What happens to the plastic in my recycling bin?
Plastic items are collected from your homes, businesses, and local recycling centres.
Then they are sent to a Material Recovery Facility (MRF), which separates plastic and non-plastic, and/or a Plastic Recovery Facility (PRF), which sorts plastic by type.
These facilities use sorting equipment such as an optical sorter which can distinguish between different types of plastics.
The plastic then goes on to a reprocessing centre where it is washed, shredded and sorted further.
The plastic is then melted and extruded into new recycled plastic pellets.
These pellets are used to make new products.
This process outlines the more common mechanical recycling process for rigid plastics. Films, multi-layered and laminated plastics can be chemically recycled, which you can find out about here.
Watch this happen
Journey of the milk bottle
Journey of PET bottle
Journey of a plastics, pots, tubs and trays
There’s more detail on the BPF Plastipedia page
Fast
facts
Here you’ll find useful facts about which plastics to recycle and why it’s such an important thing to do, not just for our planet but also the local community.
