The price of natural HDPE has decreased by nearly 5% over the past month, but color HDPE and PET have shown stability.
The price of natural HDPE has decreased by nearly 5% over the past month, but color HDPE and PET have shown stability.
Processing technology can be used to overcome shortcomings in both PET and mixed plastics, according to two plastics recycling professionals.
Federal legislation proposed in Canada requires consumer packaging to be made from a short list of recyclable materials. The guidelines include only two plastic resins.
At least 60 organizations are working to scale up depolymerization, pyrolysis and other emerging plastic processing methods. The North American market for the resulting products could top $100 billion annually.
Tech giant HP recently spent $2 million to help improve infrastructure for recovering plastics at risk of entering the ocean. The investment is expected to create jobs in an impoverished area and move more material into the recycling stream.
The scrap plastic trade will receive focus this week in Switzerland, where countries are meeting to discuss and consider amending global waste regulations.
An initiative that collects hard-to-recycle packaging from the curb in several cities could be extended to another 100,000 households by the end of this year, a plastics executive said.
Scrap plastic shipments from the U.S. declined from 122 million pounds in January to 120 million pounds in February. That February volume was the lowest single month of plastic exports since December 2003.
Scrap plastic traders continue to circumvent import restrictions in one Southeast Asian country by labeling recovered plastic as another type of commodity.