Why did you choose some colors that require the use of non-recycled plastic?

It is really a contradiction, a short circuit towards the principles of the circular economy, the choice to manufacture rubbish bins for household waste in colors such as yellow, red, blue, white or silver, to name a few, which can hardly be made from recycled plastic.

Household waste, which citizens so diligently separate at home, serves the community to be transformed, according to the principles of the circular economy, into new materials for daily use, avoiding the use of natural resources, such as oil, to build products that they can do with what we discard.

Among these wastes, plastic is separated from homes in glass, metal and paper, which take different recycling paths in order to be processed and offered again on the market as secondary raw materials.

The plastic is collected by the municipalities and sent to the selection centers which are responsible for dividing the contents of the household collection bags into the various types of plastic that are collected inside the house.

Let’s see some uses of the collected plastic waste:

• The bottles of water and PET drinks will be processed to create new granules for the production of other bottles, fiber for clothes and for the upholstery of sofas, for straps suitable for the packaging of industrial packaging, to make the transparent food trays.
• HDPE detergent bottles are processed to produce raw materials with which other bottles for detergents or industrial oils, petrol cans, construction products, covering films for product pallets, rigid hoses are obtained irrigation for agriculture, hydraulic connections for irrigation, protection membranes, driveway grass grates, signaling and containment nets.
• With rigid PP packaging it is possible to manufacture rubbish bins, transport boxes, chairs and tables for the garden, rattan type sofas and armchairs, pallets and brooms, outdoor wardrobes, trunks for the garden or for the home, cleaning buckets, trolleys and various packages.
• With the flexible plastic of LDPE packaging, selected by type, you can create other bags for the dustbin, agricultural cover film, flexible hoses for irrigation in agriculture or for the garden, cover sheets for the building industry, pots, supports for bed bases, buckets, polymer wood sheets, partition walls, agricultural walkways.

We have therefore seen some examples of how materials that come from domestic recycling can, and must, be reused to produce new products without exploiting the resources of the earth.

Technically, municipal waste can be reused, creating products that are useful to the community, of good technical quality and with a good aesthetic impact, which, however, should never be a discriminating factor in consumer choice, since, if a dustbin is brown dark instead of yellow, I don’t think it can make a difference in the house to contain waste.

In reality, on this useless aesthetic value, consumers, or those who choose for them, by delivering the bin for separate collection, make a substantial difference whether to contribute to the circular economy cycle or to frustrate the efforts to separate waste that will not be reused.

In fact, polypropylene waste bins with bright colors, such as white, red, light blue, yellow, cream, silver, blue or light green, just to name a few, can hardly be produced using recycled plastic as this, coming from a mix of colors of the collected packaging, usually does not allow to arrive in such light colors.

Consequently, either they are produced with virgin materials, therefore granules of petroleum derivation and not recycled, or the producer must make mixtures in which to insert a small percentage of recycled material and then add virgin material.

The waste bins made with the granule coming from post consumption, therefore from the separate collection, are basically produced with dark colors, such as black, green, brown, blue and dark gray.

Who cares about the aesthetic perfection of a product destined for waste if this leads to environmental problems?

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