Programme 11: Industrial Chemistry

Programme Questions: Activity Sheet 3

Waste Not Want Not – Disposal of Plastics

Plastics have often been seen as less than environmentally-friendly materials. This image is linked to a number of issues.

One issue relates to the raw material used for making plastics. Most plastics are manufactured from crude oil and some people think that this is not a sensible way to use such an important energy resource.

Another issue is the problems associated with disposing of waste plastics.

• In this activity you will think about some of the strategies plastics manufactures and users could adopt to deal with these kinds of issue.

Four strategies which are currently used to help deal with the disposal of plastics are:

• trying to cut down on our use of plastics
• recycling waste plastic.
• burning waste plastics to produce energy
• putting waste plastics into landfill sites

Your task:

• Your group will be given a set of cards which contain information and facts about these four strategies. Cut these out.
• In your group you must take a card, read it, and then decide as a group which of the four strategies the statement refers to. Do this for each card.
• Once you have four sets of cards, take each set in turn and decide whether the statements support, or do not support, that strategy.
• Use your sets of statements to draw up a table of pros and cons for each strategy.

Concentrated liquids can be used and put into smaller bottles which use less plastic.	Detergents can be bought in refill packs using less plastic.	In Europe only about 7 percent of plastics are recycled.
Plastics are difficult to sort because objects can be made of more than one plastic mixed together.	Plastic bottle banks collect less than 10 percent of plastic bottles.	Reprocessing plastics produces low grade material unsuitable for quality applications.
Washing dirty plastics uses as much energy as it takes to make them.	People are finding more and more applications for plastics.	Second bins for plastic and paper waste can get 70 percent of bottles returned.
In America and Europe plastic packaging carries a code to identify the plastic.	In Britain most plastic is disposed of in landfill sites.	Landfill sites are becoming more and more scarce.
Most plastics are not biodegradable (they don't rot).	Plastic waste has a high energy content.	Many polymers give off toxic fumes when they burn.
When buried, plastics do not produce harmful degradation products.	It is expensive to treat the fumes from burning plastics.	Waste from plastic incinerators can be used in road construction.