Eco - Local Eco News

POSTED: Monday, Apr. 28, 2008

Here's the path plastic takes after you pitch it into the recycling box

When you pop a plastic bottle into your blue bin and place it on the curb, you send it on a journey that will take it to the other side of the world to be transformed into something else.

1. Bottle goes into bin. Sanitary Service Company recycling truck picks it up and takes it to Northwest Recycling in Bellingham.

2. Three to five workers sort through the recycled materials on a pair of conveyor belts. A magnet pulls out tin, a worker pulls out aluminum cans, and someone else picks out milk bottles and other things made of colorless high-density polyethylene (HDPE) plastic (stuff marked "2" in the recycling symbol). All other plastics go in another pile, including our bottle, made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and marked with a "1."

3. Using a hydraulic press, workers bale the mixed plastic into fridge-sized blocks, each weighing 1,000 pounds.

4. When 50 of these blocks are baled, they're loaded into a shipping container. A truck takes it to Seattle or Tacoma to be loaded onto a ship bound for Hong Kong.

5. In Hong Kong, the container is moved onto a truck or another ship bound for another Chinese port. It eventually reaches a recycling plant. Most of these are in Guangdong, the highly industrialized province next to Hong Kong.

6. Workers sort through the plastic, separating the different types. PET, which these days fetches 25 cents a pound, and HDPE plastic which sells for 35 cents a pound, are the most sought after, says Jerry Powell, owner and editor of the trade magazine Plastics Recycling Update.

7. Machines grind the PET plastic into fingernail-sized flakes. Another machine washes it. Finally the factory transforms it into rods, pellets, or bales of fiber, and sells it to another Chinese factory.

8. Machines grind the PET plastic into fingernail-sized flakes. Another machine washes it. Finally the factory transforms it into rods, pellets, or bales of fiber, and sells it to another Chinese factory.

Despite rising prices for plastic, and its many practical uses, most PET bottles don't even get to step one of this journey.

The National Association for PET Container Resources reports that out of the 5.4 billion pounds of PET plastic U.S. consumers used in 2006, only 23.5 percent was recycled. The rest went to landfills.