Plastic Waste Needs Recycling Champions

February 20, 2018 – When we returned from Costa Rica this week we were swamped with things to do and I went out at bought a ready-made chicken for our dinner. The chicken comes in a plastic container that is stamped recyclable. The bottom is black plastic. The top is clear. In Toronto, I can put the clear plastic into the recycling bins in our apartment. The black plastic bottom, even though it is marked recyclable, I cannot. That’s because Toronto has no market for recycled dark plastics, brown and black.

The world needs recycling champions that can accept all types of plastics for reuse so that very little new plastic needs to be manufactured from petroleum products. In looking around for answers to improved plastic recycling I ran across the Association of Plastic Recyclers (APR). This organization has recently launched a campaign to increase the demand for recycled plastics while advocating for improved recycling programs throughout North America.

Companies on board include:

• Nestle
• Denton Plastics
• Champion Polymer Recycling
• Berry Global
• Campbells Soup Co.
• Coca-Cola North America
• Envision Plastics
• Keurig Green Mountain, Inc.
• KW Plastics
• Merlin Plastics
• Plastipak/Clean Tech Inc.,
•  Procter & Gamble Company
• Target Corp.

All these companies are committed to maximizing the use and reuse of plastic polymers and resins. The initial reuse involves turning waste plastic into pallets for warehousing, replacing the use of wood. In one company 250,000 plastic pallets made from recycled resins replaced wooden ones saving thousands of trees while removing thousands of tons of plastic from landfill.

Plastic recycling and reuse isn’t the only answer to the plastic problem that today adds more than 30 million tons of the stuff to landfill in the U.S. alone annually and contaminates the oceans of the world at the rate of 13,000 pieces per square kilometer. Six years ago I wrote about one company, Phoenix Depot International, a Markham, Ontario startup, that takes any kind of plastic waste and puts it through a zero-emission cooking process to yield diesel, gasoline, and black carbon, the latter having a number of commercial uses.

Phoenix is one of a number of companies using waste plastic as a resource to create valuable commercial products from fuels to building materials. Plastic should never end up in a landfill, or in the ocean. The governments that have allowed these materials to become part of our convenient daily lives should be obligated to ensure that this human-created problem for the environment goes away more than 70 years after we began it.