‘Robbing Peter To Pay Paul’ Is Pointless In Recycling

It defeats the green purpose to engage in recycling a product utilizing copious amounts of fresh water, a dwindling natural resource. But you have to wash plastic to recycle it.  Processing plants use up to 100,000 gallons of water a day, mostly to wash food residue and chemicals off containers before they can be shredded into plastic flakes and returned to industry for use in hundreds of applications.

Now add to this the fact that we’ve already thrown some 40 billion plastic bottles into landfills this year. Why so many? Well, the Almighty Dollar of course, they are expensive to recycle, and don’t yield much of a profit.

Riding to the rescue is ECO2 Plastics, headquartered in San Francisco, California. ECO2 doesn’t dump anything down the drain – water or chemicals. The Company created the first FDA-approved, waterless recycling process, called the ECO2 Environmental System. The process employs a corn-based, biodegradable solvent and a liquid carbon dioxide (captured from power plants,an additional benefit), bath in a closed-loop system that cleans and dissolves buildup and is then distilled to remove sugars and glues, and sequestered so it can be reused. Saving billions of gallons of water each year, not to mention landfill space. The patent-pending process was developed through a research partnership with Honeywell FM&T and the US Department of Energy (DOE).

The recycled plastic from this process is of the highest quality. It is odor-free and contaminant-free to 100 parts per million. Every 1,000 pounds is tested for intrinsic viscosity, melt flow, density, moisture content and PVC content. A guaranteed perfect product.

No water and no waste equals no added costs. ECO2′s process allows for the production of the highest quality product with the least possible cost – financial or environmental. With this system, plants can slash expenses by 1/3 through essentially eliminating their water bill. The first plant started using this water saving process in October 2008, in Riverbank, California, which at this time is in the process of being upgraded and relocated to a new location in Northern California.

ECO2′s product is virtually identical to traditionally recycled plastic, but produced in a more efficient and earth-friendly way. Plants utilizing this process could significantly increase the number of plastic bottles that are recycled in the US and Europe each year. There is no logical reason to recycle any other way.

ECO2′s technology isn’t confined to PET (polyethylene terephthalate), recycling. The United States Council for Automotive Research’s (USCAR) Vehicle Recycling Partnership (VRP), (composed of researchers from DaimlerChrysler, Ford and General Motors), has contracted with ECO2 to evaluate its recycling technology. Because ECO2 is developing processes that will reclaim HDPE (high density polyethylene), polypropylene, previously unrecyclable auto parts, and other plastics. And since this technology removes substances of concern from plastics recovered from “shredder residue” – (the material left when end-of-life vehicles (ELV), household appliances and other large items are “shredded” by a large, grinding hammer-mill, or shredder) – is part of their recycling process.

ECO2 dubbed the process – eco.logical.recycling – because it eliminates the use of water, respects and preserves the environment, while delivering a high quality recycled plastic flake, which is approved by the FDA for use in food contact applications. Truly, an earth-friendly product at no extra, if not lower, cost.

Making plastic recycling more ecological, more economical, and quite simply more logical – yep, that’s eco.logical.recycling!

….. as the green future unfolds.