How We Recycle Your Polythene Waste
How exactly does polythene recycling work? Plastic recycling first emerged towards the end of the 1960s. With the growth in the use of plastic products in practically every area of life, people needed a way to prevent landfills from overflowing with this new abundance of plastic. Researchers, therefore, quickly got to work looking for ways to recycle and reuse plastic at a low cost. We still use many of the waste management methods that they developed at Plastic Expert today. Here’s how we recycle your polythene waste.
Step One: Sort the Plastic
The first step is to sort the plastic according to type. Different types of plastic have different resin contents – something that you can see for yourself if you look at the symbols on the bottom of plastic containers.
Recycling facilities also like to sort plastic by their colour because the dye in plastic can affect the appearance and qualities of the final recycled plastic products.
Step Two: Chop the Plastic
The next step is to chop the polythene and polyethylene recycling into small chunks. The reason for doing this is twofold: to standardize the plastic and remove any debris, and chopping allows us to remove paper labels, dirt, and other small contaminants.
Step Three: Clean the Plastic
The next step is to clean the plastic to remove all of the things in it that aren’t plastic. Contaminants can harm the properties of the recycled material.
Step Four: Melt and Compress The Plastic
After cleaning the pieces of plastic, the polythene goes into a type of oven that melts it. We melt the plastic so that we can turn it into uniform pellets that can sell as raw inputs to plastic manufacturers.
A pelleting machine then takes the melted plastic and forms it into small, uniform plastic pieces. Once the process is complete, manufacturers can buy the pellets and use them to make whatever they like. Polythene water pipes, for instance, can be made anew into dustbin crates.
