4skers89

I go to the Philippines often and they are litter bugs.  People eat something and just throw the wrappers in the street.  I'm sure it's a habit developed when their food wrappers were banana leafs or other biodegradable material.  It bothered me quite a bit until I realized they don't have any collection or processing facilities anyway.  It seems like the manufacturers of products that are plastic or have plastic wrappers should bear most of the responsibility for dealing with the waste.

That's good news but I wish they were more proactive 20 or 30 years ago.  Plastic recycling is technically challenging and rarely profitable.  China stopped taking waste plastic a few years ago which is probably a good thing.  The map shows a lot of waste coming from there.  Western countries will hopefully develop a better system since they can't just ship it off to China.  What's disturbing is I know Waste Management closed down a lot of recycling centers in the past few years so I suspect a lot is now going into landfills.

The problem is what do you do with it once it’s ground up. There really isn’t much you can make with it. That’s what causes recycling it not profitable. 
 

plastics are an amazing part of our world and we all benefit from them. It’s the needless single use plastics  that need reduced greatly. 

They usually turn it into pellets and sell it to manufacturers to use to make new products.  By the time you get it to the pellet form, depending on oil prices, it can be cheaper to buy virgin pellets.  A big problem with recycling is unsegregated plastics and plastic additives effect the recycled pellet quality.  Different plastics melt at different temperatures so they can't be mixed. China stopped taking waste plastics because the incoming plastics weren't properly segregated.