Some plastics may be challenging to recycle, but doing so is not impossible, according to panelists at the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI) 2016 Convention & Exposition, held April 2-7 at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas.
Speakers in the session “Emerging Opportunities and Exploring Niche Plastics” explained how they are collecting and recycling polyvinyl chloride (PVC), agricultural plastic film and carpet.
Speakers in the session “Emerging Opportunities and Exploring Niche Plastics” explained how they are collecting and recycling polyvinyl chloride (PVC), agricultural plastic film and carpet.
Ed Pilpel, president of Polystrand, an Englewood, Colorado-based developer of fiber-reinforced polymer composites, provided an update on thermoplastic composites related to windmills.
Troy Burgess, CEO, Central States Reprocessing LLC (CSR), Lincoln, Nebraska, said he has been in the PVC extrusion business for 22 years. CSR opened its doors in 2010, recycling high-density polyethylene (HDPE) and polypropylene (PP) for the composite decking industry. In 2013, the company added a PVC recycling division as a result of customer demand, Burgess said. The company today converts 10 million pounds of PVC.
CSR learned quickly that the four main types of PVC—siding, window, pipe and fence—do not mix well with PP materials, Burgess said. Shutters are typically PP, and they cannot be mixed with PVC materials. Without commingling the material with PP, he said PVC can be recycled six times before its quality is degraded.
“We found that with PVC, it will not commingle with PP,” Burgess said.
He detailed hurdles recyclers of PVC face, including the belief that recycled PVC regrinds are inferior to virgin resins; building codes controlled and directed by large corporations that have a competitive advantage to use virgin resin; and applications for recycled materials.
Additionally, when collecting various types of PVC, Burgess said sometimes other materials are mixed in with the PVC loads and should be removed. These examples include concrete and other debris with fencing; glass and other non-PVC materials on windows; foam backings on siding; and chlorinated polyvinyl chloride (CPVC) and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) mixed with PVC pipe and most customers cannot process them together.
As CSR processes three different grades of PVC—A, B and C—Burgess said it is even more important to ensure materials are properly separated prior to being sent to the recycler. Sorting machines can separate the difficult-to-recycle plastics by color; however, they cannot sort by material type. As is the case with CSR, Burgess said he must pull out unlike materials by hand. If the materials are mixed, the quality is downgraded, as well as CSR’s total revenue from that load.
“When we get mixed bales of PVC siding, I have to manually go in,” Burgess explained. “I can sort by color all day long; but, if I want to separate siding, window, pipe and fence, I have to physically sort it out.”
Burgess said there have been some regional changes in the U.S., helping to increase the amount of end users who are willing to use recycled PVC in their products.
In addition to regional, PVC recycling is seasonal, Burgess said. CSR can bring in two to three trucks each day during the warm months, getting overwhelmed at times, whereas once winter hits, “I go on vacation,” he said.
Burgess provided this example during his presentation, citing Nebraska-based pricing: An average home siding replacement job is 38 square feet, with an average weight of 60 pounds per square feet. This equals to 2,240 pounds of recyclable product, with an average selling price of 5 cents per pound. The profit would be $112 per job. This outcome versus an average disposal cost of the same job at $80 per ton would result in disposal of the same material costing $89.90.
Market prices for plastics over the last year and a half have been the hardest to sell on The Southern Waste Information eXchange Inc. (SWIX), said Gene Jones, SWIX CEO and president. SWIX, Tallahassee, Florida, is a free service designed to help businesses, industries and other organizations find markets for materials they have traditionally discarded. Registered users can post wanted and available listings, similar to a classified ad section.
“It doesn’t look very good for the next few years, which means there will be a lot of feedstocks,” Jones said. “There are a lot of films we have the opportunity to use in fuels.”
One of those niche plastics is agricultural film. Jones explained how 40,000 tons of agricultural film is generated annually in the state of Florida. Workers pull the film out by hand, pile it up and at the end of the season burn the piles, landfilling the leftover charred material.
The agricultural film is covered in contaminants—up to 70 percent soil and moisture—and ridding of this contamination took some trial and error efforts, Jones said. He said Norman Millner, who owned a machinery manufacturing company for 55 years, invented a machine to roll the film up into a tight roll. Simply letting the agricultural film air out prior to being rolled results in much less soil contamination.
