Recycled plastic: the facts you should know
If you've heard about the continent of plastic – the floating island of plastic twice size of Texas in the Pacific – then you understand how important it is to recycle plastic. At this time, only 5% of plastics are recycled worldwide. Some of it is ignorance: most of the world still, just do not understand the dangers plastics pose to the environment and our food chain.
However, plastics are complicated. Even if you want to recycle plastics, and even if properly separated from other plastic waste your home and put it on the curb in your blue bin or green recycling plastic could still end on the continent of plastic. Why is this?
Different Types of Plastic
Look at the underside of a plastic bottle or plastic. Inside the family triangle reduce reuse, recycle ("Chasing Arrows") logo is a number between one and seven. This number indicates the type of plastic container that is made from. Some plastics are easily recycled, but other plastics are much more difficult to recycle. As a result, most municipal recycling facilities only the easiest way to recycle plastics: plastics 1 and 2. What about plastics from 3 to 7? In some recycling facilities, they are together until they have enough to send a large recycling plant to recycle these plastics. But in other recycling facilities, so does plastics 3 to 7, which have happened in your home if you did not have the Recycle Bin useful: it goes to the landfill, plastic or Pacific continent.
Plastic # 1 and # 2
Plastic # 1 is polyethelyne terephthalate (PET). This is the most widely used plastic, and is the easiest to recycle. Its plastic soda bottle, bottle of salad dressing, and cooking oil bottle is probably all made of PET. More than 2.3 million pounds PET is recycled annually.
Plastic # 2 is high density polyethylene (HDPE). Most milk jugs, detergent bottles, and many containers food are made of high density polyethylene. Unfortunately, some plastics marked with a # 2, such as yogurt cups, not really recycled. This due to other chemicals are added to plastic to mold into the desired shape. These additives that recycling of some of these basic elements # 2 impossible.
Plastic # 1 and # 2 that 96% of all plastic bottles produced in the United States. However, 80% of plastic bottles ending in a landfill, although 80% of Americans have access to a method of recycling these bottles.
Plastics # 3 to # 7
The remaining plastics are almost everything that is not a plastic bottle. Just think of all the plastic at home – her toothbrush, film transparent plastic bowls, plastic cups, drinking straws, leftovers from the night before that package almost impossible to open new original iPhone, equipment, DVD box … Plastic is everywhere.
These plastics can be categorized as plastics # 3 through # 7. None of them are particularly easy recycling, so even if your guy will take it from recycling your sidewalk, which does not necessarily mean it will become tomorrow's soda bottle. However, when investigating recycling facilities in your area, you can find places to recycle these plastics are less common.
Baseline when it comes to recycling Plastic
Plastic is much more difficult to recycle than other materials. Because the breaks during the recycling process, can only be recycled many times – that is why many prefer recyclers called "virgin plastics, or plastics that have not been recycled before because they do a better product. That means that even if you do the best to recycle all plastics, some of them could still end up in the trash.
The conclusion clear that we draw is that even the most conscientious recycling is not enough when it comes to plastics: ultimately, we must reduce our consumption. The process production of plastics, many plastics themselves, and the consequences of the use of plastic can be described as toxic. Almost all manufacturing processes of different types of plastic above involve some degree of toxicity, as these plastics disintegrate in landfills or the ocean, these chemicals Toxic find their way back to our land, our water, our food and our bodies.
So please recycle plastic. Better still, stop buying plastic wherever possible.
About the Author
K. N. Singer writes about green living and healthy lifestyle choices at The Live Better Site. To read a more detailed version of this article, and to learn more about recycling plastics #3 through #7, click here: Recycling Plastic.
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Homeowners, insurers spar over spores in toxic-mold cases.(Ballard v. Fire Insurance Exchange)(Texas): An article from: Trial $5.95 This digital document is an article from Trial, published by Association of Trial Lawyers of America on September 1, 2001. The length of the article is 1952 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.Citation Detail… |
