Plastic Recycling (British Plastic Federation)

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Nearly all types of plastics can be recycled. However, the extent to which they are recycled depends upon technical, economic and logistic factors. The most widely recycled plastics are the two used to make soft drinks bottles and milk bottles: PET and HDPE. Traditional recycling is known as ‘mechanical recycling’. A technology known as ‘chemical recycling’ means mixed batches of all types of plastic can be recycled – even back into food-grade packaging. The application of this technology to recycle large amounts of plastic is relatively new and work is underway to scale it up. Plastics are a finite and valuable resource, so the best outcome after their initial use is typically to be recycled into a new product.

 

Once the plastic is collected and sent to a recycling centre, it is typically separated into different polymer types, which are then separately shredded (and impurities like paper are removed), then melted back into polymer pellets.Recycling and other recovery processing routes help reduce environmental impacts, as well as save costs, across the construction, manufacturing and retail sectors in particular.

  

• Prevention – Reducing resources used in manufacture, ensuring products last for a long time and using less material

• Preparing for reuse – Repairing, cleaning, refurbishing and checking

• Other recovery – Incineration to produce energy, anaerobic digestion, gasification and pyrolysis to produce either fuel, heat or electricity.

• Disposal – Landfill or incineration without energy recovery

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Why recycle plastic?

• Provides a sustainable source of raw materials to the industry

• Greatly reduces the environmental (especially the CO2) impact of plastic-rich products

• Minimises the amount of plastic being sent to the UK’s landfill sites

• Avoids the consumption of the Earth’s oil stocks

• Consumes less energy than producing new, virgin polymers

• Embeds the right values and behaviour to reduce human impact on the environment

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How many times can you recycle plastic?

There is no simple answer to this. It depends on the type of plastic, how it is being recycled and what it is being recycled for. Polymers do slightly break down as they are recycled — but this minor degradation is easily countered by mixing in calculated amounts of ‘virgin’ (new) plastic

 

Types of Plastics:

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