Too much Plastic Trash from Bottles: Coca-Cola Pumps Money into Recycling Plant
GreenBiz reports that the conglomerate Coca-Cola Enterprises Ltd. has partnered with recycling firm ECO Plastics Ltd. and the new partnership plans to build a £15 million recycling plant in Britain.
The recycling plant will have the capacity to process 2 billion plastic bottles a year, about 100,000 metric tons of waste plastic. The £17 million plant is currently, even before it becomes a reality, the largest of its kind on the continent of Europe.
Ambitious eco-friendly projects apart, what does this mean?
For starters, it will more than double the amount of food-grade recycled PET in the United Kingdom.
Is this good news or bad?
It all depends on whom you ask.
Just 2 days ago, USAToday reported on the estrogenic effects of plastics, and revealed that it's not just BPA in plastics that contain estrogenic effects. In short, all the hype about BPA-free plastics turns out to be far less exciting.
Apparently, the chemical soup that makes up plastics has plenty of ingredients that are estrogenic, which means that removing BPA from plastic really doesn't help reduce the estrogenic effect of plastics.
The good news appears to be that a lot of plastics, when people put them into recycling bins, will have a place to go to get processed and not end up in the landfill.
Recycling is also part of the green-job landscape and it lessens the burden to consume virgin sources (i.e. petrochemicals among them) in order to produce more plastics.
Recycling, however, makes it so that the plastics stay in use.
In terms of long-term planning for the health of humans and the environment, so long as recycling is a robust industry, its elder sibling industry that churns out virgin plastics will also continue to go strong, seeing that the recycling plant depends on a steady supply of plastics, whether they're virgin plastics or post-consumer plastics.
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