Unfortunately, now-a-days whenever I talk to most folks about plastic recycling, they seem to think that whenever they place an item in the recycle bin, it is magically turned into new products. It's both amazing and sad to see the number of people who are not educated on how recycling actually works.
'Plastic' is the generic term for hundreds of different chemicals combinations - most of them DO NOT MIX. Few of them can practically be re-refined back into raw plastic that is ready to be used by industry (explained later).
There are several steps to recycling plastic.
The first step is sorting the plastic by chemical composition. Common plastics you most likely interact with every day are:
- Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene
- High-Density Polyethylene
- Latex (Polyisoprene)
- Nylon (Polyamides family of chemicals)
- Polycarbonate
- Polyester family of chemicals
- Polypropylene
- Polystyrene
- Polyvinyl Chloride
Some of the plastics have to be rejected during sorting due to additives such as reinforcing fibers, fire retardants, and certain dyes.
Next step is shredding the plastics and cleaning them. Things such as ink, paper, adhesives, and chemical residue are (mostly) removed during this step. The result is relatively clean plastic that is ready for refining, and a lot of toxic waste as the result of the cleaning process.
After cleaning the plastics are ready for re-refining. The method used is dependent on the chemical composition of the plastic. Some plastic is simply melted down, some are dissolved in chemicals, others are distilled, and yet more have to be broken down into their base chemicals and recombined .
Regardless how the plastics have to be re-refined, the resulting raw plastics are combined with virgin plastic, and sold as a lower grade of plastic due to the contaminants that can not be removed. Many plastics can not be practically re-refined, and are considered unrecyclable.
In over 18 years of industrial construction, I've worked in a few chemical plants dealing with plastics. They are the most dangerous places I have ever worked - far worse than oil refineries. Plastic processing releases many deadly fumes, and fatalities are a very common occurrence. One small plant I worked at in Ohio produced wrapping plastic for the food industry. They recorded a minimum of 3 fatalities per year at the plant. Since 2000, the deadliest single year was 14 deaths .
There are many areas in plastic refining facilities that required me to wear full chemical hazard suits with independent air supplies. One area I had to go into to change a valve, I was only allowed to stay for 15 minutes at a time. The chemicals where so toxic, that the fumes where eating my chemical protection suit at an alarming rate.
I'm not joking when I say that plastic refining produces a lot of toxic and very deadly air pollution and chemical waste.
Now you are probably wondering what this has to do with trash from the European Union? Due to environmental laws and very high costs, not much plastic is actually processed, cleaned and re-refined in the European Union. Traditionally they paid companies in China to recycle plastics that are not profitable to recycle or are considered unrecyclable.
Over in China, environmental laws are very lax (and oftentimes ignored), and workers are cheap + easy to replace.
Toxic waste from cleaning and re-refining operations where being openly dumped into the environment, and deadly air pollution was simply ignored.
The Chinese government eventually had enough, and outright banned the import of all low grade plastic waste.
No one else would take the European Union's 'recyclable' garbage, and the EU itself doesn't like the high costs of complying with its own environmental laws when it comes to the entire plastic recycle chain.
As a result, the EU is now quietly dumping huge amounts of it's 'recyclable' garbage in poor countries instead of actually dealing with the issues.
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