REDUCE REUSE RECYCLE

We construct our preserve brand with environment friendly materials to lower our impact on environment. Learn more about the benefits of recycling in our Recycling Issue section. Below is an overview of our experience with recycled plastics and sourcing recycled materials.

Overview of Recycled PlasticsRecycled plastics are considered to be extremely effective materials to recycle for two reasons:
There are projected more and more uses of plastics in our everyday products. Given this, the demand for raw materials will increase and recycled plastics will serve as a necessary source.
Most plastics do not break down with recycling. The recycling process does not shorten the grains, stains or fibers within the material and consequently does not reduce its strength. Other materials do not have such positive recycling qualities. For paper, recycling shortens its grains and makes it more brittle. Paper may go through a certain number of recycling cycles before it must be rejuvenated with virgin stock. Recycled paper’s utility is improved by applications like paperboard, which is thicker and not as affected by the brittle nature of its raw materials.

There are two general types of recycled materialsPost consumer: Materials retrieved after they were used for the purpose for which they were originally manufactured.
Pre-consumer: Materials retrieved that were generated as scrap or waste material of a production run. These materials are also referred to as “post industrial”.

Fuel from WasteBecause plastics are made from fossil fuels, you can think of them as another form of stored energy. Pound for pound, plastics contain as much energy as petroleum or natural gas, and much more energy than other types of garbage. This makes plastic an ideal fuel for waste to energy plants.
Waste to energy plants burn the garbage and use the heat energy produced during combustion to make steam or electricity. They turn garbage into useful energy. So should we burn plastics or recycle them? It depends. Sometimes, it takes more energy to make a product from recycled plastics than it does to make from all new materials. If that’s the case, it makes more sense to burn the plastics at a waste-to energy plant than to recycle them. Burning plastics can supply abundant amount of energy, while reducing the cost of waste disposal and saving land fill space.

How plastics are identified?In order to understand the problem that wide-spread plastics use poses for the environment, and what we can do about it, it is important to understand exactly what plastics are to begin with: what they are made of, how they are made and why?
A material can be called plastic if t satisfies three conditions: its main ingredient must be a polymer material, it must be a fluid at some time of processing (usually processed using heat) and it must be solid in its final form. Plastics can be made from many different types of polymers, and can be processed in many different ways, but as long as they satisfy these three conditions, they are bonafide plastics.

Polymer- the basic ingredient.The main ingredient of any plastic is polymer, a type of molecule that takes the form of long chain. The word polymer comes from two Greek words, poly meaning many and mer meaning parts. So as the name implies, polymers are made of many parts called monomers or monomeric units, which are chained together.
Polymers can come different shapes. For example, microweavable food containers and Dacron carpets are made linear polymers. Soft and flexible shampoo bottles and milk jugs are generally made using branched polymers. Car tiers and balling balls, on the other hand, are composed of cross linked polymers. All these polymers types are long and flexible molecules, so they can wind together and tangle like spaghetti on the plate. Some polymers are synthetically produced, such as nylon and polyester, while others can be found in nature: silk, hair, natural rubber and even starch are examples of polymers (read more details about natural polymers). In principle, any of these polymers, can be used to produce plastics; in practice however, over 90% of all the plastics are made from only five polymers, all which are synthetic, processing plastics. The initial unprocessed mass of polymer, called rasin, is processed into different shapes using variety of methods, including: extrusion, injection molding, compression molding, transfer molding and casting. Different processing techniques result in the wide variety of forms that plastic can take: ranging from thin films and elastic sheets to resilient panels and hard solid three dimensional shapes.
During this process they also often combined with plasticizers and other additives, such as coloring, to increase their strength or flexibility, or to improve their appearance.
The pure polymer resin by itself may not have the properties needed in the final product: it may be strong but too brittle, flexible but too elastic, or flexible and elastic but just plain ugly. Just like polymer material itself, additives come into different varieties:
Some can be found in the environment, while others are manufactured. The amount and types of additives used in manufacturing plastics are another factor that influence how environmentally friendly they are.