McDonald's Corp. funds polypropylene recycling grant

The Recycling Partnership (TRP), a Washington-based nonprofit organization focused on improving recycling systems, has awarded its 100^th recycling facility grant to Elkhart, Indiana-based RecyclingWorks Inc. The grant is possible, in part, to a new multimillion-dollar grant provided by McDonald’s Corp., the latest company to join TRP’s Polypropylene Recycling Coalition.

“Since its start in 2020, the Polypropylene Recycling Coalition has awarded $13 million in grant funding across 51 facilities,” says Brittany LaValley, vice president of material advancement at TRP. “These grants have enabled over 46 million people in the U.S. to have new or improved access to recycle this valuable material. Now, we can honor their hard work by ensuring this material makes it to processors and is given a new life.” 

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The coalition brings together stakeholders from across the polypropylene (PP) value chain to increase capture, sortation and processing of the material and to provide education and outreach. The Elkhart facility will use the grant to transition from PP hand sorting to machine sorting. This is the third grant provided by TRP to the Elkhart facility. The other grants supported the capture of aluminum and the capture of polyethylene terephthalate (PET), respectively.

“We’re committed to increasing recycling access and advancing infrastructure at material recovery facilities to support our customers in the recycling of McDonald’s packaging products, and this investment in The Recycling Partnership’s Polypropylene Recycling Coalition is an important step towards our goal to increase polypropylene cup recovery across the U.S.,” says Kendra Levine, director of U.S. sustainability at McDonald’s. “Without proper sortation at recycling facilities, we cannot deliver what we all want—better recycling and a cleaner environment.” 

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“The grant provided to our facility by The Recycling Partnership will enable us to install additional optical sortation equipment to achieve higher recovery rate and purity,” says Daniel Zelaya, plant manager at RecyclingWorks Inc. “This will enable us to service our local communities plus any new municipal contracts we take on in the future.”

The coalition also recently awarded eleven grants to Balcones, Taylor, Texas; GFL, Traverse City, Michigan; West Tennessee Hub, Chester, Tennessee; Metrolina, Mecklenburg County, North Carolina; the Resource Recovery and Recycling Authority of Southwest Oakland County (RRRASOC), Southfield, Michigan; Olmsted County Minnesota; and four grants to Casella locations in Auburn, Massachusetts; Charlestown, Massachusetts; Lewiston, Maine; and Willimantic, Connecticut. 

“One of the key challenges with recycling polypropylene is the ability to separate it from other plastics,” says Spence Davenport, senior director of processing advancement at TRP. “This grant will address that challenge head-on by helping RecyclingWorks invest in advanced sorting technology. This is a continuation of our commitment to ensure polypropylene can be delivered to processors and stay out of landfills.”   

The Polypropylene Recycling Coalition says it will continue to work with recycling facilities and the communities they serve to ensure polypropylene is diverted from landfills and given a second life through proper capture, sortation and reprocessing.