Plastic recycling is in a state of crisis where less than 10% is recycled. Every day, nearly 1 million tons of plastic are created. The current and only process of mechanical recycling is falling. There is all kind of plastic streams, people know they can’t sort but there is an enormous amount of pressure on the industry as a whole to come up with real solutions.
Plastics are cheap to produce, they are cheap for consumers to buy it. But once it’s thrown away it’s just left to the city authorities to pick up, to transport, to sell. As recycling exists today, sorting the material is the first step, where it receives with its a mixture and it goes through a whole series of processing steps that include magnets, shredders, optic sorters, and so forth, each of which is designed to segregate material.
Hundreds of types of plastic exist, but mechanically sorting the material is so expensive, only a few plastics are worth selling where PET bales may not look pretty but they are 98% PET. Looks like might be a little bit of carbon. Where these bales go to another facility to be chopped and washed if the plastic is clear and clean, it can be paired with virgin material for new products. If it’s not, it gets downgraded into plastic that goes into the trash.
Recycling of plastic
Endless recycling of plastic has never existed, but that could soon change. The biggest problem is mechanical recycling is not very effective. It’s a lot harder than most people think and after 30 years of experience making the semiconductors, IBM discovers the building blocks of the most widely produced plastic in the world with PET, also known as polyester.
The current effort, on the other hand, is aimed at investigating the possibility of increasing the granularity of country-level plastic waste generation data by making reasonable assumptions based on population density and affluence.
There is currently no comprehensive dataset of municipal-level waste generation data for different countries.
While we recognize the limitations of transforming country-level waste generation data into higher-resolution maps with finer granularity, we believe the exercise is important because it identifies likely global ‘hot spots’ for plastic waste now and in the near future. An important trend is increased migration into urban areas, which tends to exacerbate developing hotspots.