Closed Loop Plastic Recycling: How It Works

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We produce 29 billion plastic bottles each year. Unfortunately only 30 percent get recycled. But plastic water bottles are recyclable.

Hewlett-Packard manufactures millions of plastic printer cartridges and printers each year.  When they are depleted or retired, consumers discard them.  But HP isn’t content to let them go to landfills. These days, they are  being dismantled instead of shredded by its closed-loop processing partner, Lavergne Group.

Although HP has been recycling cartridges since 1991, it is getting much better at figuring out how to reuse the plastic. Instead of shredding used ink cartridges, Lavergne Group is dismantling them for 50 percent greater yields in recovered plastic. Here’s how the closed loop process works, according to HP’s Dean Miller: