Category Archives: PET Plastic

PET Plastic

Recycling Grants For Cities and Towns

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The Dr Pepper Snapple Group and Keep America Beautiful have recently announced the recipients in their collaborative Recycling Bin grant awards for public parks and spaces. This is the first such that the funding opportunities was made available to cities, towns, and community groups.

The focus of the grant was to help municipalities promote recycling in public settings including playgrounds, beaches and swimming areas, athletic fields, parks, walking and biking trails, and other natural settings. Increased visibility and available of recycling bins contributes to a decrease in litter and garbage waste.

In total, thirty three grants were awarded to agencies in twenty three states. A total of seven hundred and ten permanent recycling containers will be distributed. The most popular use for the bins will be at athletic fields followed by neighborhood parks and walking paths.

The grant program is part of Dr Pepper Snapple Group’s environmental strategic plan which also includes improving energy and water use in its beverage production process, reducing manufacturing waste and packaging.

WasteCare Wants You to Remember: If you’re a city administrator grappling with trash and recycling problems at your local recreation spots, considering investigating grant opportunities like the one offered by Dr Pepper Snapple Group. Having a few recycling bins  may help to keep the space free of little and encourage visitors to recycle more!

How To Recycle Single Use Coffee Pods

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Single-cup coffee makers are now a staple in today’s workplace. They can be found in staff break-rooms, kitchens, and customer reception areas. While they are very convenient and appreciated by those wanting a fresh cup of coffee or tea, the single serving pods do cause both an environmental and waste disposal concern as they are not recyclable.

It is anticipated that thirteen percent of the adults in the United States drink single-serving brewed coffee every day. This percentage is expected to increase each year as the popularity of the machines continue to grow. Luckily, coffee manufacturers are attempting to address the waste generation and recycling issue.

Most single-cup pods are made from a mix of plastic, aluminum, coffee grounds and paper. Each of those items can be recycled individually, but not when combined which is beyond the abilities of standard municipal recycling services.

Some waste reduction solutions do exist. TerraCycle provides recycling for used coffee pods and has diverted close to twenty five million capsules from landfills since 2009. Green Mountain also offers a workplace program for composting coffee grounds and recycling materials.

WasteCare Wants You to Remember: If your business relies on single serving coffee makers, take some time and look at how much waste they produce. You may discover that participating in a recycling program, or switching back to the old fashioned coffee pot, will save you more money!

Keeping Bottles And Cans Out Of Landfills

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The Governor of Tennessee, Bill Haslam, recently signed into law a bill designed to keep plastic bottles and aluminum cans from being disposed of in regional landfills.

The new law offers financial incentives to all municipalities in Tennessee which provide recycling services to their residential and business members. The Recycling Development Council for the Southeast sees the new law as an important step in keeping valuable plastic and aluminum in the recycling stream and out of the waste stream. Both plastic and aluminum are waste resources that have manufacturing markets waiting and eager  to buy them if they are separated them trash to be recycled. Having more plastic and aluminum available for re-use also helps the state in job creation, supports economic development in the “green” industry sector, and helps to reduce strain on landfills in addition to reducing the cost associated with trash disposal.

WasteCare Wants You to Remember: Sometimes offering an incentive can be a big help to changing behavior. If you’re trying to get your employees to recycle more and waste less, think of ways to reward or incentivize them for changing their habits. If a department knows they can be eligible for a reward as a result of their cost saving, recycling efforts, they’ll be all the more enthusiastic to embrace recycling and encourage others as well!

 

Recycling Up At Shopping Malls

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Before being placed on hangers or folded on shelves, the typical piece of clothing arrives at a retail store wrapped in plastic bags enclosed within cardboard boxes. This common practice ensure that the garment stay preserved and clean during packing and transport but also results in clothing stores having large amounts of plastic waste to contend with after every shipment is unpacked.

While most retail stores throw polyethylene and other thin film plastics right into the garbage, a new recycling program geared specifically for plastic waste used in the garment industry has been started by the real estate business Simon Property Group which owns and manages shopping malls and retail outlets throughout the United States.

Concord Mills in Concord, North Carolina, is the most recent Simon outlet to begin recycling and baling clear plastic waste materials. The facility has a designated  room in its shipping and receiving area which contains a hydraulic baler for compressing garment bags, shrink wrap and plastic shipping materials into one hundred and sixty pound bales of plastic. The bales are then transported to recycling facilities where they are processed and resold.

Close to one hundred and forty of the outlet’s two hundred stores are involved and the  program has recycled over two thousand pounds of plastic since last fall.

WasteCare Wants You to Remember: Shopping malls often have limited space for recycling and disposal so it’s important to think creatively and maximize resources. However, taking the time to think strategically about recycling is important for cutting down on waste disposal fees and your businesses environmental impact!

More Recycled Plastic Used In Bottles

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The Californians Against Waste consumer and environmental advocacy group recently announced that Arrowhead bottle water, manufactured by Nestle Waters, will use fifty percent of recycled PET plastic content in all bottles the company makes.

In addition, the bottle’s shape will be redesigned so that it requires fifteen percent less energy to produce. A considerable amount of the recycled plastic will be sourced regionally by CarbonLITE, a recycling facility located in Riverside, California.

Currently, the state collects close to seventy percent of plastic bottles for recycling. In recent years, in excess of two hundred million pounds of PET plastic has been collected annually and re-sold for manufacturing purposes. The state would like to see that number increase to three hundred million pounds in the coming years.

PET plastic can be recycled and reused many times without impacting quality and is the ideal substance for manufacturing high-grade beverage bottles.

