Loveland, Ohio – The Recycle by City website explains:
Recycling Tip: Bottle Caps
Caps are usually made of a different type of plastic than their bottles, so it used to be standard procedure to recycle them separately. But because of their small size, many caps wouldn’t make it through the sorting process and would wind up at the landfill instead.
Modern times, modern methods
In recent years, plastic recyclers have developed a process to separate the different plastics so both bottle and cap can be salvaged.
The process, called sink float, involves grinding capped plastic bottles into flakes and pouring them into a mechanical tub filled with water. The flakes will float at different depths based on their density. The plastic bottles, made of PET, sink, and the caps, made of PP, float! Then the individual plastic types can be harvested, prepped, and sold to manufacturers to make new plastic items, like toys, planters, and benches.
Here’s a simplified version of the processes used to separate the plastic caps from the plastic bottles.
Cap recycling adds up!
Caps might seem too small to matter – until you discover 1,000,000 plastic bottles (and caps) are consumed every minute. Gulp.
Pro Tip: To ensure caps don’t pop off during the recycling process, squeeze a little air out of the bottle before putting caps back on.
BTW, today’s a great day to stop buying bottled water. Water filters are less expensive than bottled water, and they cut out the environmental tolls of producing excess plastic.
