Disputes about disposable plastic products
EU bans disposable plastic products
A few days ago, the European Commission proposed that the use of disposable plastic products such as cotton swabs and plastic straws be banned, and that the burden of cleaning waste be placed on manufacturers to reduce marine trash.
According to the proposal, disposable plastic products with off-the-shelf alternatives will be banned and replaced with more environmentally friendly materials. The proposal also requires EU countries to collect 90% of disposable plastic beverage bottles by 2025, and manufacturers will help pay for waste. Management and cleaning costs.
However, this proposal still needs the approval of the European Parliament and the Committee and is expected to be adopted before the May 2019 election in Europe.
McDonald refused to 'disable plastic straws'
At the same time, at the McDonald's investor conference, shareholders voted to reject the proposal to 'disable plastic straws' at McDonald's in the United States.
Proposed board member Elaine Leung, a member of the marine biologist and global consumer advocacy organization SumOfUs, said that McDonald's globally consumes 95 million disposable plastic straws per day, with millions of plastic straws used every day for only a few seconds The clock was thrown away, McDonald's is the largest consumer of plastic pipettes after Starbucks.
The McDonald's Board of Directors considered that the requirement to disable straws was unnecessary and unnecessary. Disabling plastic straws meant switching to non-disposable or biodegradable straws, and the resources spent on adopting the proposal would affect other McDonald's committed environmental actions.
In January this year, McDonald's also proposed to phase out the foam packaging in the global supply chain by the end of the year, and by 2025, replace all packaging materials with recyclable or renewable materials.
Regarding the topic of 'disabling disposable plastic products', in the context of China's ban on waste and the global ban on plastics, it has set off a wave of waves on a global scale. Many people who eat melons have expressed their support for the ban on plastic straws. Isn't it nice to pour it straight into your mouth?
And groups such as McDonald's, Unilever, Nestle, etc. have stated that by 2025 100% of plastic packaging will be recycled.
How to achieve 100% recycling of plastic packaging?
Really achieving 100% recycling of plastic packaging requires a wider range of plastics industry participation.
1, Mechanical physics regeneration process
It is widely used in the field of plastic recycling. The process is quite mature, and it plays an important role in the recycling of plastic bottles. However, this process still needs a long distance to achieve 100% recovery of plastic packaging, such as disposable plastic straws. , Plastic food boxes, packaging bags recycling processing requires a very sophisticated front-end recycling system.
To achieve 100% recovery of plastic packaging, other recycling processes must be considered.
2, Waste plastic oiling process
Waste plastics oiling process, which does not require screening for mixed waste plastics (polyethylene, polypropylene, polystyrene, and a small amount of polyvinyl chloride), uses catalytic pyrolysis and catalytic reforming in a series of atmospheric pressure reactors The chemical reaction cuts off the organic molecular chain, reverts to the latest technology of low-molecular-weight fuel, and eventually converts into the process of gas, gasoline, diesel and other products.
The waste plastics oiling process does not require the sorting and cleaning of plastics compared to the mechanical and physical regeneration process, and there is no requirement for the type of plastics. Waste plastics in domestic waste or waste plastics in stale waste can be used as raw materials. For the recycling of disposable plastic products more effective.
On April 20, 2018, the China Plastics Supply and Marketing Association Plastic Recycling Branch and Anhui Kemao Energy Technology Co., Ltd. jointly established the 'Green Oil Technology Center' to promote the policy support and technology upgrading of waste plastic recycled oil (PRF) technology. And industrial applications.
3, Chemical recovery process
Solvent-based recovery process
At the 2018 RE|FOCUS SUSTAINABILITY & RECYCLING SUMMIT, which just ended last month, John Layman, chief technologist at Procter & Gamble, stated that the recovery of mechanical and physical methods has limitations.
For example, recycled PP is mostly black or gray, and very transparent PP recycled materials are difficult to obtain in the market, and PP recycled materials may be 'odor' and may be contaminated by 'toxic chemicals'.
Therefore, Procter & Gamble developed a solvent-based plastic recycling process, named 'PureCycle Technologies', which removes the color and odor from the PP and produces highly pure, recyclable flakes.
PS chemical recovery
The Oregon-based Tigard Agilyx broke the world's first commercial-scale polystyrene chemical recycling cycle. The Tigard plant will recover up to 10 tons of polystyrene waste, producing high-quality styrene oil, which will be made from styrene. Manufactured by AMSTY and NiNOS for the manufacture of consumer products.
Jon Timbers, senior manager of sustainable development and innovation at AmSty, said that chemical recycling technology is an important complement to existing plastic recycling technologies.
After a single use of plastic, its important performance characteristics have been lost, and the existing recycling technology is difficult to restore these characteristics. In addition to the chemical recovery technology can retain the properties of the original plastic, the main advantage of chemical recycling is that it will use recycled materials and Raw materials are placed in the same position in the cost curve.
Selective Extraction and Chromatographic Separation Technology
In addition, the research team led by Nien-Hwa Linda Wang, professor of chemical engineering at Purdue University, Indiana, used selective extraction and chromatographic separation technology to recover engineering plastic polycarbonate from waste plastics, acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene (ABS). ) and styrene-acrylonitrile (SAN) and flame retardants.
It can be seen that under the global circumstance of plasticization, more researchers have been stimulated and entrepreneurs have devoted more energy to developing new technologies related to plastic recycling.
Plastics are known for their recycling, but because of plastic pollution and the initiation of human discussion after a hundred years of development, the lack of plastics is widely used, and its related technologies for recycling and reuse have not developed simultaneously. When human beings face a crisis, more people are thinking.