Recycling Plastic: Facts You Need to Know

Recycling Plastic: Facts You Need to Know, republished with permission from The Live Better Site

If you have heard about the Plastic Continent — the floating island of plastic twice the size of Texas in the Pacific Ocean — then you understand how crucial it is to recycle plastic. Right now, only 5% of plastics worldwide are recycled. Some of this is ignorance: most of the world still simply doesn’t understand the danger plastics pose to our environment and our food chain.

But plastics themselves are complicated. Even if you want to recycle your plastics, and even if you dutifully separate plastics from the rest of your household waste and put it out on the curb in its blue or green recycle bin, your plastics might still end up in the Plastic Continent. Why is this?

Look at the underneath side of a plastic bottle or plastic container. Inside the familiar reduce, reuse, recycle triangle logo is a number between one and seven. This number indicates what kind of plastic that container is made from. Some plastics are easy to recycle, but other plastics are much harder to recycle. As a result, most municipal recycling facilities only recycle the easiest plastics: plastics 1 and 2. What happens to plastics 3 through 7? At some recycling facilities, these are gathered until they have enough to send to a larger recycling facility that does recycle these types of plastics. But at other recycling facilities, the same thing happens to plastics 3 through 7 as what would have happened at your house if you didn’t have that handy recycling bin: it goes to the landfill, or the Pacific’s Plastic Continent.

Plastics #1 and #2

Plastic #1 is polyethelyne terephthalate (PET). This is the most commonly used plastic, and it’s the easiest to recycle. Your plastic soda bottle, salad dressing bottle, and cooking oil bottle are probably all made from PET. More than 2.3 billion pounds of PET are recycled annually.

Plastic #2 is high density polyethelene (HDPE). Most milk jugs, detergent bottles, and many food containers are made from HDPE. Unfortunately, some plastics marked with a #2, such as yogurt cups, are not actually recyclable. This is because other chemicals have been added to the plastic in order to mold it into the desired shape. These additives make recycling some of these #2 items basically impossible.

Plastics #1 and #2 make up 96% of all the plastic bottles produced in the United States. Nevertheless, 80% of plastic bottles still wind up in a landfill, even though 80% of Americans have access to a method for recycling these bottles.

Plastic #3

Plastic #3 is polyvinyl chloride, more commonly known as PVC. This is the same PVC that is commonly used for plastic pipes, but this type of plastic is also used for shrink wrap, food containers, and some detergent bottles. And you know those tough plastic packaging around things like electronics, batteries, and other new gadgetry — you know, that evil stuff that will take your finger off rather than let you get your new cell phone out of its package? This is also PVC.

Despite having some benefits — it is easy to clean, does not require much energy to produce, and saves on the consumption of fossil fuels — PVC is not a good plastic. It is difficult to recycle, and it is manufactured with chlorine — in fact, 30% of the chlorine used in industrial processes is used to produce PVC. What’s more, when PVC is produced, dioxin is created. Dioxin is a toxic chemical that is associated with cancer.

Recycling centers are very wary of PVC, because just a small amount of it can interfere with their recycling of PET. If PVC and PET mix, a toxic byproduct is the result. Because most PVC is difficult to recycle, most of it ends up in landfills or in the ocean. Overtime, dioxin leaks from the PVC and into the environment.

Plastic #4

Plastic #4, or low density polyethelyne (LDPE), is the plastic most often used for packaging other items. When we buy a package of water bottles that are held together with plastic packaging, we are buying LDPE. When we buy a six pack of soda, the plastic rings holding the cans together are made from LDPE. Plastic produce bags, some plastic tubes, and certain plastic bottles are also made from LDPE. Since 56% of all plastic waste is packaging and containers, it is important to understand how to recycle plastic #4, rather than just throwing it away.

The best thing to do with LDPE is to collect it and sell it to a recycling facility. An internet search can help you find recyclers in your area who will buy plastic #4.

Plastic #5

Plastic #5 is polypropylene (PP), and is used in plastic drinking straws, medicine bottles, plastic ice cream containers, margarine containers, and similar food packaging. Most curbside pick up recycling programs do not accept plastic #5, but you can recycle them at Whole Foods stores, as well as through a mail-in program that the company Preserve runs.

Plastic #6

You are already very familiar with plastic #6, even though you probably never thought to recycle it: plastic #6 is polystyrene. The most common form of polystyrene is Styrofoam, the universal packaging of leftovers, take-out, and to-go soda and coffee cups. It’s also the stuff that makes up shipping peanuts (the old-fashioned ones that don’t dissolve in warm water). Styrofoam itself is not easy to recycle, but other types of polystyrene, such as those that make up plastic cups, are simple to recycle.

Luckily, it doesn’t take as many resources to manufacture plastic #6 as some other types of plastic, and make up less than 1% of total landfill volume. However, don’t let that lull you into an acceptance of throwing plastic #6 away. Reuse it as much as you can, especially those packaging materials. Alternatively, some shipping retailers, such as Kinko’s/FedEx and UPS will take those peanuts off your hands if you don’t have a use for them.

Plastic #7

Plastic #7 has the highly technical name of… “Other”. That’s right: any plastic that can’t be classified as one of the above designations is stamped with the plastic #7 / other label. Mostly, however, plastic #7 is either styrene acrylonitrile or acrylonitrile butadiene styrene. This is a tough, strong plastic that makes up LEGOs, toothbrushes, golf club heads, and plastic helmets.

But guess what else is plastic #7? Have you heard of the controversial Bisphenol-A (BPA)? This is the plastic that Tupperware and reusable plastic bottles is made out of, and which has recently been discovered to leak from the plastic over time into our bodies.

Like many of the other plastics mentioned above, plastic #7 is generally not accepted by your curbside pick up service. Furthermore, because plastic #7 is designated as “other”, different types of plastic #7 must be recycled in different ways. When it comes to e-waste, such as computer keyboards, computer monitors, and cell phones, you can turn to a company such as GreenDisk.

The Bottom Line When it Comes to Plastic Recycling

As you can see, plastic is much harder to recycle than other materials. Because it breaks down during the recycling process, it can only be recycled so many times — this is why many recyclers prefer so-called “virgin plastics”, or plastics that haven’t been recycled before because they make a better product. That means that even if you do the best you can to recycle all your plastics, some of them might still wind up in the dump.

The clear conclusion we must draw is that even the most conscientious recycling is not enough when it comes to plastics: ultimately, we have to reduce our consumption. The process of producing plastics, many plastics themselves, and the aftermath of plastic use can all be described as toxic. Nearly all manufacturing processes for the different types of plastic listed above involve some degree of toxicity, and as these plastics disintegrate in landfills or in the ocean, these toxic chemicals find their ways back into our soils, our water, our food, and our bodies.

So please recycle plastic; better yet, stop buying plastic wherever possible. Steel, aluminum, and glass are all far preferable as recyclable materials and are less toxic as they very gradually break down in our environment. Look for ways that you can reduce or even eliminate your consumption of plastic.

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