TC Palm: Recycling Reduces Landfill Waste, Oil Consumption, Experts Say
Filed under: Earth 911 - September 2, 2008
By Melissa Holsman
When a plastic bottle is recycled instead of tossed out with the trash, it impacts two of the world’s most finite resources: petroleum and landfills.
First, it takes oil to make plastic, and a typical water bottle —in which eight out of 10 are discarded— can take 700 years to begin composting, according to the Web site www.greenupgrader.com.
That same bottle during recycling undergoes a twisted high-tech journey to clean, crush, melt and then remold it into a new plastic container, from Pepsi bottles to a Publix milk jug and more.
At today’s sky-high gas prices and considering it takes more than 1.5 million barrels of oil to manufacture a year’s supply of bottled water, recycling takes on a whole new meaning—that’s enough oil to fuel 100,000 cars for a year, according to industry experts at www.Earth911.org.
In the United States, we buy an estimated 28 billion plastic bottles a year, using about 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour.
That resonated with Stuart officials last year when they voted to become the first Treasure Coast city to adopt a single-stream recycle method, allowing residents to put all items in one recycle bin.
In less than 11 months, the city boosted residential recycling by 90 percent, said recycling and conservation coordinator Mary Kindel.
And, “it’s reduced the amount of materials going to our landfill,” she said.
Under a contract with Waste Management Recycle America, Stuart and Martin County haul their recyclables to Reuter Recycling in Pembroke Pines. Using mechanized screens and optical sorting technologies, the facility processes up to 1,000 tons of material a day, said spokesman Larry Della-Betta.
At Reuter, all bottles are sorted, squashed and bundled before being shipped to a plastics processor, known as reclamation operations.
There, the items are sorted by resin type, triple-washed, rinsed and ground to a particle size called regrind, or flake.
“They’re shredded down into small flakes or pellets,” said Della-Betta.
Plastics generally are sorted into seven resin types, based on their specific compounds. Soda bottles —the most common plastic— are made of polyethylene terephthalate, or PET. Mustard bottles and yogurt tubs, made of polypropylene, or PP, are chemically different from milk jugs and detergent bottles, which are made from high-density polyethylene, or HDPE.
Once sold to a bottling firm or a “converter” manufacturer, the pellets are reshaped again using an extruder, a machine that heats, regrinds and filters the plastic through screens, which produces a material that can be remolded into new containers.
The pelletized particles also can become raw material for goods that otherwise would be made of polyester.
In addition to water bottles, recycled plastics become a host of other reusable products, such as lumber, furniture, roadside curbs, truck cargo liners and trash bins.
Plastic goes GREEN
- Purchase a product in a plastic bottle.
- When finished, wash and squash the bottle and place it in recycle bin.
- In Stuart, city trucks collect the items; later they’re trucked to the Reuter Recycle facility in Pembroke Pines.
- The items are sorted by resin type, washed and shipped to a plastics processor.
- Plastic containers are triple-washed and compacted or shredded into flakes or pellets.
- The pellets are sold to a “converter” manufacturer or a bottler company that melts and remolds the plastic into new products.
- The reusable plastic bottles are back in circulation and returned to local supermarket shelves.