ORNL (Oak Ridge National Labratories) has discovered a new way to recycle plastics apparently

First before talking about this new development I would just to briefly tell you how plastics are made. All plastics, believe it or not, are all derived from petroleum. And if you have been paying attention to what is going on in the world for the past ten or more years we have been engaged in at least three wars over the very oil that is used to synthesize plastic from. These wars would be the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and even more recently the war in Libya. All of these wars were primarily over oil!

Anyway now onto the recycling story-- the researchers at ORNL have discovered a new way to recycle plastic bags. To accomplish this the plastic bags have to go through a spinning process combined with sulfonation. According to this article at this point the plastic can more or less be customized.

In fact you can turn the plastic bags into a much more valuable product. This product can then become fibers in products such as car parts. But it is my belief from reading this article that much more can be made out of it then just simply car parts. Plus you have a virtually endless supply of plastic bags to make these fibers out of. Additionally these fibers have an excellent weight-to-strength ratio that manufacturers now require. But this process does not just stop there, because things such as carpet can be recycled by using this method. And I dare say that more products will be recycled i this manner in the years to come.