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Recycling plastics can, in many cases, significantly reduce the consumption of resources and emissions to the environment.
Plastics recycling can conserve energy and non-renewable resources as recycling replaces the need for primary extraction and manufacture of new plastics.
Recycling a single plastic bottle can conserve enough energy to light a 60W lightbulb for up to 6 hours. This assessment takes into account all the significant resources required from the point of collecting the plastic bottle in a bottle bank to the production of a recycled pellet capable of being used in place of virgin plastic.
Plastics recycling also reduces the reliance on traditional, and potentially less environmental beneficial, landfill waste disposal.
The environmental impacts and benefits of recycling plastic products vary significantly depending on the type of product and its condition at end of life.
Relatively large, clear supplies of plastic products (e.g. crates, bottles, and commercial packaging film) can normally be recycled with a positive environmental gain.
In cases where plastic products are particularly lightweight and contaminated with other materials, the energy and resources used in a recycling process may be more than those required producing new plastics. In such cases recycling is not the most environmentally sound option. Where recycling is not environmentally or economically justifiable, energy recovery is preferable as the high calorific value of the plastics can be used to generate energy for district heating and power.
Recoup and its members are committed to increasing levels of plastics recycling. At the same time we understand that a pragmatic approach to recycling is important. We should be aiming to use available resources as efficiently as possible. In some cases recycling plastic waste will not be the best environmental option.
International policy development now places increasing emphasis on the issue of waste in the wider context of product life cycles and resource efficiency. It is clear that current thinking is moving away from ‘‘end of pipe‘‘ solutions to waste and towards an integrated product policy approach. This means that environmental Best Practices will require consideration of increasingly complex trade-offs between impacts and benefits of particular products on the environment during their life cycle. For example, the overall environmental gains achieved by the use of a lightweight or longer life plastics product can make it the best choice environmentally, even though it may not be environmentally sensible to recycle a particular plastic item at the end of its life.
The use of techniques such as Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) are very important to determine which products and waste management systems are most environmentally sound. There has been considerable detailed analysis of the environmental impacts of recycling many different products containing plastics.
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