Challenges in Plastic Recycling

Plastics represent about 9%, by weight, of the materials in a typical waste stream. By volume, however, it can be up to 30% of household garbage.

Plastics are lightweight and take up a lot of space. This makes collection relatively expensive because much of what is being transported is air. It takes about 20,000 plastic bottles to make one tonne, and recyclers get paid by weight.

Much of the plastic in the waste stream is a container of some sort. These plastic jugs, bottles and jars are quite flexible and their built in shape 'memory' resists efforts to compress them in balers. You squish them and they pop back up. So, it either takes a long time to get plastic into a bale, or you need an expensive baler to handle them.

Recycling is made more challenging by the wide range of plastics in use (see Plastic Labelling). Not all of them can be recycled together and many aren't collected in enough quantity to be worth separating. They end up being marketed together for little, and sometimes negative, value.

SARCAN manages the deposit beverage container and the milk container programs for Saskatchewan. They handle and market the highest volume of plastic in the province. Their mandate means that they mostly deal with returned soft drink containers, #1 (PET), and a smaller but growing number of milk jugs, #2 (HDPE).

PET can be recycled into a large number of products, including new drink bottles that use recycled resin between outer layers of new plastic.

Kevin Acton of SARCAN notes that there are a few new wrinkles in the PET marketing scene. Some companies, especially in Europe, are starting to use different coloured bottles to make their products more distinctive. These lower the value of PET bales, as the clear bottles, which have been dominant up till now, are the easiest to recycle. A larger problem is the disruption of the American economy that followed Sept 11, 2001. Wellman's, a major American PET recycler, has closed two plants. The price of 'virgin' PET resin has also recently declined, which reduces the incentive for manufacturers to use recycled material.

Mixed plastics, usually #3 #7, are the most difficult to market, both from a utility and a price perspective. SARCAN sends their mixed plastics, which include clear film used internally and computer plastic parts reclaimed in a pilot project, to Superwood in Red Deer, Alberta, where they are made into durable plastic dimension lumber.

(Source: WasteWatch, September 2002)

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