|  | Public Health Safety | Environmental Health

The Effect of Recycling Plastic Bottles on Energy Consumption

Plastic recycling is usually discussed in terms of reducing material waste and the need to manufacture virgin materials. Plastic recycling, however, also reduces overall energy consumption, with the process used to recycle plastics being much less energy intensive than the process used to manufacture new plastic materials. Plastic, moreover, is made from petroleum resins, meaning the raw materials used to make plastic are, in themselves, energy sources. While reuse and reduction are still much more effective strategies to reduce energy consumption, recycling plays a critical part in managing the energy consumption involved in plastics.

  1. Material Savings

    • Recycling plastic not only reduces the need to manufacture new petroleum resin, but saves a series of energy costs associated with the extraction and transportation of petroleum. In the case of a product made from an energy resource, material savings can easily be translated into energy savings. The oil not used to manufacture a plastic bottle can be used as fuel or heating oil, for instance. New technological advancements in the depolymerization process that recycles plastics also allows plastic bottles to be recycled without loosing much quality in the new resins, increasing the number of times plastic can be recycled and the range of products that can be made from recycled plastic.

    Process Savings

    • In addition to energy reductions from the elimination of mining and refining processes, the recycling process is less energy intensive than the manufacture of new plastic resins, meaning that considerable energy savings also exist in the recycling process itself. Critics of plastic use often note the industrial processes that manufacture and recycle plastic are quite energy intensive overall when compared to processing other materials. The manufacture of virgin glass, for example, is less energy intensive than even the recycling of plastic. If plastic has to be used, however, recycling is the most energy intensive way of producing it.

    Transportation Savings

    • Used plastic materials are usually recovered close to the points where they are used and consumed. A bottle of water, for instance, usually travels a very short distance between the store where it is purchased and the garbage can or recycling center where it is discarded. Even the distances between the manufacturing/recycling center, the bottling plant and the store tend to be shorter than the huge distances that separate oil fields from refineries and plastic manufacturing centers. As a result, recovered plastic products tend to be closer to consumption centers than virgin materials, meaning less energy is used when recovered plastic, rather than crude oil, is the primary resource for new materials. One advantage of plastic over glass, moreover, is its lower density reduces cargo weights and transportation energy costs.

    Total Savings

    • Overall, the manufacture of new plastic products from recycled plastics as opposed to virgin materials represents a total energy savings of about 66 percent. To put it another way, the energy savings from recycling a single plastic bottle could light a 60-watt bulb for six hours, a fact that is particularly relevant considering that, in the United States alone, over 5 billion pounds of plastic waste are generated every year, slightly less than half of which are recycled.

Environmental Health - Related Articles