What type of plastic is bubble wrap

How to Recycle Bubble Wrap If you can actually resist popping it, might be acceptable in your local plastic bag recycling program. Bubble wrap is a form of entertainment as much as it is a packing material. Once you are done playing with your bubble wrap, you might be wondering how to recycle it. Even though bubble wrap is made of a common type of plastic, finding a place that takes it can be tricky.

If you cannot find a recycling center in your community, there is some good news: bubble wrap is extremely reusable, and not just as a way to keep your kids busy on a rainy day. What is bubble wrap? It is made by laying sheets of plastic on top of each other, forcing air into them to create the bubbles, and heating the sheets to fuse them together. Like so many great things, bubble wrap actually came about by accident. Engineers Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes were trying to invent textured plastic wallpaper in What they ended up with made terrible wallpaper, so they tried to sell it as greenhouse insulation.

That did not work either. Finally, the pair decided to market it as packing material. IBM was looking for something to wrap around delicate electronic equipment before shipping it through the mail, and bubble wrap worked perfectly. Fielding and Chavannes founded the Sealed Air Corporation to manufacture the product, then put on their inventor hats again.

Today, the company sells all types of packing and mailing materials. Why should I recycle bubble wrap? These clogs can cost time and money by halting the recycling process, or severely damage the machinery.

Luckily, there are other, some might say easier, ways to recycle bubble wrap. Have no fear, the process is easy and contains only a few steps. First, make sure that all of the air bubbles in the bubble wrap are popped. We assume that this step is going to be as much fun for you as it is for us. This step must also be done for any other types of air-filled plastic packaging before recycling it.

Next, find a recycling center that accepts bubble wrap. Even if your municipal recycling program does not allow for this, there are plenty of recycling programs, supermarkets, pharmacies, and other big-box retailers that will take things like bubble wrap to be recycled. Their high tensile strength causes them to get caught and tangled in the machinery of recycling facilities, which can damage equipment and even cause worker injuries.

Because of this, almost all recycling programs prohibit bubble wrap in standard curbside recycling bins. Single stream programs allow all of the common forms of recyclables, paper, glass and cardboard to be placed in a single bin rather than requiring them to be pre-sorted before collection. How to Recycle Bubble Wrap First, we should specify how not to recycle bubble wrap: Do not put it in a normal curbside recycling bin.

This will contaminate your recycling stream and cause everything in your recycling bin to be sent to a landfill. You may even get a fine from your city or town. Remove the interior bubble wrap and dispose of it at a plastic film recycling drop-off and then take the paper envelope and include it with your normal recyclables. Reusing Bubble Wrap Often, reusing bubble wrap is an easier and more economical solution than recycling it.

When unpacking bubble-wrapped goods, check the condition of the sealed air bubbles. If most or all of them are intact, your bubble wrap is safe to use again. Browse Our Entire Collection of Eco-Friendly Packaging There are plenty of things you can do with used bubble wrap , thanks to its outstanding insulating and cushioning properties. A few ideas for how to use bubble wrap again include: Reuse it as a packaging material for shipping your goods.

Cushion breakable items in storage at your facility.