Plastic-Fantastic?

I was curious to see what this indicator light was actually made of. Obviously it is made of plastic, but what plastic is used for the construction of car parts? It turns out that many different plastics are used for cars but for parts found on the outside, like this indicator light, it is a mixture of Polycarbonate (PC)- used in a multitude of consumer and engineering products because of its high impact resistance, temperature resistance and optical properties - and Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) - used to make a range of products from musical instruments (recorders and plastic clarinets) to Lego, pressure-piping, golf club heads, furniture edging and joinery panels!
These plastic are both ‘Thermoplastics’, which means they can be melted down into liquid form and re-shaped and frozen, back into a hard, glassy-state. This is very interesting.

In fact there has been a lot of movement in the automobile industry to make new plastics because of the drive to reduce weight and hence increase fuel efficiency, for many years now. However, the gains that have been made in reducing weight in cars through the use of plastics have been negated by additional parts in new cars, replacing that weight, and so there has been no real saving in fuel efficiency overall. Also, although many new plastics being developed for use in cars can be recycled, when cars are put through the mill, as it were, at the end of their ‘cycle’, there is little effort to separate the plastics from other materials and so it rarely gets recycled. There has been a ‘drive’ to create processes that allow the extraction of these plastics in the still rather crude process of dismantling / crushing of cars at the end of their 'life' but I think this is a rather vulgar reminder of our place and responsibility at the crest of the cycle of life on our planet. Maybe we should think harder about how industry waste can feedback into the life cycle of our planet so that our ecology might benefit. After all, we can only purchase products that are made by industry, so surely the onus is on governments to enforce policies that ensure any product of industry has a process that re-uses or recycles its component parts / materials, no? Maybe these can be sold on and used to make a profit. It seems ridiculous that, given the international focus on climate change AND the issues surrounding sustainability that this hasn’t happened already. But what do I know, I’m just an artist!
Some technology has been developed to turn some plastics back into fuel, but this is a complex and expensive process that involves creating more greenhouse gasses and is not 100% efficient or widely available at a cost effective price (yet). And that is the crux of the problem really. For an industry that moves extremely fast, it's reactions, and those of governments, to the 'social cost' of its produce is far too slow - and we are literally paying the price for it.