PET Bottle
Tips on how to recycle PET Bottles, 2010, 2011.
Advantages of Recycling
Advantages of Recycling
Reduce, reuse, recycle is the new mantra for the 21st Century. Even though the advantages of recycling have been long known, it is not until last few decades that it has become clear to almost everyone that if we are going to survive, we have to recycle.
Did you know that one and one-half acres of rainforest is destroyed every second? Most of it is used for timber, but significant amount of it is used for paper production. If you recycle one ton of paper, you have saved approximately 17 trees, about 7000 gallons of water and three cubic yards of landfill space. All that from just one ton of recycled paper. And that is average monthly paper consumption for a medium office. Imagine that on a large scale. Entire forests can be saved by simply altering our purchasing habit to recycled paper.
One other office item that can be recycled is a printer cartridge. In United States alone, about 700 000 cartridges are thrown away every year. Each time you buy a remanufactured printer cartridge, you have prevented about two and a half pounds of metal and plastic going to a land fill and saved about half a gallon of oil. If all cartridges in United State would be remanufactured it would mean 1.75 million of pounds less waste in our landfills and saving of 350 000 gallons of oil.
There re many examples like these all around us, and that is just considering the savings we can made. The impact on the environment is whole different ball game, as the effects of our behavior are already starting to hurt us. If we do not change our habits, the world we leave to our children will be drastically worst than the one we inherited from our parents.
PET Bottle Recycling Tips 2010
PET Bottle Recycling Tips 2010
Poly Ethylene Terephthalate (PET) bottles are used everywhere especially as the packaged drinking water industries are mushrooming like anything. This would clearly mean that the trash cans are also being filled with more of these PET bottles and these later occupy lot of space in landfills rendering acres of land unusable. They even take years to degrade and also release harmful substances into environments which cause various diseases including cancer. Therefore proper recycling of PET bottles is highly necessary. Used PET becomes waste known by recycling world as “post consumer PET” which is collected by various agencies by separating it from household waste. Even local governments all over the world are lending their support for this. The collected bottles are then transported to recycling centers called “materials recovery facilities (MRF)” where they sort out the household solid waste and separate only PET bottles and other PET products. Then the PET products are categorized according to various color sections like transparent ones, blue colored or green colored etc and remaining into mixed color category. Then the PET bottles or products or one section are crushed and pressed to make bales of them and sold to the recycling companies where actually recycling process takes place.
In the recycling centers there would be further crushing of the bales and washing of them, after which they are dried thoroughly. Then they are shred into pieces which even then posses some residues of the original product like paper labels and caps. These would now be removed by implementing different techniques to obtain pure PET fragments or “PET flakes” which are used as fresh raw material for a range of products which might be in other circumstances be made from polyester like polyester fibers, sheets etc. The PET flakes can also be used to manufacture PET bottles again. Recycling PET bottles is gaining good response.
