Resin Identification Code

Recycling is and has been a major topic of discussion in recent years, particularly plastics recycling. To further encourage and enable plastic recycling, the Plastic Industry Trade Association created the Resin Identification Codes in 1988 (par. 1, “spi”). The Resin ID codes are the numbers inside of the triangles on various plastic items, seeming signifying that an item can be recycled; however, there is much more to these codes than just that. They do not, in fact, mean that an item can be recycled, but specifically denote which kind of plastic an object is (there are six codes for specific plastics, with code number seven being something of a “catch-all” for the remaining plastics and composites), and only four of these seven codes truly
He builds his argument by outlining the history of resin codes and their immediate effects, comparing the past’s flow of plastics to today’s, and then explains why they are working to update the resin codes. Finding this article was vastly encouraging – while it did not give me the periphery information I desired, it did give me the core of my answer with much more detail than I had found previously. It also brought up “films” – thin plastics that were difficult to recycle along with the main stream of materials. Intrigued, I decided to look more closely at those, my hunger for the history of recycling being assuaged for
Frankly, this was the most interesting piece I have read – it was well-written and well sourced, and provided a good counterpoint to the previous article. Both of them together formed another facet to plastic recycling I had not considered – that of plastic bags and films (and tangentially sanitization of said plastics). Prior to this I had not actually thought to recycle plastic bags. I decided at this point that, instead of looking into the past, I would instead look into the future – into how to get consumers to recycle