Even though plastic is a highly dangerous material present today but still very popular in use, hence evolved itself for an amazing presence in this world. There are no products in the market which can replace plastic or even share the responsibilities. Plastic come with some serious ecological disadvantages that causes environmental harm and chemical risk but its use can’t be avoided completely. The requirement has lead to development of proper storage silos for plastic or some methods in order to keep plastic safe.
Why need proper methods or storage silos for plastic?
By proper method or storage silos for plastic we mean some storage methods or mechanism which can deal with the negative chemical effects plastic has. Plastics have the property of degrading itself on exposure to sunlight (UV rays), pollutants, oxygen and many other compounds and on degrading plastic produce many harmful chemicals and acidic materials hence they need to be kept safe from these compounds to avoid degradation.
Well silos actually mean to “keep the product in isolation” but it is not possible every time so here for plastics we can use some methods and techniques to keep it safe from degrading.
The first method to make into our list is use of Absorbents.
1. Absorbents: The most popular way to tackle the problem of degradation of plastics. The basic function of absorbents is that it slow down the degradation of plastics.
Functioning:
The basic function is that the absorbents absorbs the gases or the compounds present in the atmosphere who are responsible for degradation or accelerating the breakdown process of plastics.
Common Absorbents:
a. Activated carbon
b. Silica gel
c. Zeolites
These are amongst the most frequently used adsorbents.
How to use:
An adsorbent can be used in several ways. They can either be placed in the storage silos for plastic inside a paper envelope. The silo used can be any standard storage chamber. They can also be installed in the filter system of the chamber.
2. Another trick for having a safe storage for plastic is to keep and store them at a low temperature environment. Plastics usually degrade in presence of heat so avoiding this condition can help in reducing or slowing down the degradation of plastic.
Functioning:
Usually a basic to basic chemical reaction requires slight amount of heat and in case of plastic degradation a temperature of 10 degree is required.
How to use:
Storing the plastic at negative – 20 to – 10 degree can help increasing the life of plastic by not allowing the heat exposure for any chemical degradation to occur. Hence freezing the plastic is never a bad idea.
So, folks there are several methods to avoid the degradation, I have already discussed two most famous ways among them. So plastic being an integral part of today’s industrialized era can’t be fully ignored but the damage it performs to human and environment can be reduced by not allowing its degradation. These tricks can really help making the storage methods or storage silos for plastics more secure.
