Plastic recycling has taken a big hit in the mainstream media over the last couple of years. Thanks to explosive reports detailing how miserably post-consumer plastic recycling has failed, it has become fashionable for those opposed to plastic to claim that recycling is no longer a viable possibility. Therefore, the only hope for saving the planet is to eliminate plastic altogether.
First of all, eliminating plastic is not going to happen. We rely too heavily on it. Second, there is an enormous difference between post-consumer and post-industrial plastic recycling. The recycling failures everyone talks about are related almost exclusively to recycling single-use, post-consumer plastics. Critics do not talk much about post-industrial plastic recycling, probably because it’s highly successful.
Seraphim Plastics is a Tennessee company that purchases and recycles post-industrial plastic scrap in seven states. They are not alone. Other recyclers across the country do the exact same thing that Seraphim does. So why do they succeed when post-consumer recycling has been such a colossal failure? Their success lies in three key advantages.
1. Waste Is Known and Controllable
Recyclers like Seraphim are purchasing and recycling plastic waste. It could be purged and cutoffs from a plastics manufacturer or stacks of plastic pallets that are no longer usable within the logistics sector. Post-industrial recyclers have an advantage inasmuch as this waste is known and controllable.
When Seraphim sends a truck to pick up a load of purge and cutoffs, they know exactly what they are getting: plastic waste produced during the manufacturing process. They also know the waste has been controlled by the manufacturer from start to finish. There will be no sorting required at Seraphim’s facility. This leads directly to the next point.
2. Waste Arrives for Recycling Uncontaminated
One of the biggest challenges in post-consumer recycling is contamination. Plastic food packages and beverage bottles are contaminated by the very substances they hold. But they can be contaminated by other things as well. Excessive contamination can make an entire load of post-consumer recyclables useless.
Contamination is rarely a problem in the post-industrial world. Recyclers will not purchase contaminated loads. Sellers know that, so they make the effort to ensure that their plastic waste is clean. Not only that, but they also make sure that no load is contaminated by other materials – including those types of plastics that the recycler will not take.
Eliminating contamination eliminates the two things that make post-consumer recycling so hard: cleaning and sorting. A recycler picks up an uncontaminated load, transports it back to its processing facility, and immediately recycles it. There are no intermediate processes involved.
3. Post-Industrial Recycling Has a Built-In Incentive
Fairness dictates admitting that customers who sell their plastic waste need to put some effort into avoiding contamination. They could more easily throw it away. But companies like Seraphim Plastics purchase the waste from them. This provides a built-in incentive. Companies are willing to put forth a minimal amount of effort in exchange for being able to sell their plastic waste to a recycler.
A company that manufactures plastic products can turn its purge and cut-off waste inter revenue. They can also use that recycled waste in future manufacturing. It is a double win for them. Similarly, any industrial concern with plastic that would otherwise be discarded can turn it into a revenue stream.
Post-industrial plastic recycling has multiple advantages over its post-consumer counterpart. The fact that industrial recyclers succeed points to something else: we could make post-consumer recycling equally successful if we scrapped the current model and copied what industrial recyclers do. However, the chances of that happening are slim to none.
