Plastics are the building blocks for many of the products we use in our everyday lives and many of us spend time carefully sorting our recycling. But what actually happens to the plastic bottles, yoghurt pots and plastic wrap we put out for collection?
Labs produce a lot of waste. It's estimated that every year the plastic waste alone from laboratories could cover an area 23x the size of the Shard ankle deep. Although much of this waste is hazardous, a lot of it isn't. In fact, anything that can be thrown in the trash has the potential to have a different end of life.
For many materials, recycling is cost-effective and good for the environment. Take aluminum, which can be recycled indefinitely using 95 percent less energy than it takes to produce new aluminum. For paper, the benefit is clear: one ton of recycled newsprint saves about 15 trees and 7,000 gallons of water, according to estimates from the Environmental Protection Agency. Thousands of tonnes of our household plastic packaging put out for recycling, as well as other kinds of plastic waste ends up in waste incinerators in the UK.
Recycling plastic conserves the fossil fuel — natural gas or oil — used to manufacture it. But plastics are usually “downcycled” into lower-quality and lower-value products, such as carpet fiber or car parts. And while it’s true that virtually any plastic can technically be recycled, that doesn’t mean it actually will be.
Incinerators are giant furnaces for burning waste, and they cause air pollution, noise, smells, litter and traffic as waste is trucked in and smoke pours from the chimneys. Incinerators are overwhelmingly located in low-income areas and neighbourhoods.. Some also goes into landfill, where it can leach toxic chemicals into the environment.
In a nutshell even though the plastic is recyclable it is not doing good for the environment thus we encourage completely single use plastic to find an alternative such as a eco-friendly products.