Why is sorting so important in plastics recycling?
Plastics are a family of materials. There are different types of plastics, just as there are different types of metal, paper and glass. Even though they are both metals, steel and aluminum have to be separated before recycling, different colors of glass must be sorted and white office paper must be separated from newspapers and paperboard boxes. Each of the six common packaging plastics has performance characteristics that make it best suited for specific applications. Purchasers of recycled resins want to be sure that these properties are retained, so handlers sort plastics by resin type to command the highest market value. Occasionally, innovators have proposed technologies to use mixed, unsorted plastics. Some ventures have succeeded. Overall, however, sorted plastics allow for the highest valued applications for recycled plastics.
