Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Plastic recycling
Summary
Plastic recycling is the processing of plastic waste into other products. Recycling can reduce dependence on landfill, conserve resources and protect the environment from plastic pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Recycling rates lag those of other recoverable materials, such as aluminium, glass and paper. Through 2015, the world produced some 6.3 billion tonnes of plastic waste, only 9% of which has been recycled, and only ~1% has been recycled more than once. Additionally, 12% was incinerated and the remaining 79% sent to landfill or to the environment including the ocean.
Almost all plastic is not biodegradable and absent recycling, spreads across the environment where it can cause harm. For example, as of 2015 approximately 8 million tons of waste plastic enter the oceans annually, damaging the ecosystem and forming ocean garbage patches.Even the highest quality recycling processes lead to substantial plastic waste during the sorting and cleaning process, releasing large amounts of microplastics in waste water, and dust from the process.
Almost all recycling is mechanical: melting and reforming plastic into other items. This can cause polymer degradation at a molecular level, and requires that waste be sorted by colour and polymer type before processing, which is complicated and expensive. Errors can lead to material with inconsistent properties, rendering it unappealing to industry. In feedstock recycling, waste plastic is converted into its starting chemicals, which can then become fresh plastic. This involves higher energy and capital costs. Alternatively, plastic can be burned in place of fossil fuels, in energy recovery facilities or biochemically converted into other useful chemicals for industry. In some countries, burning is the dominant form of plastic waste disposal, particularly where landfill diversion policies are in place.
Plastic recycling is low in the waste hierarchy. It has been advocated since the early 1970s, but due to economic and technical challenges, did not impact plastic waste to any significant extent until the late 1980s.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.