Future Of Polystyrene Essay

The Present and Future of Polystyrene

Last year, the curbside recycling in my hometown made several changes to their program. Such changes included an increase in the amount of recycled materials each household could put every week, as well an increase in the frequency of collections. Perhaps the most welcome change for my family was the new ability to recycle all plastics. Although we had never produced a titanic amount of plastic waste, we still felt as though this allowed us to better do our part for the environment. Still, there was one plastic we could not recycle: polystyrene. So every take-out container, every piece of Styrofoam packaging went straight into the trash. “Why was this?” I thought. I didn’t take for granted that

German apothecary Eduard Simon originally distilled the monomer, Styrene, from the resin of the Sweetgum tree. It was later found that when these monomers formed chains, they shared several properties of rubber, and was thus proved to be a versatile polymer. Although it only makes up about one percent of solid waste produced in the United States, the disposal and recycling of polystyrene is still seen as an environmental issue, mainly because it does not degrade in a natural environment. For most regions, it is not possible to recycle polystyrene, both on an individual scale, such as in street side recycling programs, and on an industrial scale, such as in shipping or foodservice

As in the bacteria method, this other process would also create a useful product: energy. Agricultural engineer James W. Garthe has been attempting to develop a method for recycling polystyrene, as well as other “agricultural” plastics, in a less costly way than older methods. His plan involves skipping the steps of cleaning and separating of these plastics, steps that once made recycling process “uneconomical”, instead converting the entire bulk of the waste into “plastic nuggets” that could later be burned with coal to produce energy (“Technology” 26). Like coal burning, however, this process could produce harmful emissions, if the combustion took place at low temperatures. High temperature combustion would eliminate this threat (“Technology”