A Plastic Waste Crisis
Plastic waste is generated almost everywhere around the globe. Many feel we are at a crisis point with discarded plastic. Unfortunately, current approaches to repurposing plastic waste have severe limitations, so most plastic waste ends up in landfill, incinerated, or it leaks into the environment. Communities and companies around the globe are increasingly looking for alternatives to divert plastic waste and other petroleum-derived materials away from landfills, oceans, and the environment.
With current approaches to repurposing plastic waste, plastic is diverted away from landfill by some form of collection process, and it is sent to processing facilities known as plastic recyclers to be repurposed. Although there are numerous plastics recyclers around the world, their current technologies have limitations which make it difficult or unprofitable to process much of the durable* and non-durable** discarded plastic. For a significant portion of these plastics, no technology currently exists to process them. Furthermore, current discarded plastic recycling technologies can only process the plastic once, therefore, once these plastics have been used a second time they cannot be used again. To permanently divert a greater percentage of discarded plastic away from landfill or the environment, a new repurposing approach is required.
Plastonix believes the world faces a significant global plastic waste crisis and that present methods to recover plastic waste and other petroleum-derived materials – petroleum-derived material refers to a material derived from petroleum as it is processed in oil refineries – have significant limitations. We need better ways to recover plastic waste.