2019 Recycling Industry Yearbook

Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, Inc. 40 PLASTICS Plastics manufacturing continues to grow rapidly, reaching 348 million mt worldwide in 2018. With that growth comes the need to ensure that these materials are recycled in an environmentally responsible manner once they reach the end of their useful lives. Recycled plastic products can provide enormous environmental benefits compared with their virgin counterparts. For example, composite lumber made from recycled plastic bags conserves trees and reduces the need for hazardous wood-treatment chemicals. Using recycled plastics in manufacturing also saves up to 88% of the energy needed to produce plastics from virgin materials. Containers from food, beverages, and household products are a large part of the residential recycling plastics stream, but engineered and industrial plastics are other important sources of recycled plastics. Those materials come from a wide array of products, such as electric motors, automobile parts and components, appli- ances, electronics, medical equipment, and construction materials. Technologies to cost-effectively sort and recycle plastics have only been developed over the past 25 years, and those technologies continue to evolve. Most recently, chemical recycling technologies that break down plastics to their molcular-level building blocks such as monomers, polymers, and hydrocarbons have begun to show potential for hard-to-recycle plastics. Even so, many challenges remain, including products that were not designed for recycling, such as those made from multiple polymers or incompatible manufacturing methods. These challenges are not insurmountable, and plastic recyclers are providing leadership to overcome them. U.S. AND EXPORT MARKETS The overall U.S. plastics recycling rate is estimated to be 9%. U.S. plastic bottle recycling declined slightly, from 2.9 billion lbs. to 2.8 billion lbs., in 2017, according to the Association of Plastic Recyclers and the American Chemistry Council. Plastic bags and film recycling in the United States reached 1 billion pounds in 2017, down 31% from 2016, according to a report More Recycling conducted for ACC. The United States exported 1.1 million mt of plastic scrap to buyers in nearly 100 countries in 2018, down 36% by volume compared with 2017. Exports to China and Hong Kong fell 82% from 2017 to 2018, more than offsetting increased purchases in Malaysia, India, Thailand, Taiwan, South Korea, and other markets. Globally, an estimated 20% of end-of-life plastic was recycled in 2015.