You would think that with plants to handle plastic recycling located right in North Carolina, the state would have a very high plastic bottle recycling rate. However, this article states that less than 20% of the plastic bottles are recycled. I’m not dissing on North Carolina’s citizens at all, it’s simply a statement that getting people to recycle plastic is difficult, even when plants are located so close.

Some questions that came to my mind include what is the state doing to ensure that bottles don’t end up in the landfill? Does all trash in North Carolina go through a transfer station with sorters to keep the bottles out? Will more people just dump them illegally? Is the state providing some sort of bottle collection program to make it easy on consumers to recycle them?

The law certainly has merits and I hope it is successful at increasing the recycling rate. I also hope it doesn’t lead to illegal dumping or other such nonsense.

This article does a pretty good job of describing some of the difficulties plastics recyclers have faced over the past several months. It also points out how much plastic scrap goes to India. Which raises the question of whether it is environmentally sound to send so much plastic so far away. Let’s hope so.

The use of degradable additives in PET packaging has seemed to some to be a dream come true. No longer would we have to worry about filling up the landfills with an item that would be there for very, very long time. Those that end up in a landfill would just decompose. Wonderful, right? Not so fast.

The National Association for PET Container Resources has recently called for restraint in moving forward with the introduction of degradeables due to insufficient data to support the claims of positive environmental impact. This article states the reasons for their call of warning. One that caught me was that degrading plastics don’t have any soil benefits. So, if it doesn’t benefit the soil, what happens? Is what’s left over completely inert, incapabale of causing any damage? Could be but until we kow better for sure, I agree that companies should approach this more slowly.

I’m always skeptical about the long-term viability of a new recycled-content plastics manufacturer. Either the costs (both monetary and environmental) don’t justify the means or it’s heavily subsidized by the government. If we had a truly workable solution, you would see it spreading quickly across the country and even around the globe. So, I wasn’t too excited when I read the headlines ” <!– @page { margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } –>Plastics Recycling Plant Ready to Open.”

After reading this article, I am mildly hopeful. If they save the energy they say they do and if it isn’t subsidized by the government, this could be a really good step for all of us. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

Turning plastics back into the oil from which they were created is wonderful technology. If they are producing enough oil to make money on the process, then it would seem the only thing they have to worry about is gathering enough material consistently to keep them in the black. I certainly wish them the best and hope they can continue to grow their market and expand the use of this technology.