Recycled Plastic facts

While investigating facts about Recycled Plastic Products and Recycled Plastic Lumber, I found out little known, but curios details like:

A train company invented a way to ship oil without pipelines; bitumen is converted into a solid product and sealed in plastic made from recyclables. The pucks are designed to be transported in regular container cars by train and loaded onto cargo ships at coal terminals. They float too!

how recycled plastic is made?

Istanbul has a vending machine that releases food and water for the city's stray dogs in exchange for recycled plastic bottles.

What recycled plastic can be made into?

In my opinion, it is useful to put together a list of the most interesting details from trusted sources that I've come across answering what plastics can be recycled. Here are 50 of the best facts about Recycled Plastic Furniture and Recycled Plastic Outdoor Furniture I managed to collect.

what recycled plastic is used for?

A UK environmental agency found that reusing plastic shopping bags as garbage bags is more beneficial than recycling them
The wax in paper cups is actually a plastic called Polyethylene or PE, the most commonly used plastic in the world and is practically non-recyclable.
Plastic was invented in 1907. Since 1950, humanity has produced 6.3 billion metric tons of plastic waste; 9% of it is recycled, 12% is incinerated, 79% ends up in a landfill or in the environment. Majority of the world's plastic waste from the developed world is exported to Southeast Asia.
91% of plastic isn’t recycled and not because people don’t sort it
One consequence of lower oil prices is that fewer plastics get recycled. Since plastics are petroleum based products, if oil prices fall low enough, it's cheaper for companies that might use recycled materials to just manufacture new plastics, and recyclables end up in landfills.
Humans have consumed 9.2b tons of plastic. Out of it, 6 billion will never meet a recycling bin, and there’s no infrastructure to deal with it. That’s equivalent to the weight of one billion elephants.
In Zurich, the garbage disposal is financed by selling official plastic bags for non-recyclable waste. Garbage trucks will not even pick up unofficial bags from houses and they instead have to be placed in designated neighbourhood containers.
In world-wide production of plastic, 33% of it is used only once and 85% is not recycled at all, leading to the 5.25 Trillion pieces of trash floating in our oceans.
It is estimated that of all the trash sent to landfills roughly 30% is paper (recyclable), 18% is food waste (recyclable), and 16% is plastic. Most of this is recyclable and should not be ending up in landfills.
It takes less energy to recycle plastic than it does to burn it.

recycled plastic facts — What plastics cannot be recycled?

Why can't black plastic be recycled?

You can easily fact check why can't plastic straws be recycled by examining the linked well-known sources.

More than one million sea creatures are killed each year because of the plastic bags that are thrown into the ocean.

It can take as long as 1000 years for a plastic water bottle to decompose when thrown out instead of being recycled.

Bruce Lee's corpse is featured in his final film. The studio pieced together the 14 minutes they had, rewrote the story so the main character fakes his death and gets plastic surgery and shot the rest of the film using a stunt double and recycled footage, including footage of Bruce Lee's funeral - source

The plastic industry formed the first recycling campaign in the 1950s to counteract Vermont legislation holding the industry accountable for disposable waste.

Despite the increase in recycling plastic in the United States, plastic production is only continuing to grow.

What happens to plastic when it is recycled?

Since the 1950s, some 8.3bn tons of plastic have been produced worldwide but to date only 9% of that has been recycled. Up to 12.7m tons of plastic end up in the oceans every year.

How recycled plastic can be used?

The caps for PETE bottles (water and soda bottle containers) are made from a type of plastic which is not recyclable.

An adult-sized fleece jacket can be made from 25 recycled PET bottles.

Black plastic can’t be recycled because garbage separators are unable to identify it as plastic with infrared sensors.

Chick-fil-A uses recycled plastic to make the polo shirts worn by their employees.

In various neighborhoods throughout Istanbul, recycling boxes were installed that dispense dog food every time someone deposits a plastic bottle for recycling. Over 150,000 stray dogs are said to roam the streets of the city.

What happens to plastic bottles when recycled?

Since China’s crackdown on foreign waste imports, nearly half of plastic waste exported from the US for recycling was shipped to Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam, where there is no regulatory framework to ensure plastic waste is processed in an environmentally friendly way.

Coca Cola Australia will use 70% recycled plastic in water bottles by the end of 2019

Australia was the first country in the world to have a complete system of bank notes made from plastic (polymer). These notes provide much greater security against counterfeiting. The polymer notes are cleaner than paper notes, are more durable and easily recyclable.

Earth Day is important to help raise awareness of the impact we have on the environment and what can be done about it. Some of the stats that are used to get the point of going green across include: Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to watch 3 hours of TV. It takes less energy (90% less) to recycle aluminum cans than to manufacture new ones. The average person tosses out about 4 pounds of garbage every day. The average person uses about 12 thousand gallons of water each year. Only 27% of newspapers in the U.S. are recycled. If they were all recycled it would save one quarter of a billion trees EVERY YEAR. Every year there are 14,000,000,000 pounds of garbage thrown into the oceans. The plastic garbage kills at least 1 million creatures in the ocean each year.

How recycled plastic bottle?

Reusing and/or recycling paper and plastic bags can decrease deforestation. Using canvas bags is the best alternative.

Since plastic started being manufactured 60 years ago, 8.3 billion metric tons have been made and used. As it stands, it is estimated that only 9% of that has been recycled. Additionally, half of all the plastic we produce becomes trash in less than a year.

The presence of enough foreign materials—from food to dissimilar kinds of plastic—can ruin an entire batch of would-be recyclables.

Upwards of 50 billion disposable plastic water bottles are created each year for the United States alone, consuming over 17 million barrels of oil. Only 1 in 5 bottles are recycled.

Americans use more than 500 MILLION plastic straws daily and <10% of single-use plastics get recycled. Sea turtles and marine life mistake floating plastic for food and, if they eat it, only have a 50% chance of survival. But if the U.S. bans the straw the potential impact is significant.

Recycling plants sort by shape, and crushing cans can make them more difficult to sort and more likely to be sorted into garbage. They also recommend you leave the plastic lids on water bottles.

Plastic Wrap from packages like cases of water and electronics can be recycled with plastic grocery bags at stores.

Kenyans are building a boat/Dhow (The FlipFlopi) from recycled plastic to raise awareness of plastic in the seas. Plans are that it will sail from Kenya to South Africa in December 2018

Recycling a single plastic bottle can conserve enough energy to light a 60W light bulb for up to 6 hours

Unlike commercial and industrial recycling — a thriving market that annually salvages tens of millions of tons of metal, paper, glass, and plastic — mandatory household recycling is a money loser

More than 300 billion aluminum, glass, and plastic beverage containers have been recycled in California since 1987 through the can return program.

The Netherlands have built the world's first bike path made from recycled plastic. It took the equivalent of 500,000 bottle caps or 218,000 plastic cups to make.

91% of plastic is not recycled. Billions of tons of plastic have been made over the past decades, and much of it is becoming trash and litter. It's also estimated that 8 million metric tons of plastic end up in the oceans every year.

About 4Ocean, a company that works out of over 20 countries to help clean the worlds oceans and beaches and uses the recyclable plastic bottles to make bracelets that help fund their work to clean the oceans for everyone.

The number inside the recycling logo on plastic products are used to indicate the type of plastic the product is made of, which is supposed to consumers make more informed decisions related to their health and recycling

This is our collection of basic interesting facts about Recycled Plastic. The fact lists are intended for research in school, for college students or just to feed your brain with new realities. Possible use cases are in quizzes, differences, riddles, homework facts legend, cover facts, and many more. Whatever your case, learn the truth of the matter why is Recycled Plastic so important!