plastic is a sufferer of its own success. it&rsquos so cheap, practical and flexible that we produce millions of tons of it each year. it&rsquos being widely used right across the board, from high performance plastics used in motor vehicles to cheap containers for food. however, getting rid of plastic is terrifying. it lasts apparently forever, and waste plastic is a mounting blot, not just on the land but the whole environment. it is a fact that most plastic can be recycled. it can be ground up or melted and reused, even though it tends to be downcycled each time. however, the process of recycling is quite difficult. it&rsquos not easy to sort for one thing &ndash though there are many diverse types, most plastic seems like &ndash well, plastic, at least to the inexpert eye. some products contain multiple plastic parts such as a laptop, and plastic waste likely to be huge, so it speedily fills containers. as a result, the quantity of plastics recycled in the usa is too small, somewhere about 5 &ndash 7 and around 20 in the uk. plastic recycling has many advantages. recycling means minimum waste going to landfill, and less energy and oil used to produce new plastic, with resulting savings in greenhouse gas emissions. plastic is generally recycled in one of two ways. mechanical recycling is one way in which plastic is first sorted by hand, either into different colours of plastic, different types of plastic, or both. this is extremely labourintensive process, and even though techniques exist to segregate the waste by technologies such as infrared and spectroscopy xray fluorescence, these are expensive. once segregated, the plastic is melted down and then shredded into granules. these granules can then be shaped into a new product. the second type is known as chemical recycling. it breaks the plastic into its chemical constituents for use in petrochemical production, or refineries. it&rsquos a very costly process and requires a lot of plastic going through the system to make it economical &ndash at least 5000 tonnes each year. as always, of course the recommendation is to reduce, reuse, and recycle, in that order. it is possible to reduce the amount of plastic we buy &ndash this will mostly be in the form of packaging. we can also reuse it. generally, there&rsquos some use that we can make of used plastic. recycling is a last option, and we need make sure that plastic goes into the recycling bin and not in the general garbage. source of information httpwww.theinnovationdiaries.com1186plasticsrecycling
