One of the lesser known crusades in the war against Plastic Pollution, ‘Plastics 2020 Challenge,’ is a push to reduce the quantity of plastic materials sent to landfills.
The overall aim of this campaign which was launched in Westminster in 2009, is to double the rate of plastic recycling by the year 2020.
For its part this township may have joined the campaign much-much late, but over the last two months, some 10,290 kgs of plastic out of the town’s trash stream of 57,868 kgs, have been sorted, baled and stored, thus saving them from the ignoble fate of ending up in a landfill.
Today Clean Coonoor and the Coonoor Municipal Corporation despatched their first consignment weighing 8,220 kgs for recycling.
The baled plastics are presently on their way to Hyderabad where they will be subjected to an operation called pyrolysis, a process which involves thermal degradation in the absence of oxygen.
We thank Pyrogreen Energy Private Ltd which specialises in extracting fuel from waste plastics by this method, for taking this mess out of our hands.
This form of tertiary recycling is a far better option than the commonly pursued quaternary recycling, wherein only energy is recovered through incineration.
As a next step Clean Coonoor and the Local Body will be working towards Plastics 2030, ‘Voluntary Commitment’ to increase circularity and resource efficiency ; by increasing re-use and recycling, preventing plastics leakage into the environment, and accelerating resource efficiency.