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Companies that recycle plastic recover the material and reprocess it in any other useful form, transforming plastic drink bottles, for instance, into toys or some other useful item. Before being recycled, plastic must be sorted according to a resin identification code, thus, drink pets have code 1, for instance. However, one of the the biggest recycling problems is that melted plastic doesn’t mix easily, it must be the same kind of plastic for the blending process to be a real success.

Different types of plastic tend to dissolve separately like oil and water, and they won’t simply mix. The recent appearance of biodegradable materials changed the recycle plastic equation by the impact brought on the re-processing costs. When some of this new type of plastic gets mixed with the classical one, it will decrease the price significantly.

In an effort to implement recycle plastic principles a technological process has been developed to use plastic as a source of carbon in the process of recovering steel scraps. Another idea that has gained popularity in Australia, Japan and the USA is called heat compression.

All unsorted plastic is put in some large rotating drums, the precess generates heat friction from the plastic parts rubbing against each other, and thus all the plastic items get mixed together no matter their nature. Criticism to this procedure appeared soon afterwards, and voices claim that the amount of energy used to rotate the drums is too high.

Recycle plastic companies prefer working with HDPE (High-density polyethylene), a more expensive plastic that takes 1.75 kg of petroleum per kilo in the manufacturing process. This is used for creating durable plastics and enjoys popularity and high demands on the market; moreover, the environmental advantage here is that this form of recycling means less waste, less carbon and sulfur dioxide.

When you recycle plastic more technological difficulties are likely to appear as compared to the re-processing of paper or metallic materials because of those code numbers associated with the type of plastic. People usually neither know the difference between these codes nor which of the items can actually be recycled.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 16th, 2010 at 7:34 pm and is filed under Plastic Scrap Info. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.