The result: Tons of plastic film has been sold to Oklahoma, Texas, Malaysia, Romania, Mexico and China, to name a few areas, Jones said.
Jones’ next trial-and-error efforts will involve motor oil containers. He is working on a way to empty the bottles completely and recycling the plastic containers.
The ISRI 2016 Convention & Exposition was April 2-7 at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas.
Troy Burgess, CEO, Central States Reprocessing LLC (CSR), Lincoln, Nebraska, said he has been in the PVC extrusion business for 22 years. CSR opened its doors in 2010, recycling high-density polyethylene (HDPE) and polypropylene (PP) for the composite decking industry. In 2013, the company added a PVC recycling division as a result of customer demand, Burgess said. The company today converts 10 million pounds of PVC.
CSR learned quickly that the four main types of PVC—siding, window, pipe and fence—do not mix well with PP materials, Burgess said. Shutters are typically PP, and they cannot be mixed with PVC materials. Without commingling the material with PP, he said PVC can be recycled six times before its quality is degraded.
“We found that with PVC, it will not commingle with PP,” Burgess said.
He detailed hurdles recyclers of PVC face, including the belief that recycled PVC regrinds are inferior to virgin resins; building codes controlled and directed by large corporations that have a competitive advantage to use virgin resin; and applications for recycled materials.
Additionally, when collecting various types of PVC, Burgess said sometimes other materials are mixed in with the PVC loads and should be removed. These examples include concrete and other debris with fencing; glass and other non-PVC materials on windows; foam backings on siding; and chlorinated polyvinyl chloride (CPVC) and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) mixed with PVC pipe and most customers cannot process them together.
As CSR processes three different grades of PVC—A, B and C—Burgess said it is even more important to ensure materials are properly separated prior to being sent to the recycler. Sorting machines can separate the difficult-to-recycle plastics by color; however, they cannot sort by material type. As is the case with CSR, Burgess said he must pull out unlike materials by hand. If the materials are mixed, the quality is downgraded, as well as CSR’s total revenue from that load.
“When we get mixed bales of PVC siding, I have to manually go in,” Burgess explained. “I can sort by color all day long; but, if I want to separate siding, window, pipe and fence, I have to physically sort it out.”
Burgess said there have been some regional changes in the U.S., helping to increase the amount of end users who are willing to use recycled PVC in their products.
In addition to regional, PVC recycling is seasonal, Burgess said. CSR can bring in two to three trucks each day during the warm months, getting overwhelmed at times, whereas once winter hits, “I go on vacation,” he said.
Burgess provided this example during his presentation, citing Nebraska-based pricing: An average home siding replacement job is 38 square feet, with an average weight of 60 pounds per square feet. This equals to 2,240 pounds of recyclable product, with an average selling price of 5 cents per pound. The profit would be $112 per job. This outcome versus an average disposal cost of the same job at $80 per ton would result in disposal of the same material costing $89.90.
Market prices for plastics over the last year and a half have been the hardest to sell on The Southern Waste Information eXchange Inc. (SWIX), said Gene Jones, SWIX CEO and president. SWIX, Tallahassee, Florida, is a free service designed to help businesses, industries and other organizations find markets for materials they have traditionally discarded. Registered users can post wanted and available listings, similar to a classified ad section.
“It doesn’t look very good for the next few years, which means there will be a lot of feedstocks,” Jones said. “There are a lot of films we have the opportunity to use in fuels.”
One of those niche plastics is agricultural film. Jones explained how 40,000 tons of agricultural film is generated annually in the state of Florida. Workers pull the film out by hand, pile it up and at the end of the season burn the piles, landfilling the leftover charred material.
The agricultural film is covered in contaminants—up to 70 percent soil and moisture—and ridding of this contamination took some trial and error efforts, Jones said. He said Norman Millner, who owned a machinery manufacturing company for 55 years, invented a machine to roll the film up into a tight roll. Simply letting the agricultural film air out prior to being rolled results in much less soil contamination.
The result: Tons of plastic film has been sold to Oklahoma, Texas, Malaysia, Romania, Mexico and China, to name a few areas, Jones said.
Jones’ next trial-and-error efforts will involve motor oil containers. He is working on a way to empty the bottles completely and recycling the plastic containers.
The ISRI 2016 Convention & Exposition was April 2-7 at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas.