How does polystyrene recycling work? (Part 1)

Polystyrene is one common form of plastic in our life. Many call it Expanded Polystyrene (EPS). You can see it in coffee shop, supermarket, furniture market place, etc. It brings convenience for us.

However, some characters makes polystyrene work against it when it comes to recycling. It’s hard to collect from curbside containers because of the lightness. Besides, it’s difficult and expensive to transport. So many municipal recycling programs do not accept it.

Now many companies, such as Greenmax , provide environment solutions to solve the problem of polystyrene recycling, which is helpful to recycle them. As a kind of resource, Polystyrene’s reuse is highly paid attention to. So as individual, we should also get a basic knowledge about it.

Firstly, we should learn that plastics are sorted to #1~#7 according to its characters, and they respectively are that #1 plastic is Polyethylene terephthalate (PET), #2 plastic is High-Density Polyethylene (HDPE), #3 plastic is Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC), #4 plastic is Low-density polyethylene (LDPE), #5 plastic is Polypropylene (PP), #6 plastic is Polystyrene(PS), and #7 plastic is often polycarbonate or ABS (Others). Polystyrene is #6 plastic, also called Expanded Polystyrene (EPS). We recycle the material just polystyrene. This is the first step. (Unfinished)