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
Glass and Aluminum are quite different from plastic.
Aluminum is made of matching atoms, its pretty much pure. Melt it down, cook off any impurities and you’ve got yourself fresh aluminum which is indistinguishable from the original. Making fresh aluminum is also ludicrously energy intensive so there’s a lot of incentive to collect and recycle previously used aluminum
Plastic is tricky because not all plastics are created equal. In general, plastics are long spaghetti strands that all stick together to give you the nice plastic you want, they’re polymers which means they’re made from long strings of monomers that are connected together. When you recycle your plastics you break your spaghetti strands, after a couple rounds of recycling you have couscous instead of spaghetti which doesn’t work at all.
Making it even harder, “plastic” encompasses a broad variety of materials and if you don’t separate your #1 plastic from your #2 or #6 you don’t get plastic you can reuse at the end, you just get mush with uncertain properties, and since there isn’t a great way to separate plastics by material quickly it greatly adds to the cost of plastic recycling because you need a manual sorting stage early on.
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