Plastic Recycling
What is it?
Plastic is made from oil. Oil is drilled from under ground or under the sea, the oil is sent to an oil refinery where it is turned into products such as paraffin and petrol for our cars. By treating the oil in different ways we can make different types of plastic. Plastic is one of the most commonly used materials today. It is used to make all sorts of everyday items, including crisp packets, toys, televisions, plastic bottles, clothes, credit cards and cars. Take a look around you and see how many objects are made of plastic.
Can plastic bottles be recycled?
Yes!
How are they recycled?
There are many different types of plastic and each type has different ways to be useful i.e. some are flimsy and can be made into cling film and some are ridged and hard and can be made into something like a patio chair. Click here to find out more about the different types of plastic. Most plastic items have a triangle on them with a number inside. The number tells us which type of plastic they are made from. Plastic bottles are usually made out of numbers 1 (made out of PET), 2 (HDPE) or 3 (PVC).
Do you like a challenge?
Perhaps you could look at some plastic items to see what number inside the triangle they have. If you can find numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 then you will have a full set! But don’t think that there are only 7 different types of plastic because there are 6 main types and number 7 indicates that it is made from one of the lesser used plastics, or it could show the item was made from more than one type of plastic.
When plastic bottles are collected from plastic banks or peoples houses they are taken to a bulking station where the bottles are squashed together into large blocks and wire is used to bale them Picture. This is done to store the bottles more easily until it is time to transport them to the processing factory. At the processing factory, the bales are broken apart and the bottles are sorted into the different types of plastic. This maybe done by people, but in some high tech places infra red technology is used to identify the type and colour of plastic. Once the machine has identified which type of plastic each bottle is, a blast of air fires it into the correct sorting container. Then the separated bottles are shredded and washed to get off all the glue and labels.
Each type of plastic is heated until it melts into a liquid. This liquid is poured into moulds to make little beads of plastic called nurdles. picture. These nurdles are an easy way to transport the pure types of plastic. Plastic in this pure nurdle form is worth much more money than mixed plastic bottles that are baled together. Nurdles are the easiest and most efficient way to transport lots of plastic because plastic bottles take up a lot of room inside the vehicle. Imagine all the space inside and inbetween the bottles.
These nurdles can then be melted down and made into new plastic items, including bin bags, fleece jackets and garden furniture depending on which type of plastic it is.
Why should we recycle plastic?
Resources
Plastic is made from oil which is formed from the remains of animals and plants that lived millions of years ago in a marine (water) environment before the dinosaurs. Over the years, the remains were covered by layers of mud. Heat and pressure from these layers helped the remains turn into what we today call crude oil. Oil is a non renewable source which means that one day it will run out. Try and imagine living in a world with no plastic! What would it be like?
Marine litter / Threat to sea animals
Plastic in the sea is called marine litter and it is a real problem to the environment. Plastic litter accounts for 60 – 80% of all marine rubbish and it has been estimated that there are approximately 46,000 pieces of plastic litter for every square mile of the world’s oceans! Plastic also washes up onto beaches. One section of the British coast was found to have 550 plastic bottles per kilometre!
Reusing plastic bags
Over the last few years there has been a campaign to encourage people not to use the flimsy supermarket shopping bags and to use to cotton or jute shopping bags instead. In October 2011 the Government in Wales (the Welsh Assembly) made it law that shops could not give out free shopping bags instead they would charge customers 5p per bag. This has already had a huge impact on shoppers habits and now most people chose to reuse their existing bags and not to pay for new ones each time.
Where can plastic bottles be recycled?
Most people in Devon have plastic bottles collected from their houses, click here to find out if you can do this. In some areas there are also bottle banks for plastic. You can take plastic bottles and many other plastic items to any of Devon’s recycling centres, click here for the locations of the recycling centres and click here for the list of plastic you can take there. It really helps us if you wash and squash the bottles when you want to recycle them.
Did You Know?
25 recycled PET bottles can be used to make an adult's fleece jacket.
Recycling a single plastic bottle can conserve enough energy to light a 60W light bulb for up to 6 hours.
On average, every household uses 500 plastic bottles each year. How many of yours do you recycle?
