Polymer Recycling Statistics

Growth in post-consumer plastic tmttle recycling rate 

Looking beyond bottle recycling, over 200 million pounds of polypropylene are recycled each year from automotive batteries [14]. The lead and acid are also recovered. The recycling rate for lead-acid automotive batteries is greater than 90% according to Battery Council International (www.batterycouncil.org). 

Plastic Bottle Type Calendar Year 1999 Calendar Year 2000  

NAPCOR reported that 771 million pounds of PET was recycled from bottles in 1999 at a recycling rate of 23.7% compared to the APC numbers of 740 million pounds and 22.8%, respectively [15]. In part, these differences reflect the slightly different methodologies used to account for recycling efficiencies and yields. 

An additional recycling statistic of interest is the growth in the number of companies recycling plastics. According to APC data, in 1989 the number of companies was only about 230 but increased to almost 1400 companies by 1998. 

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Olefin metatheses are equilibrium reactions among the two-reactant and two-product olefin molecules. If chemists design the reaction so that one product is ethylene, for example, they can shift the equilibrium by removing it from the reaction medium. Because of the statistical nature of the metathesis reaction, the equilibrium is essentially a function of the ratio of the reactants and the temperature. For an equimolar mixture of ethylene and 2-butene at 350°C, the maximum conversion to propylene is 63%. Higher conversions require recycling unreacted butenes after fractionation. This reaction was first used to produce 2-butene and ethylene from propylene (Chapter 8). The reverse reaction is used to prepare polymer-grade propylene form 2-butene and ethylene ... 

Incineration of engineering and domestic wastes of inhibited plastics is inefficient in terms of energy production and leads to contamination of the atmosphere by harmful combustion products. In addition, incineration requires thorough sorting of waste, which is uneconomic. According to statistical information [25], incineration of a ton of polymer scrap is twice as expensive as recycling and five times expensive as burial. To obtain official permission to build an incineration plant is in fact improbable in many countries in the world today. 

Suitable waste plastics feedstocks are single contaminated polymers with high selectivity to monomers or commingled waste plastics. Some mixed polymer waste streams and their estimated volume, (US 1993 statistics), amenable to recovery/recycling by thermolytic processes are shown in Table [1]. 

Another important point about how the choice of PET polymer to be recycled to create new products for the construction industry has to do with the residual growth of its use in the domestic market. According to the data of economics and statistics of the Brazilian Association of Chemical Industry [2] PET increased by 34.2% in domestic production in the last half of, 2013. 

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