Suzhou Oude Science&Technology Co.,Ltd

Bottle caps are surprisingly difficult to recycle. Many curbside recycling programs ask that you remove any lids or caps from bottles. For one thing, this allows the bottles to dry out (reducing transportation costs by reducing weight). Also, open bottles are easier to crush and bale. And some recycling machines are easily jammed by plastic shards and tiny lids.

Most importantly, plastic bottle caps are often made from a different type of plastic from the bottles they’re attached to. Soda bottles are generally made from Type 1 Plastic (Polyethylene Terephthalate) while bottle caps are made from Type 5 Plastic (Polypropylene). These different types of plastic have to be recycled separately. If the bottle and the cap were recycled in the same batch of plastic, the two different plastics would melt unevenly and the whole batch would be ruined.

For this reason, bottle caps are often removed at the recycling facility. People are paid to hand sort the recyclables and remove unwanted trash. Contamination of recycling bins with garbage is a huge problem. Mixing the wrong kinds of plastic with recycling significantly increases the cost of recycling because when workers hand sort the entire bin it slows down the process and increases the cost to such a degree that it’s cheaper for most recycling organizations to simply toss the entire bin as waste material.

But what about metal bottle caps? These are often made of steel, with an attached plastic seal. This mix of plastic and metal isn’t universally recycled, so the first thing you should consider is re-using the bottle caps for homebrewing. This will keep the bottlecaps out of the waste stream for a few more uses (without any energy used to melt and reform the metal) and it can also save you a few bucks (each re-used bottle cap will save 2-3 cents). Just make sure to boil the caps between uses, and don’t re-use lids that are wearing out.

Steel bottle caps can also be made into other things. They make interesting artistic crafts, such as bottle cap jewelry, checkers, or paint mixers. There’s even a company that sells fishing lures made from bottle caps.

If your recycling center can process metal bottle caps, all you have to do is put loose caps in the recycling bin. Before you recycle your bottle caps, check with your local recycling program to see if they accept bottle caps. Many programs sort steel bottle caps using magnets. If the recycling center in your town is unable to process the bottle caps, you can also check and see if neighboring towns are equipped rather than throwing them away.

Whether you’re using steel or plastic bottle caps,

…the best way to reduce all kinds of container and cap recycling is to buy in large rather than single-serving containers. Does the event you’re holding really require dozens and dozens of 8- to 16-ounce soda and water bottles, many of which will get left behind only partly consumed anyway? Why not buy large soda bottles, provide pitchers of (tap) water and let people pour into re-usable cups?

The company has started several new programs to spur recycling among consumers.
When it comes to Coca-Cola and recycling, the soda giant says it wants to re-use as much as possible.
Millions of Coca-Cola’s signature red, white and silver cans and bottles are sold every year to thirsty customers around the world – but where do they ultimately end up? Thanks to the beverage giant’s comprehensive recycling initiative, a vast majority of them still have use long after the last drop of cola is gone.
 
The Coca-Cola Company – along with Coca-Cola Enterprises, the company’s largest US bottler – has embarked upon a series of aggressive initiatives including the world’s largest bottle-to-bottle recycling facility, a public education program and new plant-based bottles that are fully recyclable.
Target 100 Recycling Program
 
Ranked #1 in the food and beverage industry in Newsweek’s Green Rankings, Coca-Cola is making good on its promise to maximize its use of renewable, reusable and recyclable resources, with the goal of recycling the equivalent of 100 percent of its product packaging by the year 2020.
 
The company set a few initial goals: avoid the use of 100,000 metric tons of packaging, recover or recycle more than 90 percent of materials at its production facilities and increase recycled content in plastic bottles by 10 percent – all by the year 2010.
 
So how are they doing? So far, Coca-Cola has made strong progress on these goals, as revealed in its 2009 Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability Report, upon which much of this article is based.
 
