Plastic recycling power

We visited the Biffa Polymers plastic recycling centre near us to find out more about how plastic is recycled and why it is important. It was a brilliant visit and here is what we learned.

The factory recycles PET plastic which is the plastic found in drink bottles. They recycle about 1.3 billion bottles here each year, which we think sounds like loads! We saw the process that they use. First the bales of bottles arrive and get put on a conveyer belt where a big magnet pulls out any metal. Then it goes through an infrared detector which can tell if the plastic is PET or a different type of plastic, then blasts of air separate the PET from the other plastics. People then do a check to make sure that only PET is there. Then the plastic is chopped up into flakes and cleaned to get rid of any bits of drinks or labels or glue. They check for bits that are not the right plastic again and push them away with jets of air. Then the PET flakes are melted so that they look like bees wax, and they go through a machine that cuts them into pellets which are like little balls. These then go to other companies who can melt them and turn them into bottles again.

All of the other waste like the metal and the other types of plastic get taken to other recycling factories to be turned into useful things too. There is almost no waste from here.

Recycling plastic is really important because plastic is in nearly everything. This might seem bad, but actually if we recycle the plastic that we have got then we would not need to make lots more and we would not end up with it in land fill or in the sea. The process that they do at this recycling plant can be done again and again so if we kept recycling our bottles we would probably have enough plastic already made and this would be much better for the environment.

The most important thing we can do is to make sure that plastic bottles go into recycle bins and not into normal bins where they would end up in land fill, and definitely not dropped as litter where they could end up harming wildlife. If we recycled all of out plastic then it would make a big difference to our environment.