Plastic Innovations: Waste Management

Reduce, Reuse and Recycle for a Greener Holiday Season

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Reduce, Reuse and Recycle for a Greener Holiday Season</h1>
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Some of his great tips include:</div>
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<li style="background: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 4px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Look for gifts made from recycled plastics and other materials like t-shirts, hats and even purses and toys to help close the recycling loop</li>
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<li style="background: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 4px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Buy a set of inexpensive plastic containers so that you can pack extra food to go with your party guests</li>
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<li style="background: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 4px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Reuse items like plastic grocery bags around the house and recycle them at the grocery store when you’re done</li>
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<li style="background: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 4px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Explore creative ways to reuse items like bags and bows for wrapping gifts instead of throwing them away</li>
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Reduce, Reuse and Recycle for a Greener Holiday Season

Reduce, Reuse and Recycle for a Greener Holiday Season Some of his great tips include: Look for gifts made from recycled plastics a...

Earth Day, Sustainability and Plastics

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Earth Day, Sustainability and Plastics</h1>
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In the blizzard of news reports about Earth Day, you likely will hear quite a bit about how individuals, businesses and governments are focusing on “sustainability.” But it’s less likely that you will hear much about how plastics help us in our collective pursuit of sustainability.</div>
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That’s unfortunate.</div>
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Even a cursory look reveals the many ways that plastics contribute to sustainability. From more fuel-efficient cars to minimalist packaging to energy-efficient homes and buildings, innovations in plastics help us do more while leaving a lighter environmental footprint. By enabling advances in global sustainability, modern plastics have profoundly improved the way we live today while helping to preserve more of the Earth’s resources for the future.</div>
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A more promising future is something we all can celebrate on Earth Day.</div>
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Advances in sustainability made possible by plastics are evident in every sector of the economy: transportation, health care, packaging, our homes and buildings, sports, children’s toys, even the clothes we wear. So let’s take a brief look at how a couple of major uses of plastics – autos and packaging – contribute to sustainability.</div>
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<strong style="background: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">A quick spin through advances in automobiles made possible by plastics</strong></div>
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Tough yet lightweight plastic parts allow automakers to do more… with less.</div>
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The use of plastics in automobiles is growing dramatically – today’s autos are approximately 10% plastics by weight but approximately 50% by volume. That’s right: half the volume of each auto today, on average, is actually made with plastics: bumpers, door panels, seating, dashboards, carpeting, lighting, more and more parts under the hood. The list grows every year.</div>
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These plastics contribute to improved safety and design – and also to light weighting, which helps cars achieve increased fuel efficiency and create fewer emissions. Automakers likely will need to use even more plastics and plastic composites to meet government fuel efficiency standards: 54.5 miles per gallon for cars and light trucks by 2025.</div>
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New plastic composites (reinforced with carbon or other fibers) are being developed to be lighter, stronger, and more durable than ever. Unfortunately, making these innovative parts often has been a slow and expensive process. But recent research funded by plastics makers and validated by U.S. National Labs and the Department of Energy could spur innovations that allow faster and cheaper production of carbon fiber reinforced plastic parts.</div>
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These parts potentially could be used throughout much of the automobile, contributing even more to light weighting. So automakers (hopefully) could have a better shot at meeting fuel efficiency standards, and Americans could get lighter, more fuel-efficient cars. Made possible by plastics.</div>
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<strong style="background: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">And wrap up with a few advances in plastic packaging</strong></div>
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Thin, lightweight plastic packaging helps protect our food and other products with less material, so we save money by wasting less and we create less packaging waste.</div>
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In other words, plastic packaging lets us do more… with less. Specifically by contributing to those three “R” words: reduce, reuse, recycle.</div>
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<i style="background: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Reduce</i></div>
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Lightweight plastics are used to package more than 50 percent of typical consumer goods – but plastics make up only 17 percent of all packaging by weight. So plastic packaging carries more and creates much less waste than alternatives.</div>
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For example, we now routinely can choose food in minimalist, lightweight packaging made with plastics that reduces packaging and waste. And plastic packaging helps our food stay fresher and increases shelf life, so we save money and waste less food.</div>
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In addition, making plastic packaging consumes less energy than alternative materials, which results in reduced energy-related emissions. And plastic packaging weighs considerably less than alternatives, which results in less fuel burned during transport.</div>
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<i style="background: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Reuse</i></div>
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Plastic packaging makes it possible to buy, serve and store more of our favorite foods with less packaging waste. For example, some prepared foods now are available in plastic packaging that keeps food fresh on store shelves, transforms into a convenient serving dish, and re-seals to protect food during storage, creating less waste and clean up. And reusable, durable, airtight plastic containers have become a mainstay of American kitchens – many can go from the freezer to the microwave to the dishwasher over and over again.</div>
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<i style="background: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Recycle</i></div>
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With increased access to plastics recycling, we now have more opportunities to recycle more plastics and to send less waste to landfills. Consumers in more than 94 percent of the U.S. can recycle plastic beverage bottles and caps, and nearly 58 percent can recycle plastic containers from foods such as yogurt, dips, spreads, and sour cream. Plastic bags and wraps can be returned for recycling to thousands of participating retail stores, such as Target and Lowe’s.</div>
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It’s also now easier to find consumer products (e.g., kitchen tools, furniture, decking) made with recycled plastics from used beverage bottles, yogurt containers, milk jugs, or other plastic containers. Recycling more plastic packaging means we bury less valuable material in landfills – and buying recycled content products increases demand for recycled plastics.</div>
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<i style="background: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Recover</i></div>
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There actually is a fourth “R” – recover. America has approximately 90 waste-to-energy facilities that generate power by recovering the energy inherent in non-recycled plastics and other materials.</div>
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Waste-to-energy is an efficient, cost-effective means to reduce greenhouse emissions and to divert waste from increasingly expensive landfill space. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which supports this 4<span style="background: transparent; border: 0px; font-size: 10px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: top;">th</span> “R” as a part of smart integrated waste management, says waste-to-energy produces electricity “with less environmental impact than almost any other source of electricity.”</div>
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How promising is energy recovery? Simply converting all non-recycled plastics to energy could power 5.2 million households.</div>
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Earth Day, Sustainability and Plastics

