[GreenYes] NYTimes.com Article: Plastic Recycling Is a Work in Progress

[Ted Smith <tsmith@svtc.org>]

> This article from
> NYTimes.com 
> has been sent to you by tsmith@igc.org.
>
> Plastic Recycling Is a Work in Progress
>
> March 30, 2002 
>
> By CLAUDIA H. DEUTSCH
>
> At first glance, plastics recycling looks like an economic
> and environmental success story. 
>
> Consider, for example, that about 25 percent of the
> polyethylene fiber in Tyvek - a DuPont product used in
> envelopes, disposable medical suits and insulation - comes
> from jugs that once held milk or water. Fleece garments are
> increasingly made of old soda bottles. "Plastic lumber,"
> made in part from milk jugs, increasingly substitutes for
> wood in decking and outdoor furniture, and the Plastic
> Lumber Trade Association is testing the product for
> rot-resistant bridges. 
>
> EvCo Research, an Atlanta company, is using recycled
> beverage bottles to make water-repellent coatings on boxes
> for shipping fruits and meats. The TEWA Technology
> Corporation of Albuquerque is using shredded plastic in
> asphalt. 
>
> Yet few companies have achieved the economies of scale that
> could make recycling pay. 
>
> Manufacturers say they cannot get a stream of high-quality
> material at a reasonable price. Recycling companies say
> they cannot guarantee such a stream until sales grow robust
> enough to drive down costs. 
>
> "It's a chicken-and-egg situation," said Gil Friend,
> president of Natural Logic, an environmental consulting
> firm in Berkeley, Calif. 
>
> Two years ago, environmentalists, manufacturers and
> recyclers founded Business and Environmentalists in an
> Alliance for Recycling - known as BEAR - to jump-start
> plastics recycling. So far, it has only compiled data. 
>
> "We had a high objective, finding a way to recycle 80
> percent of plastics," said the manager of the alliance,
> Edward T. Boisson, an environmental consultant in
> Pittsboro, N.C. "We didn't get there." 
>
> The results of the impasse are easy to spot. According to
> the Environmental Protection Agency, nearly 95 percent of
> the 24.2 million tons of plastic waste generated each year
> goes unreclaimed. Plastics already take up a
> disproportionate amount of landfill space, and the glut is
> likely to worsen: studies show that as many as 500 million
> computers will be discarded over the next five years. 
>
> "Billions of pounds of plastics will not be dealt with in
> an environmentally benign way," said Ted Smith, executive
> director of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, an
> environmental group in San Jose, Calif. 
>
> Manufacturers acknowledge the problem. Beverage companies,
> although opposed to the spread of bills mandating return
> deposits on bottles beyond the 10 states that have such
> laws, are setting up their own retrieval programs. On Jan.
> 8, carpet manufacturers, environmental advocates and
> regulators signed the National Carpet Recycling Agreement,
> to promote carpet recycling. 
>
> Electronics companies have started "take back" programs 
> to
> collect discarded computers, printers and such. Similar
> programs are mandatory in much of Europe. Many companies
> are designing products to be easily disassembled, and
> stamping components with codes signifying their chemical
> composition. 
>
> But so far, few manufacturers are funneling all of their
> used plastics back into their products. PepsiCo
> (news/quote) experimented with a recycled bottle in the
> early 1990's, but "the economics were just not there," a
> spokesman recalled. Honeywell International (news/quote)
> tried making new fibers from old carpets; it "didn't pan
> out," a spokesman said, and Honeywell sold the business
> last year. 
>
> DuPont has reclaimed 72 million pounds of carpet in the
> last 10 years - enough to win it awards, but a tiny
> fraction of the four billion pounds of carpet that Mark C.
> Ryan, manager of environmental initiatives for Dupont
> Commercial Flooring, said wound up in landfills each year. 
>
> "Carpet recycling hasn't grown as fast as people expected,
> because the economics are fragile," he said. 
>
> Economics are not the only problem. The customers of
> Collins & Aikman Floor Coverings, a carpet manufacturer in
> Dalton, Ga., provide an inexpensive stream of used
> recyclable carpets. Still, some 40 percent of the fibers in
> Collins carpets are virgin plastic - and will be, until
> Collins is certain that its suppliers have perfected their
> recycling processes. Collins is a unit of Quad-C. 
>
> "We can't take a chance of defects affecting quality," 
> Lee
> H. Schilling, a senior vice president, said. 
>
> That concern is even more prevalent in the electronics
> industry. Each month, Hewlett-Packard (news/quote) ships
> 200,000 pounds of plastics from discarded computers and
> printers to recyclers. But it is turned into carpet backing
> and fuel pellets. Hewlett says the old plastics are a
> mélange unsuitable for new products. 
