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RECYCLING
PLASTIC SCRAP RECYCLING |
Currently, only a small percentage of the plastic produced in the world is being recycled. (approx. 25% in the U.S. and much less in the rest of the world with the exception of few industrialized countries). In Greece, as of now, there is no organized effort for the collection and recovery of plastic scrap.
The recycling business may be divided into several stages: collection and sorting, cleaning and reprocessing, and blending and marketing.
In the recycling business, entrepreneurs are faced first with the separation of the plastic waste from other waste categories and with pigment content problems, and then with the major task of separating by category the mishmash of different polymers. New emerging automatic sorting technologies make it possible now to a large extent to recover plastics from mixed solid waste, but the sorting by polymer category to allow recycling has remained a tedious, economically prohibitive challenge. (since the early 1990s, there is a technology available that uses compressed carbon dioxide to separate different plastics based on molecular density, but due to the economics, commercial applications have not proliferated).
The present uses of the unsorted plastic waste are limited: plastic lumber, some insulation materials, conversion to gaseous (Ex: syngas) and liquid products for chemical manufacturers, or merely burning for energy recovery. The plastic lumber using a mixture of various recycled plastics is presently, largely a product in search of a market, until building contractors start using it (which they haven't, yet).
Plastic Recycling Economics
Why haven't government, industry and private citizens taken to reusing plastics as they have, say, aluminum and glass? For economic reasons, mainly (although dyes, polymer chemistry, government policies and public perceptions also figure in). It costs a lot of money to produce new aluminum. It's less expensive to reprocess existing aluminum than to mine new bauxite and smelt it, through an energy intensive process. In contrast, most plastic recycling is a losing proposition financially.
In order for the plastic recycling to become economically feasible it would take a big increase in the price of petroleum (from which plastic is made), or an acute lack of landfill space, or government regulations forcing people to recycle. (Or a combination of the three).
Due to the inherent high liability to the manufacturers, the use of the recycled plastic has limited applications. (in many instances it is not approved for use in containers that come in contact with food and drink). The reality is that some of the plastic recycling that goes on now is inspired strictly by public relations motives. Companies that can afford the extra cost (it actually could cost more to use recycled plastic) are using the politically correct marketing approach to advertise the use of recycled material.
If all efforts at productive recycling fail, in some cases it is financially smarter to just incinerate plastic to produce energy. (after all the polymers started out as petroleum). From an environmental standpoint, burning the plastic beats burying it in the ground or dumping it in the ocean, assuming proper air pollution controls are used. (Switzerland incinerates 60 % of its trash, Japan 80%). The fast emergence of new clean energy technologies though, will probably make burning the plastic in the future an unacceptable option.
The new technology secured by Lion Energy can convert the unsorted plastic scrap mix into low cost construction materials with superior qualities through a low cost environmentally clean process.
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