Alternative Plastics
We know we need to do a better job recycling. We also know that some plastics are just a lot harder to recycle than others.
And when you hear about the millions and billions of pounds that end up in landfills because they don’t have a home for it, you start to realize how big of a problem this really is.
Rehrig Pacific is helping to bring lost plastics back into the circular economy. The items they make are the kind of high quality, high usage plastics that function for years. A good place for homeless plastics to go. Here’s the big idea, if Rehrig Pacific was able to source the kinds of materials that are really hard to recycle for their products, that would be huge. So that’s what they’re doing.
For any new product that we develop, we’re proactively confirming the application and the design requirements prior to selecting the material plan that would be used in the finished product to effectively meet the customer sustainability needs.
It all starts with guys like Trent Williams, a materials engineer at Rehrig Pacific’s Best in Class Research and Development Lab in Kansas City.
You have an available stream and they said this is what the product was.
It could be an old toy, a piece of outdoor furniture, or something plucked out of an ocean.
They’ll bring it to me. I’ll put it underneath some equipment that’s going to fingerprint it. And I can say, OK, that can be used into this product.
The Materials Engineering team figures out the properties of the plastic stream and finds an ideal home for it to be recycled. Let’s pick a bulky, rigid plastic commonly found on the curbside.
Polypropylene car seats. Those have been kind of a problematic thing for recyclers. They are made from a multitude of polymers. And what we’ll do is help identify what is going to be useful for Rehrig Pacific. We take the DNA of the item and I can say, yes, that’s the type of polypropylene that we are looking for. That’s exactly what we use for a lot of our rackable, polypropylene pallets. So if they’re almost identical as far as processing and durability and stiffness, and then this stream of car seats can be diverted from landfills to Rehrig Pacific pallets. But the materials engineers did not stop there.
One of the recycling streams that’s really exciting to me right now and has a great story to tell is the utilization of shrink-wrap in future products. Film is difficult to recycle and there’s billions and billions of pounds of this stuff that ends up in landfills every day.
There’s agricultural film. There’s industrial films. There’s consumer films.
Innovative processing has allowed us to begin incorporating film into many different products.
We’ve been partnering with a couple retailers that generate millions and millions and millions of pounds inside their own supply chain to manufacture products out of that film.
We’ve successfully trialed the utilization of shrink wrap in the production of recycling bins.
We’re able to make a really, kind of gorgeous, trash bin in color with that film.
Rehrig Pacific is now helping their customers turn their own discarded film into, of all things, recycling bins.
And we are utilizing those bins to effectively close the loop and recycle that product.
Rehrig Pacific is approaching the recycling ecosystem with amazing creativity, innovation and partnership. Their programs focus on ocean waste and beverage and food systems, automotive materials, and they’re all finding new life in Rehrig Pacific’s returnable beverage, dairy and agriculture crates, their pails and their pallets. With every program they develop Rehrig Pacific is making a measurable, scalable difference. Sustainability is at our core.
