And in the process, we started recreating how the plastics industry makes plastics.

Chemistry gave us plastics.

Now because the plastics are so plentiful and by the way, those other methods don't lead to the recovery of plastics, obviously but people do try to recover the plastics.

It was cabinets of processors and storage and everything.

And when the photograph was taken, it's word processors.

And then more general versions of word processors came about.

Food processors tend to be shorter and wider than blenders.

Plastics are also hard to recycle.

They store the plastics on the roofs.

Mansonville Plastics (B.C.) Ltd. v. Kurtz GmbH

At the end of this process, we have a mixed plastic composite many different types of plastics and many different grades of plastics.

Manufacturing sectors include textiles, cement and plastics.17

Whenever possible, refuse single use and disposable plastics.

Plastics have overlapping densities over a very narrow range.

And this becomes the currency of the plastics industry.

Plastics have taken the place of many conventional materials.

Monitoring of compliance with no dumping regulations for plastics

In a world that is reliant on plastics, more sustainable production, consumption, and disposal of plastic products is crucial. Civil society, industry, and government must work together to increase the share of recycled plastics, thereby ensuring that plastics costs do not outweigh their benefits.

Of California's 90 seafood processors in 1995, only five processed significant quantities of swordfish.

They manufacture plastics. They use large quantities chloroprene and benzene.

But actually, plastics are several times more valuable than steel.

So whenever possible, to choose alternatives to single use plastics.

It's got 120,000 processors they can basically process 10 quadrillion bits of information per second.

Increasing the proportion of re used plastics is a crucial step toward more sustainable plastics consumption. To this end, some automobile manufacturers have adjusted their designs to allow for easy disassembly of parts made of compatible plastics, while governments have set recycling target proportions for end of life vehicles.

Although all 40 kinds of plastics used in a North American automobile can be recycled, the need to separate and clean them makes using them more expensive than using virgin plastic resins. This translates into a higher proportion of plastics in the remnants of shredded end of life automobiles a contaminated mixture of plastics and non plastics that is usually disposed of through some combination of landfilling, incineration, and secondary recycling.

It's mostly many types of plastics and many types of metals.

The traditional way to make plastics is with oil or petrochemicals.

They have seven processors, they have 14 motors, they have but you don't care, do you?

resulting from surface treatment of metals and plastics (Y17) (decision VII 15)

And so we retrofit these with sensors and processors, and these robots can fly indoors without GPS.

But, as I've learned from Richard, the technology, the processors, the sensors, the motors, is not the story.

And TAP Plastics made me although I didn't photograph it a museum vitrine.

Plastics are a whole other story well less than 10 percent are recovered.

So the traditional ways of separating materials just simply don't work for plastics.

We said, there's got to be a more sustainable way to make plastics.

In the United States, less than seven percent of our plastics are recycled.

Closed loop recycling, in which plastics waste is used to make another product, thus carries significant environmental benefits, such as reduced energy and oil consumption. But the process of separating the petroleum based recyclable plastics from other kinds of plastics and solid waste is difficult, costly, and labor intensive, so only a small proportion is recycled.

This simulation was run on 1,000 processors for a month in order to make just this simple visible one.

Given that most of these items are not biodegradable, and are not recycled, plastics waste is building up with serious environmental consequences. While governments have begun to implement new (and often quite strict) regulations aimed at managing plastics waste for example, China banned lightweight plastic shopping bags in 2008 they are inadequate to address the world s growing plastics waste problem.

We need, you know, 30 days on 1,000 processors to do the kind of simulation that I showed you before.

And also, I thought that there would be synthetic polymers, plastics, embedded in the rock.

Mental note to the liberators throwaway plastics take a lot of space and don't biodegrade.

Now most people think that's because plastics are a throw away material, have very little value.

Upon educating myself a little further about plastics, I actually realized this was a bad thing.

Or they burn the plastics to get to the metals in burn houses like you see here.