World’s Largest Bottle-to-Bottle Recycling Facility
 
In January 2009, Coca-Cola opened an enormous bottle-to-bottle recycling facility in Spartanburg, South Carolina that will produce about 100 million pounds of food-grade recycled PET plastic each year, about the equivalent of two billion 20-ounce Coca-Cola bottles.
 
“The opening of the Spartanburg plant, coupled with our investment in recycling businesses, programs and a new marketing effort, underscores our belief that our packaging has value and we want it back — both for our own supply chain and to support the myriad of other uses for recycled aluminum and plastic,” said Sandy Douglas, president of Coca-Cola North America, in a press release.
 
The “Give it Back” Program
 
Gathering recyclables to transform into new products at its Spartanburg facility is only one part of Coca-Cola’s recycling efforts. Convincing customers to recycle those bottles and cans in the first place is just as crucial to helping the company meet its Target 100 Recycling Program goals.
 
“That Coke in your hand right now belongs to you,” states a message on Coca-Cola’s “Live Positively” website. “You bought it, you’re drinking it, it’s yours. The inside, that is. But the outside? We’d like that back.”
 
Coca-Cola has been active in ensuring that customers have plenty of chances to give back the bottles. The campaign has placed recycling bins at college campuses and sporting events around the country, including Major League Baseball games and NASCAR races.
 
Coca-Cola PlantBottle
 
Even with all of these successful recycling efforts, the plastic bottles used to package Coca-Cola products are still made from a non-renewable and less than eco-friendly material: petroleum. But in 2009, that changed as Coca-Cola introduced its “PlantBottle”, made with up to 30 percent plant-based materials.
 
For now, PlantBottles are made through a process that converts byproducts of the sugar-making process into a key component for PET plastic, but Coca-Cola plans to experiment with other plant-based materials as well.
 
Independent analyses of the bottle’s life cycle have shown that the PlantBottle reduces carbon emissions by up to 25 percent, compared with petroleum-based PET.
 
And where do these bottles go once empty? They can be recycled, too. According to Coca-Cola, their PlantBottle can be processed through existing manufacturing and recycling facilities, unlike other plant-based plastics.

FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. (Aug. 3, 10:35 a.m. ET) — Clear Path Recycling LLC has begun recycling PET bottles into clear flake at its first-ever recycling plant. The Fayetteville facility will be the largest PET recycling plant in North America when it is fully operational.

“We started consuming bottles and making flake in mid-July,” said Ron Salati, vice president of administration and commercial affairs for Clear Path, a joint venture of carpet manufacturer Shaw Industries Group Inc. and PET and polyester staple-fiber producer DAK Americas LLC.

Roughly 75 percent of the plant’s output will be used internally by Shaw for carpet production with the rest of the resin sold on the open market, Salati said. Charlotte, N.C.-based DAK supplies Shaw of Dalton, Ga., with recycled PET resins for its ClearTouch filament-fiber carpet.

The Clear Path plant fills a void in the recycled PET resin market that has existed since Wellman Inc. pulled the plug on its 200 million-pound PET plant in Johnsonville, S.C., four years ago.

The small line now operating one shift six days a week at the Fayetteville plant will produce 30 million pounds of resin annually when operations move to 24/7 in “mid-to-late August,” said Salati in a phone interview Aug. 2. That represents roughly 20 percent of the 160-million-pound resin production capacity planned initially for the plant.

Salati said the line now operating will shift from producing clear PET to green PET when the larger line — which will make only clear PET flake — begins operations. “That should be early in the fourth quarter,” he said. Both lines will use the Sorema wash line system.

“We are pretty much in line with our expectations,” Salati said. Clear Path had originally projected that it would begin operations in early-to-mid April, but delays in the permit process, rehabbing the production facilities and getting the needed infrastructure in place pushed back the start slightly, he said.

The plant currently employs 57 and will add another 25 workers when the larger line goes into operation.

Plans call for a second 120-million-pound line that will push resin production capacity to 280 million pounds annually. Salati said the company would make a decision on when to go ahead with that expansion “after we get the first phase of the plant fully operational. I expect we will make that decision in the first quarter of next year.”

