And this becomes the currency of the plastics industry.

There was an important pearling industry from the 1860s until about 1970 when it collapsed in the face of competition from the plastics industry.

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

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

i have a cap from plastic

Plastic does not burn easily.

Plastic does not break easily.

Capt. Charles Moore on the seas of plastic

They store the plastics on the roofs.

And these are just a few examples of companies that are buying our plastic, replacing virgin plastic, to make their new products.

Mike Biddle We can recycle plastic

And sometimes they'll resort to what's known as the burn and sniff technique where they'll burn the plastic and smell the fumes to try to determine the type of plastic.

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.

Eben Bayer Are mushrooms the new plastic?

This discovery formed the foundation of the modern plastics industry.

Monitoring of compliance with no dumping regulations for plastics

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

We grind the plastic down to about the size of your small fingernail.

Prepackaged meals may come with a disposable plastic spork.

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

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

But bioplastics are not a silver bullet for managing plastics waste.

Similarly, the mixer housing can be made of metal or plastic.

And by using mycelium as a glue, you can mold things just like you do in the plastic industry, and you can create materials with many different properties, materials that are insulating, fire resistant, moisture resistant, vapor resistant materials that can absorb impacts, that can absorb acoustical impacts.

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

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

It's a bad thing that plastic breaks down into smaller little bits, because it's always still plastic.

And instead of plopping down several hundred million dollars to build a chemical plant that will only make one type of plastic for its entire life, our plants can make any type of plastic we feed them.

will never gather up all the plastic and put the ocean back together again.

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

NEWARK, NJ Plastics are everywhere.

And they said this one friend of mine said, I've got one word for you plastic.

The waste is separated into recyclable materials (plastics, metals) and organic waste.

Button copy signs with plastic pips rather than glass appeared in the 1970s.

In 1989, OMV acquired a 25 stake in plastics group, Borealis.

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.

The most important industry in terms of emissions is cement manufacture.

Plastics have overlapping densities over a very narrow range.

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

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

These are usually made from plastic and are often shaped like an animal or other familiar objects.

This form of torture consists in covering the head with a plastic bag to cause asphyxia.

The Making of Sputnik

Construction industry

The citrus industry is the largest fresh fruit exporting industry in Australia.