I was reading an article recently on how green friendly it was to stave off throwing plastics into a land fill and just how many plants and animals this action saved. But what I guess this person never looked at was how much carbon the act of recycling actually produces. I believe that recycling is something you do with plastics but having worked in that environment for so many years I think the media only really bought in on the fluffy parts of the recycling business and fell asleep to what it actually costs.

So lets follow the life cycle of your average plastic container, for our example we are going to use a classic styrene container. Probably a nice clear one, that contained a salad and was bought a a store with a nice paper label on it.

1. The consumer removed the label and puts it in the paper recycling bin, then washes out the plastic container and put it in the Styrene bin because it has a 6 in the triangle under it.
2. The consumer then takes a trip to the recycling depot which I might add results in them burning fossil fuels and adding to the carbon on the planet.
3. The container is put in with other containers like it which in turn are housed in a building that might require storage of those containers and thus also contributes to carbon.
4. The container then gets compressed and baled and placed on a truck. The act of compressing and baling it takes fuel and electricity which also contributes to carbon.
5. The truck transports that bale and others to a depot or even to the plastics recyclers which I might add takes fuel which in turn results in more carbon.
6. The recyclers has to remove the glue that is stuck to the containers that use to hold the label, if they do not this results in wastage of plastic and pressure problems when they re-melt the plastic and extrude it. So the containers have to be cleaned of the glue.
7. The containers then get chipped back up so they can be re-melted in the extruder and re-pelletized. All this taking large quanitieis of energy and thus more carbon.
8. the repelletizer then deposits the pellets into a bin which is either used in house if that company makes plastics products or is packaged up and shipped to a products manufacturer.
9. If the pellets are shipped to a products manufacturer a clear product can not accept a recycled ploymer into it without clouding the final product so it has to be tinted. This taking more energy to extrude as the melt is thicker.
10. The little triangle under a plastic signifies how many times a plastic can be recycled, but what it fails to tell a person is that the plastic can not be used at 100% in a new product but only in the case of Styrene at 30% or in some instances 40% with virgin resin. This is because as you use the recycled polymer more and more it losses it’s abllty to be elastic and ends up no longer being usable.
11. So now that clear clam shell container went from being clear to now ending up in a tray that is black and only 30% of the orginal clear reprocessed container could be used in the new black tinted tray which I might add still has to be packaged up again and trucked which takes Carbon.

So ultimately if you really look at recycling you might want to think about plastic containers a bit differently, your doing the world a dis-service by recycling them because your contributing almost 3 times to the carbon bank. Yes, the plastic is out of land fill but from a capitlizum point of view when you bring back a product to be recycled you do not see a dime for that return but the people that drop off the bales get paid for that material. Recycled plastics are often bought and sold on their own market and the consumer through their grace brings these products back free for the stores and agencies to sell. Which in turn pumps more Green house gases into the environment throgh the processing of them.

My idea would be to build a home repellitizing unit for your plastics that you can bin your own recyclables and sell. Because a lot of the carbon costs are around trucking around air spaces in bales.

When thinking about saving the planet you might want think about the planet and do your due dilligence.