited applications. The two most widely manufactured plastics, polypropylene and polyethylene, behave this way, which limits their utility for recycling. Recently, the use of block copolymers as “molecular stitches”[3] or “macromolecular welding flux” has been proposed[4] to overcome the difficulties associated with phase separation during recycling.[5]
The percentage of plastic that can be fully recycled, rather than downcycled or go to waste, can be increased when manufacturers of packaged goods minimize mixing of packaging materials and eliminate contaminants. The Association of Plastics Recyclers have issued a “Design Guide for Recyclability”.[6]
The use of biodegradable plastics or plastics which can be organically recycled or can be composted in Industrial composting is increasing for certain short lived packaging applications [7]
