How can the environmental impact of waste plastic be reduced?
Economics is taking care of the problem, in that mixed plastic recycling centres are the latest initiative from WRAP after successfully setting up PET and HDPE recycling centres. WRAP’s goal is to have at least one Material Recycling Facility (MRF) operational by 2011. No reason to believe this isn’t possible after attending the dissemination event last week. Plastics are here to stay really as we need them to preserve food for long periods of time. Without which we wouldn’t be able to support the number of people that there are on this planet. Plastic (in PET bottles) is essential for helping with disaster scenario’s such as China’s Earthquake. Also helps reduce the weight of food soldiers have to carry in the field. The only realistic way is to rationalise the number of plastics we use (get rid of PVC for example), set up recycling streams to reprocess plastic and take the bare minimum of virgin plastic (which will needed for pharmaceutical and medical materials anyway) for products.
