Recycling by product massive number of types of plastic, they each carry a resin identification code, and must be sorted before they can be recycled. This can be costly; while metals can be sorted using electromagnets, no such 'easy sorting' capability exists for plastics. In addition to this, while labels do not need to be removed from bottles for recycling, lids are often made from a different kind of non-recyclable plastic. To help in identifying the materials in various plastic items, resin identification code numbers 1-6 have been assigned to six common kinds of recyclable plastic resins, with the number 7 indicating any
PET bottle recycling PET bottle recycling Bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET, sometimes PETE) can be used to make lower grade products, such as carpets. To make a food grade plastic, the bottles need to be hydrolysed down to monomers, which are purified and then re-polymerised to make new PET. In many countries, PET plastics are coded with the resin identification code number "1" inside the universal recycling symbol, usually located on the bottom of the container. PET is used as a raw material for making packaging materials such as bottles and containers for packaging a wide range of food products and other