Currently, every country faces the challenging issue of managing a large amount of waste plastics. According to statistics from the European Association of Plastics Manufacturers, in 2018, the energy recovery rate of incineration for power generation in EU countries was 42.6%, the resource utilization rate was 32.5%, and the remaining 24.9% was sent to landfill as waste. In the United States, the energy recovery rate is 15.75%, the resource utilization rate is 8.66%, and the landfill rate is 75.59%. Some countries have long relied on exporting waste plastics to solve local governance problems. In the period from 2013 to 2017 alone, China disposed of 36.66 million tons of imported waste plastics. In July 2017, China issued the "Implementation Plan for Prohibiting the Entry of Foreign Garbage to Promote the Reform of the Solid Waste Import Management System," which stipulates that, by the end of 2017, it will no longer import life-source waste plastics, unsorted waste paper, as well as textile waste and vanadium residue. Subsequently, many Southeast Asian countries also began to emulate China's approach, rejecting the import of foreign waste such as waste plastics.
Nowadays, concepts regarding the governance of waste plastic pollution are continually progressing and improving. The emphasis is on strengthening stock management rather than flow management—managing and recycling plastic raw materials and products that have already been produced and accumulated, minimizing the production and use of entirely new raw materials. Only in this way can true reduction and infinite recycling be achieved. This requires changing the original practice of degrading and utilizing waste plastics after recycling to equal-level utilization or even upgraded utilization.
The degradation utilization of recycled plastics is widespread. For example, fast-food boxes and beverage bottles are made from food-grade, high-value native plastic materials. However, after recycling, they can only be made into furniture, daily necessities, etc., making it difficult to be remade into plastic packaging directly in contact with food.
To obtain high-quality, food-grade recycled plastics, it is necessary to upgrade the entire production process, strictly control it, not only eliminate all pollutants harmful to human health in waste plastics but also prove that recycled materials will not change the food composition, taste, or odor in an unacceptable way. Only by meeting these conditions can true equal-level recycling of waste lunch boxes be achieved.
In the home appliance industry, many leading Chinese companies have achieved a closed-loop for plastics. For example, under Haier, Hai Lv Yuan, and TCL Obo in Tianjin, they dismantle and recycle scrapped household appliances, clean and crush household appliance plastics, use Wandful electrostatic intelligent sorting production lines to separate and purify plastics, then perform granulation and modification, and finally apply them to the production of new home appliance components. Such a cyclic use contributes to the circular economy.
From a global perspective, some countries have made clear regulations on the application of recycled plastics. For example, Australia specifies in the "National Plastics Plan 2021" that by 2025, the recycled plastic content of plastic packaging should reach 20%, while Canada plans to achieve a proportion of 50% recycled plastics in some plastic packaging by 2030. On March 30, 2022, the EU released the "EU Sustainable and Circular Textile Strategy," which prohibits plastic bottles from being degraded and used to make textile fibers after physical recycling, aiming to protect the closed-loop recycling system of plastic bottles and promote primary plastic circulation. According to a survey by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), some large international beverage and food companies are already using a certain percentage of recycled plastics in their packaging.
Perhaps people have not noticed that unlabeled foods, especially beverages designed without bottle labels, have been launched and sold in countries such as the United Arab Emirates, Japan, and South Korea. South Korea's Nongshim mineral water, Japan's green tea, as well as Pepsi and Coca-Cola, etc., have product information printed on bulk packaging boxes, minimizing the types of plastics in beverage bottles. Innovative ideas that overturn conventional thinking make simple and efficient recycling reuse possible.
