International Plastics News for Asia

Recycling


The buzz word in the plastics industry today is "recycling". I have seen so many trade exhibitions and conferences deal with the issue of properly disposing, recycling and reusing plastics that it is no longer surprising that companies now try to outdo one another in being able to come up with the best solutions to recycle used plastics products.


I have been closely monitoring how companies deal with disposable plastics bottles, a most challenging task. More than 13 billion plastics bottles are disposed of each year. While plastics are recyclable, the resulting materials are limited to so-called second generation re-use only - which means that the materials from recycled plastics bottles end in landfills.


This makes it now more interesting to follow recent efforts to do more than that. There's the IBM -Stanford breakthrough research in green chemistry which is expected to lead to a new recycling process that will enable the repeated recycling of plastics materials. While it may take a while before the process would be put into use, it definitely provides much hope for the industry and its players. More researches by other institutions and organizations are now being conducted along this line and hopefully in the near future, would bring good results.