Plastic is one of the most commonly recycled materials. However, there is also a staggering amount of rubber in the world, and as cars get cheaper and better, this will not change. Recycling rubber is difficult but necessary, just like recycling electronic waste. At ReCharged, we take electronic waste and donate it to families in India if we can, or even if it isn’t useful anymore, we make sure that the materials inside don’t go to waste or harm the environment.

How Rubber is Recycled

When tires are taken off cars and given to rubber recycling facilities, they have to go through multiple steps to make the raw materials useful. Depending on the company, the processes vary to get them to a useful state. One technique is to clean off the rubber and grind it down into crumbs. Then magnets and other processes are used to take out steel and polyester fragments from the tires. Other companies freeze the rubber with liquid nitrogen to then smash it down into crumbs and use. The last method to recycle rubber is to use tire pyrolysis, which burns the rubber without oxygen in order to not release toxic fumes but let the tire break down into small molecules, which vaporize and then are extracted to make oil. Vulcanized rubber is very strong, which makes it hard to recycle, but with all the cars in the world, it is a necessity.

Biologically Recycling Plastic

Plastic already has lots of different methods to recycle it, but one of the most interesting ones is using living organisms to do our work for us. It takes a long time for plastic to degrade in nature, but by genetically modifying bacteria, scientists can speed up the process. Plastic is a polymer, which is made of long chains of repeating monomers. The bacteria simply break the monomers apart and we can recycle them into high-quality plastics. However, even though this seems very good, it does not see as much practical application as other types of plastic recycling, it can help create a circular economy with high efficiency in the future. Recycling plastic this way is currently more expensive than creating new plastic, and not every type of plastic can be recycled, but this is just another technology that could help shape our future.