why are plastics recycling facilities so limited?

Question

There are SO many types of plastics in common use - at least 7 to my knowledge - but rarely more than 1-3 types of facilities for recycling...and no-one ever seems to want polystyrene!

Answer 1

because your country produces and fixes the price of oil enabling plastics to be produced thus stifling the market forces that would enable recycled plastics to be competitivley priced. there is very little differnce in cost. and it is labour intensive sorting the different plastics and different colours cross conamination of colour can ruin a batch pigmented for a single colour usage. regards LF

Answer 2

Because plastics are basically polymers. These are huge networks, that can be seen as entangled worms or snakes. A lot of dirt can 'infiltrate' this snaky substance. Once in, you cannot get it out. The only really usefull thing you can do with most plastics is to burn them, as they contain (almost) all the energy as the petrol they were made from.
Good example: if you abuse a glass/metal bottle for painting purposes, and you put some white spirit in it, nothing will happen. If you do that with a plastic bottle, the white spirit will penetrate the polymer network. If that plastic bottle would be reused for food packaging, you would contaminate that future food container. So basically, you see that the properties of polymers decline when it is recycled. For f.i. steel, it is the opposite: you make a car and 'melt' it again as many times as you wish.

Another problem is composite materials. Some plastics contain fibers (glass, carbon, ...) If anorganic, it is not so easy to separate them again. It will cost a lot of energy. How to recycle a glass/polyester boat? It is not so easy, the polyester is a thermoset and you cannot just melt it. Also, the glass fiber will have lost quite some of it's properties.

Though, use of composite materials can be very appropriate, due to saving weight and thus energy - fi in transportation applications.

Answer 3

Most people don't realise that councils actually make money from recycling schemes.

The best sources of revenue are glass and metals (especially aluminium).

Recycing plastics can't generate much revenue (if any) for the council because the cost reprocessing is not significantly less than the cost of processing from new.

Glasses and metals, however, are not by-products of other industrial processes and require large amounts of energy for purification. This, together with relatively easy decontamination high melting temperatures, means that waste glass and metal is actually worth something. The council can easily make glass and metals recycling worthwhile even if it's badly managed.

Having said that, it is possible to recycle (or at least re-use in some way) all plastics, as described in the link.

Answer 4

Because plastics are low density. The transport cost (in both money and to the environment) is high compared to the price obtained for second hand plastic. Councils do recycle plastics if they are close to a recycling plant and transport costs are not so high.

Answer 5

Market, if the market exsists for a type of plastic it has value, like High Density Polyethelene and PET, if you have polystyrene and no market your only option is to make bean bag chairs. Like other materials Aluminum is >$.60 a pound, glass on the other hand is trash that you have to pay to reuse... rough business

Answer 6

cuz the price is so high and the companys that use plastic like PS prefer to buy virgen plastic than recycling at the same price this is one and the other one is cuz last 2 years and early this year the companys full up of PS

Answer 7

Where I live the council have provided each household with three bins: brown for garden and food waste, and also cardboard; green for non recyclable items; blue for paper and plastic - we put all sorts of plastic in this.

Answer 8

probably coz its hard to recycle plastic,

(re-molding etc..?)