Plastic can be found everywhere in our daily life and is not easy to be decomposed naturally, which makes it easy to cause environmental pollution. So can plastic be recycled? What are the ways to recycle it?
Mechanical recycling
Mechanical recycling of e-waste plastics is suitable for places where large quantities of plastics can be generated, where there is a stable source of supply, and where the collection point is close to dismantlers, material processors, and potential product users.
Use as a chemical raw material
The use of plastics as chemical raw materials, including the use of mixed plastics as a reducing agent in the metal smelting process, is applicable in the following cases:
a. Plastics are scarce and there is a wide variety of resins;
b. Sorting and dismantling of products is difficult; and
c. Plastic suppliers, recyclers, and end-users are located at great distances from each other, where the transportation costs of inter-regional recycling of plastics outweigh the potential economic benefits of the plastics.
Processing into Engineered Fuels
Processing of plastics into engineered fuels is small but commercially viable. Much depends on how closely the fuel manufacturer and the end user work together. The economics depend on the fuel manufacturer's manufacturing costs, transportation costs, the selling price of alternative petroleum or other oils, and the cost of incineration.
Energy recovery
Energy recovery is defined as the utilization of waste plastic products from daily used plastic boxes that are not consumed by the consumer countries, either by direct combustion or as a booster for other fuels, by means of resource recovery that generates and recovers heat energy. Major examples are the incineration of domestic waste to obtain steam, electricity and hot water; other examples are the use of high calorific value fractions as a substitute for fossil fuels in cement kilns and coal-fired power plants, for coal gasification, for slag melting, and for refuse-derived fuels in metal-recycling systems.
