Part 1 of Green Innovation: Recycling Plastics Series

In 2017, roughly 267.8 million tons of waste were generated by the American population. Of the 35.3 million tons of plastic, only 2.92 million tons were recycled or composted. For more information on these statistics, check out the EPA’s 2017 report.

While it would be nice to see the amount of recycled plastic increase, there is still a lingering question: what happens to the plastic that is recycled?

The plastic-recycling can be easily separated into a series of 6 steps:

1. Collection: This step is the most well-known, and it involves all the recycling collection processes including government services, bins in public spaces, and more.
2. Sorting: Machines sort the plastics to find which ones the plant can process and to prevent damaging the equipment or slowing the process.
3. Washing: This step is used to remove impurities, including labels, dirt, residue, and other non-plastic things.
4. Resizing: During this stage, the plastics are ground-up to make processing more efficient and remove possible impurities unaffected by the last step.
5. Identification and Separation: Here, the plastic chunks are separated by their different properties in processes that will be discussed later.
6. Compounding: During this phase, the plastic bits are combined into pellets which are then used in the manufacturing of plastic products.

In the following posts, I will discuss each in greater detail. The collection process, however, is quite straight-forward and is discussed below.

Collection

The collection process, as mentioned above, is quite simple. Plastics are collected through a variety collection methods, including trash services (retrieving designated RECYCLE-ONLY bins), non-for-profits, and recycling bins. The real “meat” of the process occurs in the following steps.

Stay posted for Part 2 of the Green Innovations: Plastics Recycling Series.