The tide may finally be turning for scrap plastic harvested in the electronics recycling process, with new processes creating additional consuming customers who can create a legitimate secondary commodity market.
In a session on the topic at the E-Scrap 2004 event, held in mid-October in Minneapolis, a panel of speakers addressed the overall demand for scrap plastic in China as well as some improved technologies that can upgrade this mixed stream as factors in the improved demand and pricing.
Speaking on behalf of the American Plastics Council, Tom Kingsbury of Dow Chemical Co., Midland, Mich., acknowledged the past challenges of recycling this mixed stream of engineered plastics, but says sorting advances and manufacturing innovations are improving circumstances.
Noting that the stream consists of ABS, HIPS and PC/ABS blends, among some 20 or so other resin types, Kingsbury says this mixture is “absolutely not” a barrier to recycling. “The industry saw this coming and has researched it,” he added, noting that the plastics industry helped fund sorting research carried out by MBA Polymers and others.
Kingsbury also remarked that the large global resin producers were not likely to jump into the fray as major producers of recycled resins. “Our processes are not well-suited to handled recycled streams,” he commented, pointing to Union Carbide as a company that lost about $30 million trying to compete with entrepreneurs in the recycling sector.
With most electronic goods now being manufactured in Asia, Kingsbury said that recyclers hoping to sell scrap plastic and secondary resins back into that market would almost surely have to export to there. But other markets are forming in North America, he noted. “I have full faith in the entrepreneurs in this group,” he stated.
A presentation by Dewey Pitts of IBM Corp. spelled out how that company’s use of recycled resins peaked at 10 percent in 2000 and now stands at about 5.5 percent.
According to Pitts, obsolete computers are being collected, and processes to use recycled resins exist, but “what’s needed are ‘gap companies’ to develop a business of sorting and cleaning these plastics.”
University of Wisconsin professor Tom Osswald conducted a pilot program that addresses those very ‘gap’ processes. Working with a local electronics recycler and a resins compounder, Osswald used a thermo-kinetic process that allowed the compounder to produce pellets that could fetch 30 to 34 cents per pound on the resins market.
He believes that recyclers teaming with compounders to produce such products can upgrade the market for the plastic monitor and computer housings harvested by electronics recyclers. “Right now this plastic is baled and shipped to China at a price of two to five cents per pound,” says Osswald. “But these materials are better than that; they should go to a much higher application.”