Earth Day, Sustainability and Plastics In the blizzard of news reports about Earth Day, you likely will hear quite a bit about how in...

Diverting Plastics From Landfills: A Two-Pronged Approach

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Diverting Plastics From Landfills: A Two-Pronged Approach</h1>
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Most of us know the three “R’s” when it comes to reducing waste and protecting our environment: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.  But did you know that there is a fourth “R”?  Recovery.  Energy recovery is the high-tech process by which waste is converted into alternative energy.</div>
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Currently, 86 energy recovery facilities across the U.S. process about 97,000 tons of materials per day, powering homes and businesses.   Using plastic waste to generate energy helps address many of our biggest challenges: energy independence, waste diversion, and climate change.</div>
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Did you know…</div>
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<li style="background: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 4px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The United States currently processes 13 percent of its solid waste through energy recovery –enough energy to power homes in five states or the equivalent of 28.6 billion barrels of crude oil.</li>
<li style="background: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 4px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Energy recovery facilities mean a lot less waste goes to landfills. Energy recovery facilities can reduce by 90 percent the volume of waste that goes to landfill.</li>
<li style="background: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 4px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Modern energy recovery facilities are greener than ever. Today’s technology allows modern energy recovery facilities to process waste with cleaner emissions than some conventional fuels processed in most power plants. In fact, EPA estimates that energy recovery technology in use today helps prevent the release of 33 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually.</li>
<li style="background: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 4px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Plastics help energy recovery technology for municipal solid waste work better. Because plastics have a higher energy value than other components of municipal waste, they help increase the efficiency of the energy recovery process and create less ash for disposal.</li>
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Diverting Plastics From Landfills: A Two-Pronged Approach

Diverting Plastics From Landfills: A Two-Pronged Approach Most of us know the three “R’s” when it comes to reducing waste and protect...

Plastic Innovations

Reduce, Reuse and Recycle for a Greener Holiday Season

Earth Day, Sustainability and Plastics

Diverting Plastics From Landfills: A Two-Pronged Approach

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