Trends in waste plastics and recycling

Zero emission is an ambitious project aimed at the conversion of the conventional top-down or one-directional flow type production systems of modern society to those of a recycling type. The basic idea underlying this project is to understand in detail the material flow mechanism in a particular segment of society and to evaluate the transformability of the hitherto one-directional types of process into recycling types. The authors, members of the Zero-Emission Research Group of Japan, are investigating the material flow of plastics in Japan. The present work describes the features of this project, as well as the results obtained so far.[PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]