{"id":163605,"date":"2023-05-10T00:22:51","date_gmt":"2023-05-10T05:22:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/05\/recycling-plants-spew-a-staggering-amount-of-microplastics"},"modified":"2023-05-10T00:22:51","modified_gmt":"2023-05-10T05:22:51","slug":"recycling-plants-spew-a-staggering-amount-of-microplastics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/05\/recycling-plants-spew-a-staggering-amount-of-microplastics","title":{"rendered":"Recycling plants spew a staggering amount of microplastics"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

An unsettling report released barely a year ago painted a grim picture<\/a> of the plastics industry\u2014only about 5 percent of the 46 million annual tons of plastic waste in the US makes it to recycling facilities. The number is even more depressing after realizing that is roughly half<\/a> of experts\u2019 previous estimates. But if all that wasn\u2019t enough, new information throws a heaping handful of salt on the wound: of the plastic that does make it to recycling<\/a>, a lot<\/em> of it is still released into the world as potentially toxic microplastics.<\/p>\n

According to the pilot study recently published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials Advances<\/em><\/a> focused on a single, modern facility, recycling plants\u2019 wastewater contains a staggering number of microplastic particles. And as Wired<\/em><\/a> explained on Friday, all those possibly toxic particulates have to go somewhere, i.e. potentially city water systems<\/a>, or the larger environment.<\/a><\/p>\n

The survey focusing on one new, unnamed facility examined its entire recycling process. This involves sorting, shredding, and melting plastics down into pellets<\/a>. During those phases of recycling, however, the plastic waste is washed multiple times, which subsequently sheds particles smaller than 5 millimeters along the way. Despite factoring in the plant\u2019s state-of-the-art filtration system designed to capture particulates as tiny as 50 microns, the facility still produced as many as 75 billion particles per cubic meter of wastewater.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An unsettling report released barely a year ago painted a grim picture of the plastics industry\u2014only about 5 percent of the 46 million annual tons of plastic waste in the US makes it to recycling facilities. The number is even more depressing after realizing that is roughly half of experts\u2019 previous estimates. But if all [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1635],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-163605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-materials"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163605"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163605\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}