Norway has joined the list of countries which has taken recycling plastic to a new level. The Scandinavian country now boasts a 97 per cent recycling rate, according to Huffpost. It has declared that plastic bottles do not belong to the people but are on loan.
Customers can now exchange plastic bottles in stores, petrol stations, or reverse vending machines located in public places for either money or store credit.
Plastic producers in Norway are subject to an Environment tax where the more plastic they recycle, the less tax they have to pay. If they reach a recycling rate of 95 per cent, they are exempt from paying the tax at all. The plastic bottles can be recycled into textiles, packaging material and other plastic items.
Norway is not the only country which has taken painstaking efforts to recycle plastic and protect the environment. Sweden is using its garbage to power electricity in at least 1 million homes across the country. The garbage is burnt to form heat energy which in turn produces electricity. A problem that Sweden is now battling is that it has now run out of garbage and is forced to import garbage from Norway.
Another country with an innovative method of recycling garbage is Belgium. Once a car is recycled and only the shredder waste remains, technology helps to recover raw materials from the waste, according to babble.com.
Other countries like Italy and Japan, impose heavy fines on its residents if they do not segregate their waste, recycle it and also, in the case of Italy, not have a recycle bin within 500m of their front door.
