What to do with PET bottles
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.
