Plastic recycling is the process or recovering waste or scrap plastics and reprocessing the material into other, useful products, completely different from their original state at times. For example, plastic bottles once used for soft drinks are recycled and turned into a park bench. Recycling is met with mixed reviews. Some say that more energy and money are put into the recycling effort than what you’ll ever get out. And others say that recycling is a very effective way to stop pollution, conserve landfill space, and help our planet recover from excess carbon emissions. Regardless of opinions, plastic recycling continues to be big business, and many of the recycled items can be commonly found in millions of homes, parks, schoolyards, etc.

Plastic polymers require greater processing to be recycled than glass or metal materials. Plastics have very low entropy of mixing, which is due to the high molecular weight of their large polymer chains. A macromolecule interacts with its environment along its entire length, so its enthalpy of mixing is quite large in comparison to that of an organic molecule with a similar structure. Heating the plastic alone is not enough to dissolve such a large molecule. And because of this, plastics must often be nearly identical in composition to mix efficiently.

When different types of plastic are melted together, they tend to undergo phase-separation, similar to oil and water, and set in these different layers. The phase boundaries cause structural weakness in the material, and the polymer blends are only useful in limited applications. Another barrier to recycling is the widespread use of dyes and fillers and other additives in plastics. The polymer is too viscous to efficiently remove fillers, and would be damaged by many of the processes that could cheaply remove added dyes.

The use of biodegradable plastics is increasing rapidly. If some of these get mixed in with other plastics during the recycling process, the final product becomes less valuable. Many of these problems can be solved using an elaborate monomer recycling process, in which a condensation polymer undergoes the inverse of the polymerization reaction used to manufacture it. This yields the exact same mix of chemicals that formed the original, which can be purified and used to synthesize new polymer chains of the same type.

Another potential option is the conversion of various polymers into petroleum by a much less precise thermal depolymerization process. This process would be able to accept almost any polymer or mix of polymers, including thermoset materials like vulcanized rubber tires, and biopolymers in feathers and other agricultural waste. Like natural petroleum, the chemicals produced can be made into various fuels and polymers. A pilot plant of this type exists in Missouri, using turkey waste as input material. A new process has recently been developed in which many kinds of plastic tubing can be used as a carbon source in the recycling of scrap steel.

If you’ve ever recycled in your life, then you know it’s a way to make some cash in a pinch. Recycling not only puts a few dollars in your pocket, it also helps out our environment. Metals, plastics, and other harmful substances line our streets. Often times in big cities, we’ll see the homeless with their collection of cans, bottles, copper wiring, etc.

They’re not the only people who are doing this. Many ordinary people from average communities go to great lengths to recycle old aluminum cans and glass bottles. It may look strange to walk alongside the road picking up cans, but you’re helping the environment and earning cold hard cash.

Recycling is one of the easiest things in the world to do. There is a lot of junk to be found in any town or city you live in. By taking a simple walk around the block, you can probably spot an entire shopping cart worth of junk just lying around. Cans are always the most common lying around, but you’ll also see bits of wire, hubcaps, bottles, countless plastic items, etc. Read the rest of this entry »

Paper recycling is the process of recovering waste paper and then remaking it into new paper products. There are three categories of paper that can be effectively used as feed stocks for making recycled paper.

The first is mill broke, followed by pre-consumer waste, and then post-consumer waste. Mill broke is paper trimmings and other paper scrap leftover from the manufacturing of paper, and is recycled internally in a paper mill.

Pre-consumer waste is material that was discarded prior to consumer use. And post-consumer waste is material discarded after consumer use, such as OM (old magazines), OTD (old telephone directories), and RMP (residential mixed paper). Any paper that is suitable for recycling is referred to as scrap paper.

Over 90% of paper pulp is made from wood, holding paper production accountable for around 35% of felled trees. Recycling of newsprint saves around 1 ton of wood while recycling 1 ton of printing paper saves a little more than 2 tons of wood.

