What should I do with my used PVC shower curtain liner?

July 19th, 2009 admin Posted in Information |

When replacing the PVC shower curtain liner today, I was wondering what kind of plastic it was and whether it was recyclable.

Here is what I learnt about the various types of plastics. The following list is from Wikipedia’s article on Plastics.

1. PET (PETE), polyethylene terephthalate: Commonly found on 2-liter soft drink bottles, water bottles, cooking oil bottles, peanut butter jars.
2. HDPE, high-density polyethylene: Commonly found on detergent bottles, milk jugs.
3. PVC, polyvinyl chloride: Commonly found on plastic pipes, outdoor furniture, siding, floor tiles, shower curtains, clamshell packaging.
4. LDPE, low-density polyethylene: Commonly found on dry-cleaning bags, produce bags, trash can liners, and food storage containers.
5. PP, polypropylene: Commonly found on bottle caps, drinking straws, yogurt containers, Lego building blocks.
6. PS, polystyrene: Commonly found on “packing peanuts”, cups, plastic tableware, meat trays, take-away food clamshell containers
7. OTHER, other: This plastic category, as its name of “other” implies, is any plastic other than the named #1–#6, Commonly found on certain kinds of food containers, Tupperware, and Nalgene bottles.

Three main things I learnt are:

1. The biggest difficulty with recycling plastics is that these types tend to get mixed up when people try to keep the plastics aside for recycling, and separating them is a labor intensive problem - often not worth the trouble - and thus, unfortunately, sending all this plastic, irrespective of the good intentions of recycling them, into landfills.

2. PET (Coke and Pepsi bottles) is very different from PVC (Gatorade bottles and my problem at hand, shower curtain liners), both of which are different form HDPE (milk jugs and detergent bottles)! PVC if mixed with PET, can ruin not only the batch of PET that is being recycled, it can even hurt the recycling machine! So be careful with recycling PVC.

3. Polystyrene (PS), which is used in “styrofoam” to-go food takeout boxes, is typically not recycled because it is not cost-effective to do so (maybe because of how cheap it is and also because of the food contamination that goes with the territory). It almost definitely ends up in landfills, and only centuries of wait may see its end. Along the way, during those centuries, who know how much damage it causes to the living things that inadvertently ingest it.

So, all in all, recycling is not as easy as dumping anything plastic into the recycling bin; it is important to be aware of the differences between plastics. It is important also to educate ourselves about how to ensure that what we think we are recycling actually gets recycled. Styrofoam is best avoided. Maybe we need to leave repeated comments on restaurant websites that they should avoid using styrofoam-based to-go boxes, and instead switch to paper (like Chinese-takeout buckets).

I am not sure how well I will be able to follow all of my own suggestions. The intention here is to start thinking about these issues.

A couple of other interesting websites I found:

1.  http://www.townofcary.org/depts/pwdept/recycling/trivia.htm

2.  http://www.greensangha.org/PVCaction.PDF

Now, the question still remains. What do I do with the used PVC shower curtain liner? I don’t know if Cary recycles PVC. I need to find out and act accordingly. And maybe it is best to stop buying these liners, and instead switch to a cloth-only liner or some bio-degradable variety.