Issues You Should Be Conscious Of Before You Recycle Plastic Resin

| Saturday, April 21, 2012
By Abhishek Agarwal


There are a variety of misconceptions with regards to the recycling of plastic material. It's the responsibility of every citizen to pay attention to the damage caused by plastic to the environment, and accordingly take every possible measure to recycle plastic resin and other plastic derivatives. This concept is catching on fast in Malaysia, as well as other countries across the globe.

Every plastic material manufacturer is bound to mark the product with the chasing arrows symbol. However, this doesn't mean that the plastic could be recycled. The only info supplied by this symbol is through the number contained within the arrows, which indicates the general category to which the plastic resin belongs.

It is not possible to recycle plastic resin of all categories, only certain grades allow for recycling. Moreover, a recycled product generally can not undergo recycling a second time. Another false impression among people is that proper collection of plastic waste will decrease the amount of plastic that is land filled. This strategy usually backfires when the total utilization of plastic increases faster than the rate of collection.

There are plastic recycling bins located in a number of places in Malaysia. However this doesn't mean that all of them effectively recycle plastic resin. More often than not, the plastic is simply collected, and rarely gets reprocessed into other useful products. The thrust should be on reducing the consumption of plastic.

Many a plastic material manufacturer will argue that using plastic containers helps in the conservation of energy. However, the truth is quite the opposite. The construction of plastic containers consumes as much energy as it would take to manufacture glass containers from raw materials. In fact, to recycle plastic resin typically costs more than it might cost to make a glass container from scratch.

Most people in Malaysia, in fact all over the world, think that their efforts to decrease pollution start and end at measures to recycle plastic resin. But there are many other feasible alternatives which may actually decrease the pressure exerted by plastic on the environment. These range from source reduction to refillable container, bulk purchases to minimal packaging and so on and so forth.

It is part of the corporate social responsibility of each plastic material manufacturer to ensure that the manufactured products can be recycled, as far as possible. Plastic has a number of advantages, and is indispensable for a wide range of applications, but at the cost of severe damage to our ecosystems.

To effectively recycle plastic resin on a larger scale, this can create employment opportunities for many individuals, other than saving the environment from pollution. Such developments might prove to be extremely beneficial for the unemployed in Malaysia, and in other nations of the world as well.

We need to recycle plastic resin as much as we can, whenever and wherever we can. Freshwater and saltwater ecosystems everywhere in the world have been clogged by plastic, and the terrestrial ecosystems are in equally bad shape. If we could get over being lazy and irresponsible, it might work wonders for our environment.




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