Current Trends, Challenges, and Opportunities for Plastic Recycling

Plastics are an unavoidable part of our everyday lives. These plastics products have a wide range of mechanical and chemical properties, making them useful in varied industries, comprising automotive, electronics, and packaging. Plastic products, despite their many applications, pose a key environmental danger owing to their non‐degradability. The current use of plastic products will accumulate as waste in landfills and natural habitats if left unchecked. In the plastics industry, promising approaches such as recycling practices have been acknowledged as a way to mitigate this impact. These will provide opportunities to reduce CO 2 emissions, energy use, and waste disposal. In this chapter, we compare different recycling strategies and discuss alternative materials such as biodegradable plastics. Recycling technologies and processes that absorb, sort, and reprocess recyclable plastics will be improved, opening up new possibilities in the recycling methods. This chapter examines recent and future advancements in plastics use and recycling, and the environmental effects of waste plastic accumulation are discussed. We then suggest certain conceivable answers to these problems, both in terms of analysis and industry implementation.