Rachel Abramson Plastic Recycling Awareness May 8 2008 p. 1 Plastic Recycling Awareness among Students at UC Berkeley Rachel Abramson Abstract Plastics are the fastest growing portion of municipal solid waste. Out of the 22.4 million tons of plastic produced in 1999, only about 5.6% were reused. Plastic packaging purchases by the individual consumer have increased four times faster than plastic recycling by the consumer. Using recycled plastic to manufacture new plastic products can reduce the energy needed for production by about 80%. In order to increase plastic recycling, current environmental attitudes and recycling awareness must be considered as obstacles. This study analyzed the differences in awareness of plastic recycling between students living in residence halls and students in cooperative housing at UC Berkeley, with the hypothesis that students who live in cooperative housing have a higher awareness than students living in residence halls. Awareness was further subdivided into five categories: plastic recycling in Berkeley, plastic recycling codes, energy savings, water use, and recent public policy. This study found that students living in cooperative housing had a higher overall awareness. However, the two populations had a similarly low level of awareness for each of the five subcategories. This highlights the need for a better educational campaign in regards to plastic recycling.Rachel Abramson Plastic Recycling Awareness May 8 2008 p. 2 Introduction Plastics have improved the health, safety, and efficiency of everyday life. With their unique qualities of lightweight and strength, plastics are used in packaging, automotive applications, medical systems and more (Subramanian 2000). The versatility and low cost of plastics have contributed to plastic’s displacement of other materials, such as glass and paper, causing an increase in plastic production at a rate of about 5% per year since 1973 (IWMB 2003). Plastic provides both structural and insulating qualities and reduces the amount of material needed to support a product while still maintaining the functions of packaging (IWMB 2003). As a result, plastic sales have reached more than 50 million tons in 2000, up from 30 million tons in 1990 (IWMB 2003). U.S plastic resin sales–which are used in packaging (26%), building and construction (22%), consumer and institutional (14%), exports (10%), and transportation (5%)(IWMB 2003)–have increased from 6 billion pounds in 1960 to 108 billion pounds in 2000 (Plastic Debris 2005). However, the many different uses of plastic make it difficult to handle as waste (IWMB 2003). A typical postconsumer product contains up to 20 different types of plastic materials in addition to non-plastic material (EPA 2002). This complicates the first step of a complete recycling scheme- identification, separation, and classification (Santos et al 2005) –as it is difficult and time consuming to separate plastic based on density, shape, and color (Poulakis and Papaspyrides1997) when a single product contains multiple types of plastic. This difficulty in recycling is more critical since plastic is the fastest growing portion of municipal solid waste (IWMB 2003). Nearly 50% of the plastics created in 1999 were dumped in landfills (IWMB 2003). Out of the 22.4 million tons of plastic produced, only about 5.6% were recovered (EPA 2001, EPA 2002). Because of plastics’ light unit weight to volume ratio, they take up approximately twice the percentage of volume when compared by weight (IWMB 2003). It is not known exactly how long plastic wastes will take up this extra space in landfills (IWMB 1992) due to their slow decomposition. For example, Type 6 plastic disintegration is estimated to take from hundreds to thousands of years to decompose (IWMB 1992). In sum, the manufacturing of plastic continues at a significantly faster pace than recycling (IWMB 2003). Considering plastic packaging alone, sales to consumers are increasing four times faster than recycling by the consumer (IWMB 2003). The rate of plastic recycling has stagnated at a low level (IWMB 2003).Rachel Abramson Plastic Recycling Awareness May 8 2008 p. 3 Since more than 95% of the total energy needed to make one kilogram of plastic is used in extraction and refining (IWMB 2003), plastic recycling significantly reduces fossil fuel consumption (Shent et al 1999) by avoiding these stages. This is particularly beneficial given that these stages use energy from burning fossil fuels, which releases pollutants such as sulfur, dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and carbon monoxide into the air (EPA 1998). Manufacturing plastic products from recovered materials to produce a new product can reduce the amount of energy needed by about 80% (EPA 1998), resulting in savings of 50-75 mBtu of energy per ton of material recycled compared with the production of virgin materials (EPA 2002). The energy saved from recycling four kinds of plastic is equivalent to 150-200 gallons of gasoline per ton of plastic recycled (IWMB 2003). Plastic recycling conserves energy while also making a significant reduction in the total volume of municipal solid waste (Shent et al 1999). Compared to the use of virgin plastic, manufacturing plastic from recovered materials results in a net reduction in 10 major categories of air pollutants: aldehydes, ammonia, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, methane, nitrogen oxides, other organics, particulates, and sulfur oxides; and 8 major categories of water quality indicators and pollutants: biochemical oxygen demand, chemical oxygen demand, dissolved solids, iron, metal ions, oil, sulfuric acid, and suspended solids (EPA 1998). However, research has shown that plastic recycling uses large amounts of water, exceeding the reduced emissions of pollutants in water, to remove impurities from the plastic (Santos et al 2005). These impurities are then washed into the effluent, requiring the recycling facility to treat the effluent before discharge (Santos et al 2005). Yet the levels of solids, high pH, oil and grease in the effluent can easily be decreased by simple physical-chemical treatments such as preliminary tanks which remove solids heavy enough to sink to the bottom of the tanks (Santos et al 2005). There are significant expenses in plastic recycling programs, but the weight of the evidence suggests that plastic recycling has important economic benefits. In the past there was little
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