Plastics are eco-efficient in many ways. For example, they efficiently insulate buildings, they provide lightweight and safe packaging, they reduce the weight of cars and make them quieter. They help to harness the sun and wind as energy sources. Also, at the end of their useful life, plastics still have a lot to offer – they are simply too valuable to be thrown away.
The raw material for the manufacture of most plastics today is mineral oil. It is cost-efficient and, in effect, using a small amount of oil (4% of the world's oil and gas consumption) helps us to reduce the use of a far larger amount of oil in energy applications.
Plastic is used to make a whole range of products for crafts, households, leisure, sports, medicine etc. But when plastic products can no longer serve their purpose, we need to recover the value that has been invested in order to produce them. The high calorific value of plastics is actually similar to that of fuel oil. Therefore, plastics can partly substitute fuel oil as primary raw material, immediately conserving primary resources. So where it is not technically or economically feasible to recycle the plastic material in any other way, energy recovery remains a viable option.
''Plastics too valuable to throw away'': a fun 3 minute video explaining the resource efficiency of plastics, in easy to understand terms.
The video can be viewed on YouTube www.youtube.com/watch?v=82-Yz8MbxA0