WasteCare Wants You to Remember: Does your business or facility have designated recycling for plastic bottles? If so, are your employees recycling them or mistakenly disposing of them with the trash? PET Plastic is desirable on the recycling market so every bottle that is put in the trash costs you twice: to acquire it and then to dispose of it. Save green every month on your disposal fees when you “go green” and commit to recycling as much as you can!

Schools Get Benches For Recycling

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County administrators in Indiana are offering schools, community groups, and not for profit organizations with the opportunity to acquire new benches in exchange for collecting and recycling plastic caps from beverage bottles.

Lake County, in the northwest corner of the state, has started the project as a way to promote recycling throughout the area. For any group that collects over four hundred pounds of plastic caps, the country will provide a high quality indoor and outdoor use bench made of recycled plastics.

The county has allocated funds to purchase as many as twenty benches from regional manufacturer, Green Tree Plastics in Evansville, Indiana. Benches will be awarded to groups once the redemption of the collected bottle caps begins. It takes nearly four hundred pounds of recycled plastic to make each bench, so the collection of the waste plastic helps to defray the overall cost of the bench. Each community group will be limited to acquiring four benches in the initial round of the recycling program.

WasteCare Wants You to Remember: Is your town using strategic thinking to promote recycling and green businesses? Collaborating between different groups is a great way to work together and support both community and business needs. If your town isn’t doing something like this, take the first step and ask! You may find more support and interest than you expected!

More Plastic Bag Bans Proposed

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Concord, Massachusetts, a suburban town in the metropolitan Boston area, in the latest in a series of many communities to take up the issue of plastic bag bans. Under consideration will be regulations limiting the use of single use plastic bags, restaurant take-out cups and containers, and PET water and drink bottles.

Earlier this year,  the small village of Manchester by the Sea, on the northern coast of the a state, approved a ban on retail single-use plastic bags. The regulation is currently under review by the state’s attorney general and if it is approved, will be official for July 1 of this year. Enforcement of the ban, which has stiff penalties for non-compliance, will fall to the local police department.

Brookline, another Boston suburb, last year banned plastic bag use in retail stores bigger than 2,500 square feet.

In Concord, businesses and residents currently recycle close to fifty percent of the waste stream, and local schools and government buildings have switched from selling bottled water to installing water fountains and re-usable water bottle filling stations to promote less waste.

WasteCare Wants you to Remember: As more and more communities seek alternatives to waste disposal, as a business owner of manager, it pays to always be thinking of ways to reduce your waste stream and boost recycling. Investigating recycling opportunities and environmentally friendly options for packaging may be easier and less expensive than you think!

Restaurant Chain Steps Up Recycling Efforts

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The popular sandwich shop and restaurant chain Subway has recently announced its decision to begin using multi-sandwich catering trays manufactured using ninety five percent post-consumer recycled PET in its twenty nine thousand locations around the United States and Canada.

Subway officials anticipate that the decision to move to environmentally friendly trays made from recycled material will help to divert close to two million pounds of plastic waste materials from being disposed of in landfills throughout the region.

The decision to move to the new catering trays follows the decision last year of Subway replacing conventionally made salad bowls and lids with those made of post-consumer recycled PET materials. The company hopes to continue with its gradual shift of replacing less environmentally friendly restaurant materials with those that help to reduce the brand’s overall environmental footprint.

WasteCare Wants You to Remember: Restaurants, deli’s, and sandwich shops have so many different options when it comes to reducing waste and increasing recycling efforts. From using post-consumer recycled products like containers and lids, to composting food waste, to setting up designated recycling bins for glass, plastics, and paper for customers, there’s many ways to reduce your environmental impact and save money on your waste disposal fees!

Alternative Wood Decking Increases Plastic Film Recycling

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Southern California alternative wood decking manufacturer Trex, is increasing its collection of thin-film plastics in its home-base and hopes to expand operations throughout the country.

Since 2008, Trex has partnered with regional dry cleaners, grocery stores, hospitals, and the San Diego Padres’ Petco Park for collecting the unwanted lightweight plastic film and bags it uses in the manufacturing of wood alternative decking and construction materials. Trex decking is made of ninety five percent recycled material, combining sawdust with recycled items such as bread and sandwich bags, plastic newspaper sleeves, and grocery and dry cleaning bags.

Using compressed-air mini-balers, Trex has able to make the collection and storing of the waste materials easier and less expensive for their participating partners. Company officials hope that it is this convenience and ease of use that will allow operations to expand in the coming years.

In 2011, over one billion pounds of plastic film and bags were recycled in the United States. More than half of all that recycled plastic material was acquired by the businesses in the plastic and alternative decking and construction materials industry.

WasteCare Wants You to Remember: In construction and remodeling, the alternative materials market is a growing one. The plastic grocery bags you choose to recycle today not only help reduce trash in landfills but they also help new “green” businesses to grow and develop!

Using Recycled Plastic For Bridge Repair

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County administrators in New York state have made the decision to use materials made of one hundred percent recycled plastic when repairing the Dean Road Bridge in the village of Clare.

The St. Lawrence County Highway Department is responsible for the maintenance and repair of the bridge and will be replacing the decking using a product called Struxure, manufactured by the green-friendly building materials company, Axion International.

The recycled plastic materials that were used to create the boards resulted in over thirty thousand pounds plastic being diverted from landfills across the country.

The county used Struxure boards on another project the prior year that originally called for the use of concrete forms. The boards were much easier to install and have proven durable in the tough weather conditions of upstate New York. The boards easily withstand water and the salt substance used to treat snow and ice and so the county has determined their use an effective cost saving and environmentally friendly measure.

WasteCare Wants You to Remember: Whether it’s your own business or the activities of your local government, it pays in more ways than one to be on the look out for cost effective green alternatives. Technology is advancing rapidly in green options for the construction and municipal repairs sector, and you might be surprised by the options, alternatives, and savings!