I know glass and aluminum can be recycled pretty efficiently, but if plastics have lower melting temperatures I would assume they’d denature less therefore offering better methods of recycling.
In: Chemistry
*Very* simply, when glass and metal are recycled they can be melted at a temperature that burns off the various contaminants still attached (no cleaning process is perfect) and then the burnt stuff can be removed.
When plastic melts it doesn’t get that hot, so the contaminants are mixed in with the plastic, resulting in a lower quality material. If you heated the plastic enough to burn the contaminants, you would burn the plastic too.
The need to clean the plastic better, and also sort it into various types of plastic, increases the cost of recycling significantly.
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