Construction and installation of a second line would take anywhere from nine to 12 months, he said. Initially, that line was anticipated to come online in fall 2011.

When a second line is added at Clear Path, the plant’s annual use of recycled PET bottles will be equal to slightly more than 60 percent of the PET bottles that stay in the U.S today after they are collected, as it typically takes 100 pounds of material to make 75 pounds of resin.

More than half of the 1.45 billion pounds of PET bottles collected in 2007 went to export markets, leaving only 615 million pounds for U.S. reclaimers. “Our output [from Phase 1] will be more than 10 percent of the amount of pounds of PET bottles that are collected annually in the U.S,” and nearly 20 percent when the second line is added, Salati said.

Clear Path is using both bale and deposit bottles for producing flake.

“We haven’t had any issues buying bottles,” Salati said. “We started buying bottles back in December and we have been able to build a good supply as we have a significant area for inventory.” The company currently has 20 million pounds of PET bottles in inventory.

He said the company is using baled bottles from municipalities, Canadian bottles and West Coast deposit bottles and expects overall yields of 70-75 percent.

“We don’t have much flexibility [in where we get our bottles]. Given our size of operation, we need to buy from everywhere,” Salati said.

He said Clear Path will resell the non-PET materials that are separated out of the PET bales. “We will take the byproducts and cap materials,” Salati said. “That is a good material we can sell.”

Salati said 80 percent of the Fayetteville’s plant production will be clear flake and the other 20 percent green flake.

“In addition to the startup of a new line, this is literally the birth of a new company,” Salati said. “We are learning about the variability of curbside bottles. We are still working on the chemical formulations to make sure the flake is as clear as possible.”

Salati said maintenance workers were hired earlier in the year and helped install the equipment, and supervisors were put in place in May. Recycling line operators started in June.

“We have had to invest a lot of time and money in training people on the equipment and training them in our core values of safety and environmental responsibility,” Salati said. He said equipment vendors helped train the production workers and that Clear Path also is partnering with Fayetteville Community College on training.

Salati said the PET recycling market has performed “pretty much to our expectations” since the plant’s construction was originally announced in April 2009. “The spread between bottles and flakes has been pretty consistent.”

He said that before the larger line starts up sometime in the fourth quarter, Clear Path has several things it must do first.

“We have to prove the quality of the product meets our expectations and we have to prove that we can manage the volume of incoming material logistically,” Salati said. “We have to be able to manage the higher flow of materials.”

That will be even more critical when the company embarks on Phase 2 of the plant and it reaches 280 million pounds of resin production capacity, he said. “When the second line opens in the fourth quarter, we will have to open a bale [of bottles] every four minutes. But when Phase 2 opens up, we will have to open a bale every two-and-one-half minutes,” Salati said.

Surgical gloves market will have little growth

If existing manufacturers or start-up companies are looking to take on a hospital product, they should stay away from surgical gloves.

Prices for surgical gloves have come down substantially and are expected to fall or remain steady in the next six to 12 months, according to group purchasing organizations and surgical glove manufacturers. This is a result of a glut of both domestic and foreign manufactured surgical gloves on the market, which also have been forced to compete with cheaper, sub-standard quality imports from China and Taiwan.

Specialty glove manufacturers are trying to compete with the surgical glove market leaders by marketing “cut-resistant” and “needle-burn resistant” gloves. Many surgical glove manufacturers see these gloves as gimmick products, and believe surgeons will do the same.

What caused the price decline Between 1984 and 1986, annual dollar growth rate in the surgical glove market (both sterile and non-sterile gloves) was about 4%, according to Market Research Intelligence Co., Mountain View, Calif.

Nestle Waters North America in Greenwich, bottler of Poland Spring, Perrier and other soft beverages, has won Connecticut’s top quality award for its redesigned eco-friendly plastic water bottle.

The domestic arm of the European food-beverage giant received the Connecticut Quality Improvement Award (CQIA) for its lightweight, recyclable Eco-Shape brand bottle that uses one-quarter less PET plastic than its previous generation container.

