Cope Plastics wins award

The International Association of Plastics Distribution has awarded its Environmental Excellence Award for Best Recycling Program to Cope Plastics, a distributor and fabricator of plastic sheet, rod and tube headquartered in Alton, Illinois.

The company was singled out for expanding its recycling program to include 36 different grades of plastic, which make up close to 90 percent of the material the company distributed or consumed.

The expansion of its recycling program resulted from opening a supply scrap channel for five different polyvinyl chloride (PVC) types. The company says its new PVC outlet is forecasted to keep an additional 200,000 pounds of PVC scrap out of landfills each year.

In 2012, Cope says it began a concentrated effort to regain scrap from customers. From July 2012 through June 2013 the company received 141,575 pounds of scrap plastics. The next year, the company saw the amount of plastic scrap collected from customers climb to 604,053 pounds from July 2013 to June 2014. Meanwhile, the company notes that the number of customers taking part in the program increased by 129 percent.

To further increase its recycling efforts, last July Cope added a single-stream recycling program for employees to recycle cardboard, post-consumer plastic, steel and aluminum cans and glass and paper containers. The program offers recycling to more than 100 company employees who live in communities too small to offer curbside recycling. This program is responsible for an additional 200,000 pounds of post-consumer waste being collected for recycling.

Other recipients of the IAPD’s 2014 Environmental Excellence Awards are the following:

• Best New Program: Polymer Industries, which implemented programs that reduced its waste from 4 million pounds per year to 400,000 pounds per year.
• Best Overall Program: Laird Plastics, which was cited for its efforts to collect, analyze and report environmental data to corporate leadership, customers and manufacturers. Laird’s recent accomplishments include recycling at 50 of its facilities and hundreds of customers throughout North America.