Citation:

Smith, Raymond L., S. Takkellapati, AND R. Riegerix. Recycling of Plastics in the United States: Plastic Material Flows and Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) Recycling Processes. ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering. American Chemical Society, Washington, DC, 10(6):2084-2096, (2022). https://doi.org/10.1021/acssuschemeng.1c06845

Impact/Purpose:

This study develops flows for plastics in the United States, focusing on polyethylene terephthalate, i.e., PET or plastic #1, as well as resource use and emissions for recycling processes.  Plastics are littered or illegally dumped to an extent that worldwide attention is focusing on the presence of plastics in the environment.  Plastics in the environment may lead to microplastic pollution which may have human health and environmental effects.  The results of this effort describe flows of various forms of PET resin that are managed for disposal as well as PET bottles recycled through Material Recovery Facilities (MRF) and reclaimers.  The MRF and reclaimer processes are modeled to describe inbound and outbound materials, resource use, and emissions.  In addition to individual compounds emitted by these processes, global warming potentials presented as CO2 equivalents are determined.  These results can be of interest for U.S. EPA’s Office of Resource Conservation and Recovery’s Facts and Figures municipal solid waste documents as well as the EPA’s U.S. Environmentally-Extended Input-Output (USEEIO) model which represents the U.S. economy in sectors.  These results can help improve the accuracy and usefulness of these models. 

Description:

As efforts are made toward establishing a circular economy that engages in activities that maintain resources at their highest values for as long as possible, an important aspect is understanding the systems which allow recycling to occur. In this article a common plastic, polyethylene terephthalate, i.e., PET or plastic #1, has been studied because it is recycled at relatively high rates in the U.S. as compared to other plastics. A material flow analysis is described for PET resin showing materials collected, reclaimed for flake, and converted into items with recycled content. Imports/exports, reclaimer residue, and disposal with mismanaged waste are all shown for U.S. flows of PET. Barriers to recycling PET exist in the collecting, sorting, reclaiming, and converting steps, and this article describes them, offers some solutions, and suggests some research that chemists and engineers could focus on to improve the systems.

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