CarbonLite: Inside the World's Largest Plastic Bottle Recycling Plant | SoCal Connected | KCET

every year in the United States consumers use literally billions of plastic bottles just like this but after you toss it into the recycle bin do you ever wonder where it goes well about 20% of those bottles end up right here at carbon light industries this is the largest facility of its kind here in the United States and Leon the Chairman how you doing hi how are you nice meeting you good you're going to take us on a tour show us around yeah finally here we go this is from a with your safety hat and hold that on before we can't go in okay got a suit up suit up wow this place is huge this 60 million dollar facility in Riverside processes two billion plastic beverage containers every year that's more than 500 bottles for every person in LA we bring in bales of product as you can see garena bail then you have to break up that bit okay so you separate the bottles and that's the process that's a great process separate the model so breaks up the veil most of the bottles recycled in this facility come from redemption centers where consumers can return their beverage containers for a cash refund so plastic is relatively lightweight right well this square bale of plastic bottles weighs more than 1300 pounds and it stinks by the way whoo and the journey begins conveyer belts tumblers sorters then it goes to a metal detector make sure at any time then it goes through it we call it the pre-wash what it does it washes the bottle and remove the labels you can see the Labour's are being removed so it's a pretty involved process then from the time the plastic arrives and is in these big bales it leaves like it goes through a lot even to get it to the point where its first being washed exactly from the time it started and you news about 30% of the Cavs in the we end up with only 70% of what we give in in the US most recycled beverage containers are sent to China they're melted down and turned into polyester materials and used to make anything from t-shirts to carpet to teddy bear stuffing but often those items ultimately end up in a landfill Carbon lights goal is to keep a bottle cycle of life going it's known as closed-loop recycling or bottle to bottle so I would imagine that one of the huge advantages of this kind of recycling is that if you're getting bottles from Southern California you're recycling them here in Southern California I'm using it in a tension or new bottles in Southern California is far and away head and shoulders above the rest of the country Susan Collins has been studying the environmental impacts of plastic for more than 20 years she says California's recycling success is because we require deposits and the law is statewide the states that have the programs that cover the whole state where they make a decision like our entire state will adopt a container deposit law then boom within a couple of years they see recycling rates in the 80% range so after the bottles have been separated by color this is the before their ground up into little bits about the size of cornflakes it was Hey after all as much as they recycle here it's still less than 1% of the 245 billion beverage containers Americans use every year and while some of those containers are recycled as well they rarely turn back into bottles carbon light hopes to change that because when plastic bottles turn back into plastic bottles that means less new material is being sourced fulfilling the promise of recycling is making a product that can be used to replace virgin materials because when you do that you save all of the greenhouse gases all of the production of toxics all of the energy that went into getting those virgin materials out of the ground in the first place and the final step sterilization to make a food grade materials to take volatiles out of any volatiles that are left in the material will be taken out and then nails to be shipped to the customer so essentially you have to sterilize all of this flash stay exactly that is really hot plastic very elastic you don't want to touch that so what does all of this ultimately produce these tiny little pellets enough to fill giant silos like these before being shipped off to bottle makers so when a crushed plastic bottle enters carbon light it looks a little something like this before ultimately ending up as the finished product these are food grade plastic pellets which will then be sent off to bottlers to create new bottles it could be a 50% recyclable material bottle like this or a bottle like this that's made from 100% recyclable plastic so with this type of closed loop recycling that means these bottles can be reused literally an infinite number of times which means fewer bottles end up in the oceans in the streets or in the landfill so is there really such a thing as eternal life for plastic bottles well for now this place is probably as close as it gets I'm Derrick shore for SoCal connected

Channel: KCETSoCalConnected

Views: 1,425,800

Keywords: Recycling (Industry), Plastic (Exhibition Subject), Plastic Bottle (Hull Material), Bottle (Collection Category), Green, Plastic Bottle Recycling, CarbonLite, Environment, KCET (TV Station), SoCal Connected, Television (Invention)

Id: vAr4BZM_Tzk

Length: 6min 30sec (390 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 16 2014