Title: How Does Plastic Cause Air Pollution? | rePurpose Global Blog
Headings: How Does Plastic Cause Air Pollution?
How Does Plastic Cause Air Pollution?
1. The Extraction of Plastic’s Raw Material: Oil
2. The Impact of the Recycling Industry on Air Quality
3. Incineration of Plastic Materials
4. Plastics Ability to “Off-Gas”
Breathe In, Breath Out: What next?

Content: Tossing our plastic bottles and packaging into the recycling bin makes us feel good. But plastic recycling can become a problem when it does not follow strict environmental and workforce standards. Did you know that over half of our plastics deemed to be “recycled” are shipped overseas? Unfortunately, many informal and formal recycling facilities in South and Southeast Asia fail to have safe working conditions and pollution control measures. Lian Jiao is a Chinese town that had become a toxic waste dump for the West’s plastic recycling. Workers melt down plastics without wearing any sort of professional protective gear and the air in this small town is thick with plastic-derived, toxic emissions. Just like producing virgin plastics, recycling plastics have the share the same threshold for emitting noxious gases into the atmosphere. In 2017 China announced that it no longer wanted to be everyone’s “garbage dump,” as it recycled 50% of the planet’s plastic products. As a result, Western nations have been puzzled over what to do with the huge amounts of garbage they produce every year, and how to dispose it, which leads us to the next way plastics impact our air quality: the release of toxic substances via incineration.