subject: Recycling Plastics The New Focus Of Society, Industry [print this page] Recycling polymers is the buzzword in today's environment conscious plastic industry as well as the society. Recyclable polymer scrap comes from two sources: domestic or post user and industrial scrap.
Each year millions of dollars are spent across the world to get rid of plastic bags and each year millions of dollars are spent by retailers to buy the plastic bags to give to their customer, which eventually ends up as part of your city's responsibility to get rid of waste. It's a vicious and for now unending cycle.
However, as more people become aware of the direct and indirect costs of using plastic bags, there's a slowly but surely growing consensus on recycling plastic bags.
Recycling plastic bags and wraps is very useful because this valuable material can be made into dozens of new products such as low-maintenance fencing and decking, building and construction products, shopping carts or even new bags.
In order to successfully recycle this scrap, a recycler usually takes a few pre-processing steps such as washing the scrap and shredding it down to a more uniform size.
The washed and shredded scrap is then extruded and cut into pellets of recycled plastic which are then packed and reused for making useful objects.
However, recycling reduces the quality of the polymer.
First and foremost, recycled polymers invariably have poorer physical properties compared to the virgin polymers.
Second, the polymers from two different sources do not meld with each other easily even if they are of the same plastic.
Also, the recyclers face problems due to moisture content of the scrap. Moisture creates surface defects, which reduce the aesthetics of the end products, reducing their value.
Due to moisture, the pellets often lack good surface finish and the reduced strength results in poor physical properties of the products made from such pellets.
Generally, the recyclers use desiccants or specially designed additives for recycling plastics, either while recycling scrap or while making products from pellets, in order to reduce the effect of moisture.
Finished recycled products are then reintroduced into society and are used in myriad applications.
