Which Way? Recycle Or Degrade?

Figures show that the world produces more than 330m tonnes of plastic a year, uses 500 billion plastic bags a year, and sells about one million plastic bottles every minute, a figure that is expected to triple by 2050. At the same time, there is also a part of plastic garbage into the ocean, affecting the marine environment.

In this context, plastic pollution control has been put on the agenda.

Recycling and biodegradable plastics are two of the most touted ways to reduce plastic use.

Plastic recycling or biodegradable plastic?

Industry insiders believe that plastic as a renewable resource, recycling can better reduce the waste of resources and energy.There are many experts who believe that the solution to plastic waste lies in vastly increasing the amount of plastic recycled, not in developing and using biodegradable plastics.

Some experts oppose this, pointing out that most plastics are degraded and recycled, with limited recycling times, and their efficiency and value gradually declining.The fact that plastic recycling is growing at a much slower rate than plastic production prevents it from being a major solution to plastic pollution.

Plastic is recycled as a buffer for degradable plastics。

Data show that plastic products to achieve degradable standards, need to meet the material can be decomposed into carbon dioxide, composting disintegration, and the residue of compost will not affect biological growth, which can not contain heavy metals.

This puts forward high requirements for the technology of degradable plastics, so in the immature market, the cost of the first launched degradable plastics will be higher, thus affecting the acceptance of degradable plastics by consumers.

"100%" degradable plastics will "occupy" the market in the future

The implementation of biodegradable plastics is not easy, mainly in two aspects, the first is the technical difficulties, application scenarios differentiation and cost and other problems need to be addressed;Second, biodegradable plastics should be gradually standardized in relevant policy formulation, legal protection, industry standards, market supervision, certification system and so on.

According to the data, the degradation effect can be divided into "complete" degradation and "partial" degradation.It is widely believed in the industry that fully degradable plastics will dominate the market in the future and that "partial" degradable plastics will be introduced into the market.In this process, plastic recycling will play a bigger role, along with biodegradable plastics, to reduce waste plastic production.