Less plastic not only curbs the environmental impact, but when combined with a smaller paper label, also means less weight and lower transportation costs, Nestle said.

The CQIA is America’s first and oldest state-level quality award to advance innovative programs that improve quality, performance and marketplace competitiveness.

It uses the same quality criteria as the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, named for the former CEO of former Scovill Brass in Waterbury. Baldrige also was commerce secretary under President Ronald Reagan from 1981 until his death in 1987.

Nestle Waters and other CQIA recipients will be honored Oct. 29 at Water’s Edge Resort and Conference Center in Westbrook

Plastic Processing at Our Recycling Plant

Recycling Logistics processes plastics. We recycle every type of plastic. In our facility are four granulator used to reduce plastics to the next stage of the process. The plastic symbol chart below explains what different plastics can be reprocesses and utilised for.

Each plastic type will behave different at temperature. Each number has a different molecular structure, therefore cannot be mixed without compromising quality. Mixing PETE will ruin the recyclability of HDPE or LDPE. Therefore recycling Logistics teaches all the facilities we work with how to keep different plastics separated.

Recycling Logistics transports baled plastic and cardboard.

When plastics arrive at our plant we inspect the quality of the product. Then assess suitability for future uses. If suitable we will granulate the plastics.

Baled plastic film

Computer plastic baled ABS

Now the plastic is separated we can granulate it.

The granulator reduces the large pieces of plastic into manageable product

Mixed granulated Plastic left goes through a process to turn it into plastic pellets (Below)

These pellets are identical and will be used to make new products.

The company has started several new programs to spur recycling among consumers.

When it comes to Coca-Cola and recycling, the soda giant says it wants to re-use as much as possible.

Millions of Coca-Cola’s signature red, white and silver cans and bottles are sold every year to thirsty customers around the world – but where do they ultimately end up? Thanks to the beverage giant’s comprehensive recycling initiative, a vast majority of them still have use long after the last drop of cola is gone.
 
The Coca-Cola Company – along with Coca-Cola Enterprises, the company’s largest US bottler – has embarked upon a series of aggressive initiatives including the world’s largest bottle-to-bottle recycling facility, a public education program and new plant-based bottles that are fully recyclable.
 
Target 100 Recycling Program
 
Ranked #1 in the food and beverage industry in Newsweek’s Green Rankings, Coca-Cola is making good on its promise to maximize its use of renewable, reusable and recyclable resources, with the goal of recycling the equivalent of 100 percent of its product packaging by the year 2020.
 
The company set a few initial goals: avoid the use of 100,000 metric tons of packaging, recover or recycle more than 90 percent of materials at its production facilities and increase recycled content in plastic bottles by 10 percent – all by the year 2010.
 
So how are they doing? So far, Coca-Cola has made strong progress on these goals, as revealed in its 2009 Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability Report, upon which much of this article is based.
 
World’s Largest Bottle-to-Bottle Recycling Facility
 
In January 2009, Coca-Cola opened an enormous bottle-to-bottle recycling facility in Spartanburg, South Carolina that will produce about 100 million pounds of food-grade recycled PET plastic each year, about the equivalent of two billion 20-ounce Coca-Cola bottles.
 
“The opening of the Spartanburg plant, coupled with our investment in recycling businesses, programs and a new marketing effort, underscores our belief that our packaging has value and we want it back — both for our own supply chain and to support the myriad of other uses for recycled aluminum and plastic,” said Sandy Douglas, president of Coca-Cola North America, in a press release.
 
The “Give it Back” Program
 
Gathering recyclables to transform into new products at its Spartanburg facility is only one part of Coca-Cola’s recycling efforts. Convincing customers to recycle those bottles and cans in the first place is just as crucial to helping the company meet its Target 100 Recycling Program goals.
 
