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Plastic recycling is low in the waste hierarchy, meaning that reduction and reuse are more favourable and long-term solutions for sustainability. It has been advocated since the early 1970s, [ 15 ] but due to economic and technical challenges, did not impact the management of plastic waste to any significant extent until the late 1980s.
Plastic sequestration is a means of plastic waste management that secures used plastic out of industry and out of the environment into reusable building blocks made by manual compaction. Plastic sequestration is motivated by environmental protection and modeled on the Earth's process of carbon sequestration . [ 1 ]
The United States is the world leader in generating plastic waste, producing an annual 42 million metric tons of plastic waste. [59] [60] Per capita generation of plastic waste in the United States is higher than in any other country, with the average American producing 130.09 kilograms of plastic waste per year. Other high-income countries ...
Plastic recycling is the process of recovering scrap or waste plastic and reprocessing the material into useful products, sometimes completely different in form from their original state. For instance, this could mean melting down soft drink bottles and then casting them as plastic chairs and tables. [ 83 ]
As the plastic flotsam photodegrades into smaller and smaller pieces, it concentrates in the upper water column. As it disintegrates, the pieces become small enough to be ingested by aquatic organisms that reside near the ocean's surface. Plastic may become concentrated in neuston, thereby entering the food chain. Disintegration means that much ...
Catalytic degradation mainly focuses on plastic waste polymers as they are transformed into hydrocarbons. [clarification needed] Biodegradation causes the surface or the strength of the plastic to change; this process eventually decomposes vulnerable materials into carbon dioxide and water as microbes consume components of the material. [14]
The discovery of PETase from I. sakaiensis provides a potential solution to the world’s amassing plastic; however, naturally occurring enzymes are limited in their degradation abilities due to instability, low activity, and expression levels, which ultimately drive the need for improvement if they are to be used for large-scale industrial ...
The trade in plastic waste from industrialized countries to developing countries has been identified as the main cause of marine litter because countries importing the waste plastics often lack the capacity to process all the material. [249] Therefore, the United Nations has imposed a ban on waste plastic trade unless it meets certain criteria.