Altyor is fighting misconceptions about recycled plastic by giving you 5 false beliefs about this material with high potential for the environment.
#1 We can only do black!
Recycled plastic is not necessarily black. For this, the quality of the recovered products or of the recycled material must obviously be well controlled. At Altyor, we found the solution by creating our own recycling loop thanks to the recovery of used products and then transforming them into re-injectable granules.
#2 Too many appearance defects!
Today, we manufacture products with recycled plastic with up-to-date visual quality standards. With a good recycling process, a large part of the material’s imperfections can be eliminated! To facilitate the reprocessing of the material at the end of its life and increase the quality of the RPM*, it is necessary to integrate good practices when designing the part (which will be recycled): avoid paint, glue, inappropriate decorations (no labels or replace it with pad printing).
*RPM = recycled plastic material
#3 Not enough materials available!
Since the end of 2020, the market has been under great pressure. You can learn more about this shortage in this episode of 10 minutes with Polyvia. The situation with regard to RPMs is different. This material is available and its potential is underdeveloped. It should be noted that Altyor offers recycled material, particularly from its own loop, ready to be re-injected into its customers’ products. This is what Bob the French mini dishwasher has chosen to do by incorporating Altyor recycled plastic material into their products.
#4 Too expensive!
In fact, if you make your own recycling loop and control your partner chain, the cost of the material and the re-injection are equivalent to virgin material. So don’t worry! Do the maths and this argument will have little value.
#5 It’s transportation that counts!
It is often thought that in the carbon impact of a product, transport is the most harmful. This is true with planes, but not necessarily for other means of transport. For this misconception, there is only one solution: make your LCA, that is, your life cycle analysis. At Altyor, we had also understood this in principle, but following the various LCAs carried out, the conclusions were simple: using recycled plastic can greatly reduce environmental impact. By way of example: on an injected plastic part, the use of recycled plastic makes it possible to reduce the carbon impact by 50%, whereas the reduction in transport would represent a reduction of 5%.