A Pathway to a Second Life for Plastics
Only 10% of plastics are sorted and recycled currently. Realistically a lot of plastics that end up in the plastic bin to be recycled are considered contaminates. These statistics need to change and quickly.
Consumer education, which we covered in the article title “Circular Economy: Beginning with the End in Mind,” talks about the importance of and investment needed in consumer education. Having people aware of what can be recycled could drastically help lessen the cost of sorting and provide a recycled content that is pure enough to create a market of feedstock for other products, preferably setting up a situation that in the near future could provide for new packaging.
Even with the lack of pure material, there are some entrepreneurs right now that are making products out of plastic waste with the intent of keeping it out of landfills and oceans. Check out these two videos showing some radical re-use. Both videos show the turning of plastic into building materials:
Video Courtesy: Reuters
Video Courtesy: Clear Rivers
The use of recycled plastics as a building material also could help to lessen the use of concrete. In terms of manmade CO2 emissions, concrete production is the third largest contributor globally. Helping to mitigate that with recycled plastics has a great deal of potential in helping to address global warming. So, we take our hats off to the innovative re-use of plastic in this way. However, these innovations are coming from products that require thought on how they can be re-used...vs. plastic products that are engineered from the beginning to be re-used and intelligently designed to reduce the costs associated with sorting and recycling. If we don't catch the plastic in this stream, it ends up in landfills or even worse in oceans, streams and rivers. So having a built-in insurance policy engineered into plastic, guaranteeing that the waste will degrade in a much more rapid time frame (3-7 years), would help to reduce landfill space and mitigate environmental damage from plastics clogging up our waterways, oceans and wilderness.
Watch for more from us here on, “Recycling through sorting and mitigating plastic waste leakage through innovative technologies that degrade plastic without causing micro-plastics.”