Why Is Recycling Plastics Important?
Recycling and reuse of plastics have the obvious benefit of decreasing the amount of used plastics that end up in landfills. With increased plastics recycling, fewer natural resources need to be extracted to produce virgin plastic. Producing new plastic from recycled material uses only two-thirds of the energy required to manufacture it from virgin raw materials. Five 2-liter recycled PET bottles produce enough fiberfill to make a ski jacket; 36 recycled bottles can make 1 square yard of carpet. In addition, a great amount of plastic waste is found in the world’s oceans. “The world now uses 230 million pounds of plastic annually.much of this is for one-trip packaging that is thrown out within a year of production, on average. Because the plastic that enters the ocean tends to fragment, it is likely to remain in the environment for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, notes Richard Thompson, a researcher at Plymouth University, U.K. who has published two studies on plastics in oceans a
