Plastics are a versatile, convenient, cost effective, strong and lightweight amenity we have all become accustomed to over the last few decades and the largest market is packaging materials. Plastic use has no signs of slowing down and unfortunately this resource is now creating almost 8.3 billion metric tons of waste per year and increasing(I).
Although technically recyclable, most plastics cannot be easily recycled due to their size, multi-layers, and contamination, amongst other factors . Today, almost 91% of collected recyclable plastics in North America end up in landfills(II). If untreated, these discarded plastics can remain for hundreds of years before turning into harmful biogases like methane. As recycling efforts have not been as effective as we would like them to be, it has become necessary to find other solutions which compliment these efforts.
What if we told you there is a solution today that can accelerate the biogas production in these landfills and in only a few years this otherwise harmful biogas can be collected and turned into clean renewable energy to be used in everyday life?
PLASTIC TO ENERGY
Waste to Energy (WTE) is the process of generating energy such as heat, electricity, and fuel from a waste source. Across North America, there are currently about 300 WTE landfill facilities which process about 80% of the waste Americans discard every year.
NEO Plastics makes everyday products like straws, cups, bags, trays, food containers, and even single use coffee capsules, work in today’s most common disposal method. When properly discarded, these applications are eliminated as a pollutant and converted into biogas used for clean renewable energy to heat homes, fuel vehicles and power industries.
NEO is a solution that supports the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Sustainable Material Management (SMM) approach to using and reusing materials more productively over their entire life cycle. NEO also supports all other initiatives such as the EPA’s Landfill Methane Outreach Program (LMOP), and Zero Waste and Material Reductio
