Recycling
Household waste goes through a recycling process in order to:
- Regenerate new raw materials (either by mechanical or chemical recycling),
- Undergo energy recovery (burning) to release energy.
After sorting by the consumer, plastic bottles go through a seven-step process to be properly recycled:
- Collection and sorting (clear PET, dark PET, HDPE) by waste management organizations because some plastics are not compatible and require different recycling temperatures or processes,
- Bottle crushing: to create flakes that will continue to the next step in the process,
- Washing: to eliminate impurities (glue, labels, and product residue),
- Flotation: this step separates flakes depending on their composition (some plastics are incompatible with one another),
- Flake sorting: optional, a more refined sorting to obtain higher quality recycled plastic materials,
- Granulation: to transform flakes into pellets (preferred form for certain processes to make finished products like plastic bottles),
- Finally, recycling: transforming the material into a finished product by melting the plastic and shaping the secondary raw material into a finished product.