>
> "It would only make sense if we could make all of our
> products out of one uniform batch of recycled plastics,"
> said Renee St. Denis, who, as Hewlett's end-of-life process
> manager, grapples with such issues. 
>
> To make matters worse, even recycling's most ardent
> supporters often squabble among themselves. Beverage
> companies detest bottle bills; other users of recycled
> plastics want them passed. Environmental advocates want
> beverage companies to recycle old bottles into new ones,
> while carpet companies want the old bottles for themselves.
>
>
> Industry truces would not solve recycling's volatile
> economics. Virgin plastics are made from oil, recycled
> plastics from trash, so logic would suggest that recycled
> materials would be cheaper. But it is costly to collect,
> transport, sort and clean discarded plastics. And every
> time oil prices fall - and they fell by more than one-third
> last year - recycled plastic loses value. 
>
> "Recycled plastics are a commodity, and commodity prices
> are low," said Richard McCombs, chief operating officer of
> MBA Polymers, a company in Richmond, Calif., with a
> patented technology for separating plastics from
> electronics devices. 
>
> Moreover, items made of recycled plastics, while more
> durable, are expensive. EvCo's plastic coating runs about
> $2.50 a pound, compared with about 50 cents a pound for
> wax. The upfront cost of plastic decking can be twice that
> of wood. TEWA's asphalt is more expensive than asphalt made
> of rock and sand. 
>
> The manufacturers of these products say that less of their
> product is required by weight, and that their products
> perform better. But customers are not easy to convince. 
>
> "We're bottlenecked by end users who are resistant to
> change," said Len Cox, who handles TEWA's marketing. Alan
> E. Robbins, president of the plastic lumber association,
> echoed that complaint. "The folks who make wood are good at
> parrying our claims," he said. 
>
> Recyclers who do win customers over may still be stymied by
> the problem of getting waste plastic. 
>
> Most bottles are made of "pure" plastics - polyethylene
> terephthalate, or PET, for soda bottles, and high-density
> polyethylene for milk bottles - that are easily turned into
> carpets, plastic lumber or bottles. 
>
> Some 75 percent of the bottles the Coca-Cola Company
> (news/quote) uses in North America have 10 percent recycled
> content, and the company said it planned for all of its
> bottles to have recycled content by 2005. And Pepsi,
> despite its past disappointments with recycling, said last
> month that it, too, aimed to have 10 percent recylced
> content in all bottles by 2005. 
>
> But beverage companies have easy access to their old
> bottles. Coca-Cola collected discarded bottles at a Nascar
> event in Atlanta in November and at the Winter Olympic
> Games in Salt Lake City. Coke sent the Nascar plastic to a
> recycler; it will use the Olympics plastic itself. 
>
> But experts say that only bottle bills can give small
> companies access to the four billion PET bottles that end
> up on roadsides or in landfills each year. "The bottles are
> there, but getting them is a problem," said John G.
> Kokoszka, EvCo's vice president for operations. 
>
> The problems are even greater for those who want to reuse
> plastics from durable goods like computers. They contain
> blends of plastics, metals, glues and additives that are
> hard to separate. And, discarded bottles are usually a few
> months old. Discarded durables vary in age by decades, and
> can include plastics that are no longer used. 
>
> Some companies anticipated that problem. In the 1990's,
> I.B.M. (news/quote) began using the same plastic in several
> products, making them easier to recycle. Three years ago
> I.B.M. introduced the IntelliStation E Pro, a computer with
> plastic parts made almost entirely of recycled resins. 
>
> "We wanted to demonstrate that using recycled plastics was
> viable," said Wayne Balta, I.B.M.'s vice president for
> corporate environmental affairs. Mr. Balta said that
> I.B.M.'s goal was to eventually use recycled resins in most
> products. 
>
> Those goals may yet be attainable. Recycling companies are
> already experimenting with optical recognition technology
> and electric charges to separate plastics, and with
> solvents that remove glues and labels. 
>
> "Technology is no longer the major barrier to recycling,"
> said Michael M. Fisher, director of technology for the
> American Plastics Council. "People have to figure a way
> around the collection problems." 
>
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/30/business/30RECY.html?ex=1018520381&ei=1&en=838000936f327dfe
>
>
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Ted Smith
Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition/Campaign for Responsible Technology
760 N. First Street,San Jose, CA 95112
408-287-6707-phone;  408-287-6771-fax
http://www.svtc.org/svtc/
=========================================
Food for thought:  How Gandhi Defined the Seven Deadly Sins
ˇ Wealth without work; ˇ Pleasure without conscience; ˇ Knowledge without character;ˇ Commerce without morality;
ˇ Science without humanity;ˇ Worship without sacrifice;ˇ Politics without principle