“That Coke in your hand right now belongs to you,” states a message on Coca-Cola’s “Live Positively” website. “You bought it, you’re drinking it, it’s yours. The inside, that is. But the outside? We’d like that back.”
 
Coca-Cola has been active in ensuring that customers have plenty of chances to give back the bottles. The campaign has placed recycling bins at college campuses and sporting events around the country, including Major League Baseball games and NASCAR races.
 
Coca-Cola PlantBottle
 
Even with all of these successful recycling efforts, the plastic bottles used to package Coca-Cola products are still made from a non-renewable and less than eco-friendly material: petroleum. But in 2009, that changed as Coca-Cola introduced its “PlantBottle”, made with up to 30 percent plant-based materials.
 
For now, PlantBottles are made through a process that converts byproducts of the sugar-making process into a key component for PET plastic, but Coca-Cola plans to experiment with other plant-based materials as well.
 
Independent analyses of the bottle’s life cycle have shown that the PlantBottle reduces carbon emissions by up to 25 percent, compared with petroleum-based PET.
 
And where do these bottles go once empty? They can be recycled, too. According to Coca-Cola, their PlantBottle can be processed through existing manufacturing and recycling facilities, unlike other plant-based plastics.

In my apartment building there is a frightening, filthy trash chute that’s like a giant monster eating up the building’s trash through its long throat. From inside my apartment, I can hear bottles, cans and miscellaneous pieces of garbage clattering down its throat into its bottomless stomach.

When I go outside I encounter the street side trash cans. These have the recyclable waste on one side and the non-recyclable waste on the other. How can I tell which is which? Does a plastic bag that just had a snack in it go into the recyclable or non-recyclable side?

Unfortunately, I’ve stopped thinking about it, because I know that there is someone who will come by and sort out all the trash. No sooner than I’ve thrown a plastic bottle into the garbage than an elderly man or woman totting a bag full of recyclables pulls it out. It’s worth something to them, and it seems that it’s a full-time job for a handful of people around my apartment area to sort out this trash.

When I go to a fast food restaurant, I callously throw all my waste directly into the trash bin, hoping to never see it again. After I’m done eating, I wonder if it’s possible to simply put another burger into the wrapper, instead of tossing it out and creating so much waste.

Recycling had a very different feel when I was back in the States and lived in Taiwan. In both places recycling is supported by public awareness, government policies, and advanced infrastructure.

In the U.S., legal requirements as well as a sense of social responsibility create an incentive for individuals to recycle. In my hometown, there were “”recycling”" days when trucks would come around to pick up the newspaper, glass and cans that we would separate from the trash and put by the curb.

Just the act of sorting out the trash made me more aware about what was needed to be recycled and what was regular garbage. I was amazed, however, when I lived in Taipei and saw the extent and development of its recycling program. In order to encourage recycling, citizens had to buy special and expensive trash bags. However, recycling was free.

The sorting of recyclable materials required much more attention. Even plastic lids for takeout dinners could be separated into different categories. When the truck came to pick up all the waste, it was astounding to see how carefully everything was sorted into different bins.

In China, recycling is still limited because of relatively underdeveloped infrastructure and a serious lack of social awareness due to limited incentives for individual recycling. In China there is no cost associated with trash.

However, China is one of the world’s leaders in importing waste to be recycled. This is due to the waste being turned into raw materials for the industrial process. In the past this had included electronic waste from the developed world. Oddly enough, despite all the trash that exists domestically, Chinese companies find themselves recycling more trash imported from overseas.

In cities the primary motivation for recycling is the money that can be earned by selling paper, plastic bottles and appliances to scrap dealers. These dealers usually resell the materials to a recycling center which then converts them into usable raw materials for manufacturing.

There are several things that could be done in China.

For example, there needs to be a larger investment in the infrastructure necessary to recycle. More money needs to be invested in factories and technologies that can process the waste and turn it into something that can be resold. There should also be an expansion of existing collection services and clarification on what products can be recycled.

