When dealing with the life cycle of plastic, hundreds of solutions await, from alternative bioplastics that might be able to degrade themselves through the magic of fungus, to complex chemical recycling that can break plastics down to become other petroleum products or to be rebuilt good as new.

But as promising as chemical recycling and next-generation plastics may sound, experts also say some of the most realistic solutions to plastic pollution involve eliminating it from packaging as much as possible.

Decision-makers are asking: How can manufacturers design their plastic packaging to be recycled more easily after consumers are done with it? Should packaging all be the same color of plastic to avoid dye-based contamination in recycling processes? Could markers on different types of plastic help imaging robots at sorting facilities do their jobs better when diverting containers by type? Which products could avoid using plastic altogether?

Currently, the vast majority of plastic recycling is done by mechanical methods. First, post-consumer plastics are divided by number; for example, the PET plastic or polyethylene terephthalate commonly used for beverage bottles needs to be separated from the HDPE plastic (high-density polyethylene) that’s often used for laundry detergent containers. Each group is then often shredded and melted into pellets that can get remelted and formed into new packaging. Or different plastics can be repurposed into boards for outdoor decks or processed into fibers for carpets and clothing.

But because heat can degrade the polymer chains (strings of repeating molecules) in plastic, there are limits to the number of times plastic can be “recycled” in the truest sense of being made into a new product.

With those limitations in mind, many people, from those working for the largest oil and chemical manufacturers (think BP and Dow) down to individual entrepreneurs, are experimenting with chemical recycling as a potential way to recycle even more plastic. Less than 10 percent of the stuff actually gets recycled, but chemical recycling offers the promise of rebuilding the molecule chains that are broken down with heat, as well as the possibility of converting plastics into fuels and other compounds.

Read the full article about recycling by Samantha Wohlfeil at Grist.