Arkansas Recycling Coalition: New Tricks for Old Dogs

For recycling coordinators and MRF operators, glass bottles, folding cartons and aseptic packaging can be difficult materials to connect with end markets.

Those attending a session at the Arkansas Recycling Coalition’s 2011 Annual Conference heard presentations that offered some good news regarding these sometime troublesome markets.

MRF and drop-off center operators throughout Arkansas have a new outlet for glass containers in the form of Ripple Glass LLC, based in Kansas City, Mo. According to the company’s Debbie Utter, Ripple Glass is aggressively searching Arkansas for glass bottles of all colors.

The company supplies an Owens Corning plant near Kansas City with a crushed three-color glass sand-like mixture that the building products company uses as an ingredient in insulation.

Utter says the Owens Corning plant uses around 150,000 tons per year of the fine crushed glass. Even if Ripple was able to collect all the estimated 80,000 tons of bottle glass generated in Kansas City, it would need to seek out glass in adjacent states like Arkansas to meet the factory’s demands.

She said Ripple is working to source trailer loads of material, either from MRFs or larger collection centers in Arkansas, or suggested that smaller drop-off centers could work together to create joint staging areas for glass bottles.

Michele Wagner of the Carton Council, Vernon Hills, Ill., provided an update on that group’s efforts to boost the recyclability of gable-top and aseptic beverage cartons.

The Council’s goal in part is to meet a requirement set by the Federal Trade Commission that 50 percent of the American public “have access to recycling” a type of package in order for that package to have the “chasing arrows” recycling logo on it.

When the Carton Council, which is funded by carton manufacturers and consumer products companies, started its efforts just 22 percent of Americans had access. That figure has risen to 34 percent, said Wagner, and the group is working hard to raise the figure.

Wagner said the Council has found a willing end user in the form of tissue mills, which can pulp the cartons and screen out the LDPE plastic layers and aluminum foil layers in their pulping process. What they are left with is a good source of pulp with long fibers and no ink included.

The next challenge is helping MRF operators identify ways to effectively and affordably separate cartons from other materials in their sorting plants. Provided MRFs can do this, said Wagner, recycling coordinators are usually willing to add cartons to their collected mix.

Wagner said the Carton Council has helped pay for the installation of more than 10 optical sorters to help MRF operators do this, with other funds earmarked for additional installations.

David Rives of Revolution Bag, Little Rock, Ark., let session attendees know that his company is using post-consumer recycled-content resins in the production of trash bags designed for hospitals, schools and other institutional users.

Rives says Revolution Bag’s line of recycled-content products can help buyers earn LEED points and meet state, local or federal recycled-content purchasing guidelines or mandates.

Revolution Bag is a subsidiary of Delta Plastics, a Little Rock-based company that collects and processes plastic irrigation tubing and other agricultural plastic scrap to make a wide variety of finished products.

The Arkansas Recycling Coalition’s 21st Annual Conference & Trade Show was Sept. 19-21 in Eureka Springs, Ark.