Recycled PET

Recycled PET and other plastics

Let’s face it: plastics have become a nightmare for our environment. For example, More than 500 billion plastic bags are used around the world each year, mostly once only, and then discarded in landfill or litter, or end up in our oceans.

Plastic Stats: About one and a half million tonnes of plastic is used in Australia each year (about 1 million tonnes is made locally, and 500,000 tonnes is in the form of imported products). About half of this ends up as waste, and a large proportion of the rest used to be exported to China for recycling. But now the Chinese have said: No more.. Householders throw away around 520,000 tonnes of waste plastic each year, much of which is short life packaging materials.

Most plastic products and packaging still end up in landfill once they have fulfilled their first use. This wastes the oil used to manufacture the items and pollutes the environment with long-lived waste. One alternative is to collect and sort waste plastic into identical polymer types, so that it can be recycled into useful new products such as outdoor furniture, wood building substitutes, new packaging, fabric for recycled lanyards, and even pens and rulers.

Applications for Recycled PET

Every year consumers around the world use and throw away hundreds of millions of plastic PET bottles.

Today, many of these are collected in recycling schemes, sorted and ground for recycling into rigid plastics such as in car parts, computers, appliances and packaging; but also spun into fibre, yarn and then woven fabric for use in carpets, clothing, bags, lanyards and caps.

Recycling PET into these products saves energy, resources and reduces waste compared to the use of virgin fibres derived from oil. It also diverts long-lived PET plastic waste from landfill.

While the best strategy is no doubt avoiding the use of plastics wherever possible, there is so much plastic in our world that recycling some into new products at least prevents some of the plastic waste from being dumped and polluting our environment.

You can see and buy recycled plastic pens and rulers at BuyEcoGreen

or if you are after printed items, especially recycled PET lanyards, with your logo etc you can see them at EcoPromotions.