Do you know what happens to plastic?

[Tom_nerd]

hey guys,

 

I was doing a presentation on plastic and wanted to know where smart people (you guys) think that plastic you put in the recycling goes.

(If you think its a mixture then put the one that you think most of it goes to)

enjoy!

 

thanks in advance,

Tom

[WereCatf]

7 minutes ago, Tom_nerd said:

I was doing a presentation on plastic and wanted to know where smart people (you guys) think that plastic you put in the recycling goes.

In what country and, in certain countries, what area of the country? Recycling is NOT handled the same in every country around the world and e.g. different states may handle it differently. You should also specify what kind of plastic we are talking about, since even that can be separated into multiple categories.

[pythonmegapixel]

Roughly what happens, at least in the US and UK, is:

• The higher-grade stuff, which there is demand for in recycled form, is recycled into new plastic and used to produce other products
• The lower-grade stuff is sent straight to landfill or incineration
• The stuff in the middle is shipped off to where recycling is cheaper, if there's the demand, otherwise it's also just landfill/incineration.

It isn't composted or put into space. Some of it is dumped into the ocean, but that doesn't tend to be the intended way of disposing of it.

[Downkey]

i wish i could choose multiple answers

[Lii]

8 hours ago, WereCatf said:

In what country and, in certain countries, what area of the country? Recycling is NOT handled the same in every country around the world and e.g. different states may handle it differently. You should also specify what kind of plastic we are talking about, since even that can be separated into multiple categories.

do you Know what my city does? there are recycling bins, pretty much everyone "sponsor" them, and when the dustman takes the trash.. they just mix everything together, as they weren't from recycling bins

 

yeah it depends

[TheDocH]

My council send everyone free rolls of recycling bags( I guess we pay for them in tax) so maybe that's a good thing

[airborne spoon]

from what i've noticed over the years is unless it's the good plastic it all goes into landfills or burn pits, hardly any stuff actually gets recycled, like pizza boxes they don't get recycled because there is oils on the cardboard so it's just normal trash. If plastic has some crap on it that cant come off in 0.5 seconds it goes in the trash

[Mling]

i heard they used to get sent to china to be turned into some other product. But a few years ago china stopped taking the worlds trash so a lot of recyclable plastic ended up in the land fill. Only glass and metals are properly recyclable and good for the environment. We've been using glass and metal for thousands of years.

[Mling]

When i was a kid in the 90s McDonalds used to have seperate bins for recycling. They got caught out throwing everything into the same skip bin behind their restaurants.