Plastic is widely used as package of various products, due to its cheapness and easy to form. With the growth of plastic industry and consumption, amount of disposable goods is increasing rapidly, they are discarded after using. For example, electrical kettles, electrical appliances, food boxed, beverage cups and other white foam polystyrene plastic. These products have characters of bulk, light weight, non-corruption, and hard to biodegradable, these waste plastics is also called as “white pollution”, they are found everywhere, and is polluting our environment. Kingtiger will introduce the reasons and ways for recycling plastics.

Reasons for Recycling Plastics

Reduce the plastic pollution and protect our environment

There are two hazards of white pollution:

visual pollution and potential hazards.

Visual pollution refers to the plastic bags, boxes, cups, bowls and other scattered in the environment, thus to bring people’s visual stimulation, affect the beauty of the surroundings.

Potential hazards of white pollution

Waste plastic can endanger human health. Disposable foam plastic lunch boxes and plastic bags seriously affect our health. harmful substances will penetrate into the food when temperature reaches 65 ℃, which will cause damage to human liver, kidney and central nervous system. The ultra-thin plastic bags for food are generally PVC. As early as 40 years ago, people found vinyl chloride monomer left in the vinyl chloride. If people contact with vinyl chloride, there will be finger edema and sclerosis.

Waste plastic can worsen soil environment, seriously affecting the growth of crops. The degradation time of the plastic products usually takes at least 200 years. Waste plastic film and bags remain in soil for a long time, thus can affect the crop’s absorption of moisture and nutrients, inhibit crop growth, and cause the yield reduction. Plastic scraps would cause livestock suffer the disease of the digestive and even death.

Recycling waste plastics is the fundamental solution to white pollution. In fact, compared with other materials, plastic has a significant advantage: plastic can be easily recycled repeatedly. After the recycling of scrap plastics, waste can be processed into new product or can be produced the diesel and gasoline.

So waste plastic recycling is important, recycling can reduce white pollution, save energy and protect natural sources, save landfill space.

Two Periods to Reduce Waste Plastic Pollution

Reduce waste plastic pollution includes two period: one is the reducing the use of plastics materials in producing process, another is recycling the plastic waste after been discarded.

At present, there are many solutions on reducing plastic pollution. For example, to improve the raw materials used in the production of plastics products. In order to meet the needs of protecting the global environment, the world plastics processing industry has developed many new green technologies. In terms of resource conservation, it mainly aims to improve the anti-aging performance of products, prolong the life span, and multi-function. In terms of resource reuse, research is mainly on plastic waste’s efficient separation technology, efficient melting and recycling technology, Chemical recycling technology, thorough biodegradable materials, water-soluble materials, edible film. In the reduction of technology, it mainly on the studying of waste plastic compression volume reduction technology, film bagged container technology. In the development of CFC substitutes, the main research is carbon dioxide foam technology. In the alternative research, It mainly aims to develop substitutes of PVC and PVDC.

Reducing Plastics Variety When Using

R & D departments have taken into account the need for recycling and disassembly when designing their products, this is a revolutionary concept change. For the recycling, designers began to avoid using multiple plastics when designing their products. BMW was prepared to reduce the plastic type by 40% in its new car design. The automobile industry to reduce the type of plastic used, mainly hope to win the good image of environmental protection by consumers. At present, this design concept is gradually accepted the entire plastic processing industry.

However, efforts in all aspects still fail to extinct any of the 20 types of plastics available on the market. After all, product diversity has led to the varieties of plastic. For example, tyre of plastic used in the production of electronic computers and automobiles is different. Therefore, the experts suggested that the relevant recovery standards should be set, which stipulated that the special trade should only use the designated materials, or could not control the effective recycling.

5 Ways to Dispose Waste Plastics

Landfill treatment

Due to the plastic material is generally light, and non-perishable, the landfill will become a soft foundation and difficult to use in the future. Corrosion-resistant and anti-bacterial are a major benefit of plastic products, but they become a headache for scientists after they are discarded. Organic matter is difficult to be decomposed by microbe. Waste plastic in landfill suffered long term rain washing, a large amount of harmful substances are brought into our living surrounding, endangering our future generations.

Incineration

As the large heat of plastic, it easy to damage the incinerator. And gas generated will contribute to the global warming, some plastics will emit harmful gases in the combustion and pollute the atmosphere.

Classification Recovery

Classification is the most important for recycling plastic. Common plastics are polystyrene, polypropylene, low density polyethylene, high density polyethylene, polycarbonate, polyvinyl chloride, polyamide, polyurethane, etc. Their differences are difficult to distinguish. Most waste plastic are sorted by manual. Recently, there has been new research progress in the plastic sorting. Infrared sorting technology is quick and accurate, but cost of waste plastic sorting is higher.

Pelleting

This method refers to recycle used plastics into plastic granules by a suit of professional plastic recycling system, which including crushing, cleaning, disinfecting, heating, cooling, pelleting, etc. Plastic granules can be used for producing plastic products.

Pyroysis

Pyrolysis is a environmental method to recycle plastic waste, it uses a pyroysis reactor to convert waste plastic into fuel oil and carbon black. This method may need enough investment cost, but the economic benefits is very considerable. The more important, this way is green, there is no pollutants in the whole process.

At last, we should minimize the use of disposable plastic tableware and paper cutlery. Any one-time tableware is not only pollute our environment but also the greatest waste resources. We should not overly rely on plastic bags in our daily life. We should refuse to use plastic bags when buying food. Let us make efforts to reduce using of plastic products and save our planet.