While Scientists Research, Mechanical Recycling Presses On

As a company that specializes in commercial plastic recycling, we are always interested in what science is doing to improve recycling as a whole. No recycling process is perfect. There are always better ways to do things. But we have noticed that so many research projects ultimately fall flat. Meanwhile, mechanical recycling presses on.

Mechanical recycling is what we do here at Seraphim Plastics. Our process is a tried-and-true process that has faithfully served plastic recyclers for decades. Many of the new solutions science is looking into are highly technical in nature. Most actually do work. However, making them economically viable at scale is another matter.

How Mechanical Recycling Works

Mechanical recycling is about as simple as it gets. A commercial plastic recycling company obtains post-industrial plastic scrap from all sorts of partners. The scrap is then reduced to small pellets we refer to as regrind. The regrind is packaged and sold to manufacturers who combine it with virgin plastic to make new parts. It is really no more complicated than that.

One of the things that makes our business profitable is the simplicity mechanical recycling offers. Mechanical recycling isn’t complicated in terms of either implementation or technology. It also doesn’t require a huge investment compared to something like pyrolysis. Mechanical recycling is cheap, efficient, and profitable.

Granted, mechanical recycling does not work well with post-consumer plastics that are subject to contamination. We can effectively do what we do with post industrial waste because we don’t have to sort and clean the plastics we recycle. Even so, this recycling could theoretically be applied to post-consumer plastics if it were implemented in the right way.

Science Continues to Do Good Work

None of this is to say that researching new and better ways to recycle plastic isn’t worthwhile. It is. Furthermore, science continues to do good work in the recycling field. As a case in point, researchers from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory published a report last October, a report detailing their development of new means of reducing mixed plastics to monomer molecules. It is an exciting project, to say the least.

The process researchers came up with combines a chemical application along with neutron scattering and high-powered computing to literally deconstruct plastic waste. Mixed plastics can be reduced to “pristine chemicals” by way of individual monomers.

Those chemicals can then be utilized to create either new plastic polymers or entirely different products. When new plastics are the goal, individual monomers are combined to create the polymer chains plastics are known for.

Complex and Energy Intense

While Oak Ridge scientists have proved their process in the lab, they have also acknowledged that it is both complex and energy intense. Deconstructing mixed plastics down to monomers requires a tremendous amount of advanced technology and a lot of energy. To make the process viable for commercial plastic recycling, researchers need to find a way to scale it up without exponentially increasing process complexity or energy requirements. Therein lies the biggest challenge.

In the world of commercial plastic recycling, you have two basic models under which recycling occurs: mechanical and chemical. Mechanical recycling has proven itself as financially viable and fairly efficient. The fact that mechanical recycling works so well allows us to recycle tons of commercial plastic waste every year.

While mechanical recycling presses on, science continues to research better ways to address chemical recycling. If researchers can improve recycling in a way that maintains economic viability, the industry will be more than happy to embrace it. But for now, mechanical recycling is still the best way to do it.