Environmental Question #4 [Recycling]

Courtesy of Reddit user u/lunalovegood

Q: Is it possible to come up with a better/economically feasible process for recycling plastic?

A: Yes, but there will always be serious limitations to recycling. Plastics are made up of chain-shaped molecules called polymers, and the recycling process involves unweaving those chains, then reweaving them into something else. As an analogy, if you think of a plastic as a sweater, with some effort you could unweave a sweater back into being yarn so you can make a new sweater from it, but you're bound to cut or break some of the fibers in the process. Each time you unweave and reweave the sweater, the fibers will gradually get shorter and shorter until the yarn you get from it has such short fibers that you can't make a decent sweater out of it. That is the problem of recycling plastic, no matter what you do the quality of the plastic goes down a little bit every time it's recycled until its performance is so bad it's unusable. There is definitely room for improvement in our current recycling systems, but for plastics there's no such thing as an infinitely recyclable material. In the long term the best we can hope for is to create new plastics that can be recycled a few times, then biodegrade when they reach the end of their useful life. Huge strides in this direction have been made over the past 10 years, and over the next 10 years we'll start to see materials like this hit the market in bigger and bigger ways.

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