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When you compost your PLA plastic products, you are working to create a closed "cradle to cradle" loop for the material:
- Corn, processed to make...
- Lactic Acid, polymerized to make...
- PLA, which is used to create
- PLA Products, which are
- Used, and then
- Disposed of, when it is
- Composted, returning to the soil to grow more
- Corn.... go to #1
This is a pretty long loop (and also inefficient, from an energy perspective).
One way to shorten this loop would be to recycle, as we do with regular plastics:
- Corn, processed to make...
- Lactic Acid, polymerized to make...
- PLA, which is used to create
- PLA Products, which are
- Used, and then
- Recycled, where it is
- Mashed up into PLA... go to #3
This is "mechanical recycling". The problem with this is, PLA doesn't recycle as nicely or easily as regular plastic. There are difficulties with getting a nice-looking, pure product.
So what can we do? LOOPLA (by Galactic) has a possible answer: chemical recycling.
The LOOPLA process can provide a major short-cut that increases the efficiency of the cradle-to-cradle PLA loop:
- Corn, processed to make...
- Lactic Acid, polymerized to make...
- PLA, which is used to create
- PLA Products, which are
- Used, and then
- Sent to a LOOPLA plant, where it is
- Broken down into Lactic Acid, go to #2
Although this process is still cutting-edge and in its experimental and testing phase, it promises to provide a real answer: it promises to be cost efficient, and provides a mechanism that will allow us to keep re-cycling the same feedstock around and around... each time producing PLA products that are exactly the same quality as products made from virgin PLA.
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