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Electricity has always been with us. It was here before humans, and will continue to be here long after we’re gone. It’s in the air we breathe, the water we drink, and can be our best friend or a dreadful enemy. The idea of using electricity has been around for over 2,000 years. In 600 B.C., Thales of Miletus wrote about pieces of amber becoming charged if they were rubbed against something.What we now know to be simply static electricity was something of a marvel at the time. From that time, we’ve grown leaps and bounds, and now have the knowledge to use electricity to our best advantage, as we see with automobiles. But it didn’t happen overnight. The path to the future is paved with great milestones.

Until 1600, no one had a word for what Thales had discovered. Then, an English scientist named William Gilbert finally coined the term “electricity” after the Greek word for amber. He wrote about the electrical properties of many substances in his De Magnete, Magneticisique Corporibus. Read the rest of this entry »

Batteries are a paradox to those of us who don’t completely understand the way they work. They’re both simple and complex, capturing energy in a small device to power-up our devices. A battery is two or more electrochemical cells which store chemical energy, thus making it available as electrical energy.

Some more common and advanced batteries use only one cell to operate.Some of the more common cell types include galvanic cells, fuel cells, flow cells, electrolytic cells, and voltaic piles. Though archeologists have unearthed batteries from ancient times, Alessandro Volta is credited with creating the first modern battery in 1800.

Since then, batteries of all shapes and sizes have been used. Today’s batteries can be small, powerful, rechargeable, and long-lasting. Using batteries has proven to be an effective way to cut back on energy costs and pollution, and are all-around more convenient than using an electrical outlet.

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The prices of crude oil act as any other commodity in the world, with price swings occurring whenever there is a shortage or oversupply. The price cycle of crude oil can extend over a very long period of time depending on the ever-increasing demand for oil, as well as oil supply produced by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and non-OPEC oil supply companies.

The history of oil prices shows that the petroleum industry has been heavily regulated in terms of production and price control, especially in the United States, and throughout the duration of the 20th century, into the 21st.

Before WWII, there was an oversupply of crude oil. This was put to the test when oil was discovered in Texas in the 1930s, and the major oil companies were working together to keep the price up. WWII taught the government the importance of having a safe oil supply. In 1933, Americans paid almost $300,000 to Saudi Arabia’s King Ibn Saud for an oil concession. Read the rest of this entry »

Steel, aluminum, and other types of metal are very common materials found across the globe. Every year they’re produced in vast quantities and used in multiple applications. The usefulness of metal was discovered thousands of years ago. And since then, technology has combined metals, making them stronger and more reliable than ever.Longevity, malleability, conductivity, and strength are the reasons they have been used over the years to provide us with many of the goods we use today. Various metals can be found in cars, computers, buildings, utensils, etc. Metals can remain viable products, even decades after they’re discarded.

Metals can be recycled indefinitely without losing any of their properties over time. One of the most recycled metals is aluminum. Like most metals we use, aluminum is an ore. The bauxite, a reddish clay-like ore, rich in aluminum compounds, is mined for the metal. The tricky thing about processing the aluminum is that it only exists in combination with other elements, usually oxygen.

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To help protect our planet from things unnecessary like excessive waste which has proven to be dangerous for humans and other species of animals and plants, scientists decided that there were better ways to dispose of waste; the most common and effective way being to recycle and reuse plastic products.Plastic recycling is the process of recovering scrap and waste plastics and reprocessing them into useful products. Sometimes the products are completely different, like plastic bottles into park benches. For those of us who do recycle, we’re sometimes put off by the different numbers used in the process. These numbers are the Plastic Identification Code (PIC).

Seven groups of plastic polymers, each of which have specific properties, are used for packaging applications. Each group of polymer can be indentified by the PIC. The PIC appears inside a three-chasing arrow recycling symbol. This symbol indicates whether the plastic can be recycled into new products.

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