Recycling

The process of recovering the plastic waste and reprocessing it into a variety of useful products is called as recycling. This is done to reduce the wastage of those materials that can be potentially useful after recycling as well as minimize air and water pollution that may be caused by waste disposal methods like incineration and landfill disposal. 

Benefits of Recycling -

It reduces the need for landfilling and incineration, prevents pollution caused by the manufacturing of products from virgin materials, saves energy, decreases emissions of greenhouse gases that contribute to global climate change, and helps sustain the environment for future generations.

Disadvantages of recycling -

Recycling may sometimes be an expensive option as it needs time and labor to sort and dump items. To render the items for recycling, they have to be dry. For instance, agricultural plastic films that are used for mulching applications are often entrapped with dirt, moisture and plant debris. So, rendering such plastic waste for recycling is not a practical option. Suppose the cost of making a new product out of recycled materials is more than cost of that product made out of new materials, then no company would invest money on the recycled materials. Sometimes, the products may not be designed to be recycled and in such cases a great deal of energy is required to reprocess these materials for re-use.

Challenges in recycling –

Compared to glass or metallic materials, plastic poses unique challenges. Because of the massive number of types of plastic, they each carry a resin identification code and must be sorted before they can be recycled. Metals are often sorted using electromagnets, however, there is no such 'easy sorting' capability that exists for plastics, which makes it an expensive option. In addition to this, while labels do not need to be removed from bottles for recycling, lids are often made from a different kind of non-recyclable plastic. Also, most often there is a variety of plastics types that are present in the waste and each has a different melting point. As a result, this may cause problems in the remelting process.