How Plastic Bottles are Recycled

Plastics are made of various chemical combinations. To remove some of the headaches of sorting plastics for recycling, a method was invented that sorts them by weight. 

The process is called Sink Float. An entire water bottle, for example, is ground into small flakes in a vat of water. The caps are made of a different chemical composition, so in the past, they had to be individually removed, or the whole bottle was thrown out. Now the lighter plastic that caps are made of simply floats to the top to be skimmed off. 

Once the plastics are separated, they are sold to companies in bulk, where the flakes can become a number of things. More uses are being found for high-density building materials.

You can help bring down the one million-bottles-per-day job of recycling bottles by using your own permanent filtered water container.