Profitability and sustainability is another key initiative that should be strengthened. A colleague of mine conducted a project through her school to raise awareness about recycling in corporations. The key to encouraging companies to recycle was to emphasize the potential cost savings through reducing trash.

Finally, an overall increased awareness among the population about recycling is necessary. This needs to start with where people live, include where people work and even restaurants and fast food establishments should do a better job of sorting out their trash.

This may require new laws and regulations, but it would be well worth it in order to encourage people to protect the environment, and improve the quality of people’s lives.

We can all do our part, so after you’ve read this article, please remember to recycle the newspaper.

Plastic shopping bags are used to carry groceries and other purchases home from stores. Most are made of polyethylene film. Several types of polyethylene exist, and some bags may be labeled with a specific resin code (such as HDPE #2, which stands for high density polyethylene, or LDPE #4, which stands for low density polyethylene). Most grocery bags are HDPE #2, while thicker shopping bags, bread bags, newspaper bags and dry cleaning bags are LDPE #4 or a similar material. Both these types of plastic can be readily recycled into other products such as textiles, flower pots, plastic lumber and playground equipment. In most cases, however, they cannot be recycled through your community’s household recycling program. See the bottom of this page for recycling information
Environmental Impacts
Plastic bags generate a number of environmental impacts throughout their life cycle. These include greenhouse gas emissions and pollution from the process of extracting and refining petroleum or natural gas, manufacturing the plastic bags, and transporting them to market.

Research has shown that manufacturing and transportation of paper shopping bags create more pollution and use more energy and water than plastic shopping bags.

Disposal of plastic bags creates additional environmental impacts. Plastic bag litter causes several problems, including the following:

Bags clog gutters and sewer grates, causing flooding.
Bags get caught in trees, fences and other objects, where they become an eyesore.
Bags kill animals–particularly birds and marine life–when the animals become entangled in the plastic or when they mistake pieces of plastic for food.
Plastic can take hundreds of years to degrade, and can pose risks even when it has degraded into smaller pieces, since these are especially attractive to animals as food. Plastic film adversely affects landfill operations by interfering with moisture distribution and leachate flow within landfilled waste.

Too Valuable to Waste
According to several sources, including reusablebags.com [exit DNR], U.S. shoppers use an estimated 100 billion plastic bags every year and recycle only a small percentage of them, though market demand for the recycled bags is growing. Many of the bags are reused by consumers as trash liners or pet waste bags, but the vast majority end up in landfills or causing harm in the environment after being thrown away.

A new report from Swiss consulting firm SRI Consulting suggests that the yield from PET recycled bottles is 50 per cent or more, meaning that placing the bottles into landfill may lead to a lower carbon footprint.

According to Eric Johnson, a research analyst at the Zurich-based consulting company, recycling is not the most efficient way to handle waste management of PET bottles. He added that firms needed to examine all the plastics collected. Author of the report PET’s Carbon Footprint: To Recycle or Not Recycle, Mr Johnson outlines the carbon footprint of processing the PET’s in recycling facilities.

During an interview, Mr Johnson said that recycling only makes sense if it is decreasing the carbon footprint of the material. He continues saying that for every 100 tonnes of PET collected, there must be at least 50 tonnes to come back and be placed in other products. According to Mr Johnson, that is not the nature of the PET recycling industry making it useless to recycle from an environmental and economical standpoint.

He also said that countries with adequate landfill space and not much recycling infrastructure are better off sending the plastics to landfill because that is the lower carbon option. Both the National Association for PET Container Resources and the Association of Postconsumer Plastic Recyclers declined to leave any comments regarding the report, which came out on 9 August.

The report analysed PET bottles’ carbon footprint by following the material from production of raw materials straight to disposal of the product and the secondary packaging from birth to end of life. Based on the evaluations, Mr Johnson concluded that the best kerbside recycling programmes for such materials were found in Europe, but that it was still not enough yield to justify recycling over sending the bottles to landfill. Mr Johnson said that the biggest issue is that kerbside recycling collects a lot of the material, but that very little is actually recycled once it is sorted and separated.