Every time a municipality shuts down its recycling program, it is understood that the program’s failure was due to financial losses. Municipalities just cannot seem to make enough money on recycling to justify its cost. But does that mean recycling cost-effectively is impossible? Not at all. For proof, we need look no further than pre-consumer plastics.
Pre-consumer plastics are identical to their post-consumer counterparts in molecular structure, chemical composition, and form. The one distinguishing feature that makes them easily recyclable perfectly illustrates why municipalities and private trash haulers have struggled for decades to recycle post-consumer plastics.
Plastic That Has Never Been Used
Seraphim Plastics, a Tennessee company that specializes in recycling industrial plastic waste, succinctly explained what pre-consumer plastics are in a 2022 blog post. According to the company, pre-consumer plastics are plastics that are intended to ultimately wind up in the hands of consumers but never actually do.
Seraphim cited the example of plastic food containers. They suggested a scenario in which a run of thousands of food containers came off the line only to display some kind of flaw that prevented the manufacturer from selling them to a food processor. As such, the containers had to be discarded.
The hypothetical containers were intended to eventually make it to consumers. They did not. But guess what? They could be easily recycled thanks to one simple fact: they have never been used. They are clean and uncontaminated. They are not mixed with any other plastics or materials like paper and glass. They could go right to any plastic recycler with a mechanical process for turning them into plastic regrind.
How Industrial Plastics Are Recycled
It turns out that industrial plastics are recycled via a similar process. Imagine a load of plastic trays no longer needed by a wholesale bakery distributor. They have reached end-of-life. The trays are purchased by an industrial plastic recycler, transformed into regrind through a mechanical recycling process, and sold as feedstock to manufacturers who will turn it into new plastic products.
This is exactly what Seraphim Plastics does every day. There are other companies around the country that do the exact same thing. The key to their success is purchasing plastics that have already been cleaned and sorted. Not having to clean and sort themselves is what makes industrial plastic recycling profitable.
The One Big Difference
Getting back to the original point, the one significant difference between pre-consumer and post-consumer plastics is use. Pre-consumer plastics have never been used. They do not have to be cleaned and sorted in order to be recycled. They can go from manufacturing plant directly to recycler without any intermediate processes. Not so with post-consumer plastics.
Post-consumer plastics rarely go into curbside recycling bins totally clean. Not only that, but recycling bin loads also consist of different types of plastics along with paper, glass, and cardboard. But it gets worse. A lot of post-consumer plastic loads are contaminated by food and other trash that should be discarded in the garbage can. Making matters worse still is the fact that just a little bit of contamination can ruin an entire truckload of recyclable plastics.
It is About Cleaning and Sorting
The fact that pre-consumer and post-consumer plastics are identical provides a great lesson on recycling: successful recycling is all about cleaning and sorting. If we could solve that particular problem within the post-consumer industrial space, we could effectively recycle a lot more plastic than we currently do.
Does anyone have any workable suggestions? The plastic recycling industry is ready and waiting to accept clean and sorted post-consumer plastics.
