Saturday, October 9, 2010

rce9rys discusses the plastic problem

I wonder if JBII is courting plastics companies. You would think they would be all over supporting this technology.

The Problem With Plastic and Why Reduce and Reuse are Essential to Recycling

A big problem with plastic is the utter lack of uniformity in the plastics industry. There are so many different types of plastic on store shelves, almost all of which we assume can be recycled, but a lot of which cannot. You may even see those famous little arrows that symbolize recycling on a package that in actuality cannot be recycled. That’s an issue of plastics companies doing a little greenwashing, knowing that the more people are comfortable with tossing their plastics in a recycle bin, the more new plastics they’ll go out and buy.

We assume that the plastic containers we throw into the recycling are being made into new plastic containers, but that is not necessarily true. In a study by the Ecology Center in Berkeley, California, they found that none of the plastic recycled in Berkeley was actually reprocessed into new containers. Most of it goes into secondary products like textiles, parking lot bumpers and plastic lumber — all materials that cannot (or are more difficult to) be recycled the next time around. So, we’ve created a system that collects recyclables but doesn’t actually recycle them. Not cool.

1 comment:

  1. Somewhat like paper recycling the fibers become shorter each cycle-but like paper can't a certain percentage of shorter fibers be tolerated before performance is unduly affected?

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