I recently got the chance to take a tour of Dart Container’s recycling facility. Dart has a statewide (and further) polystyrene (also known as Styrofoam) recycling program, where they collect used polystyrene from the food service industry, schools, county recycling drop offs; and people send them polystyrene to be recycled. Dart’s trucks go within a one hundred mile radius of Mason, MI (right outside Lansing), reaching forty-four county sites in twenty counties. Dart does this as a public service and they do not necessarily make money recycling, they do it because it is simply the right thing to do (being as they are primarily a new polystyrene manufacturer).
The process itself is quite amazing; they have a few employees who sort the trash before it gets processed. There are three different levels of polystyrene, which ends up as three different colors/qualities of usable resin. After being sorted the polystyrene is melted back down and then cooled in water. Little pellets are created, and they are slightly bigger than normal virgin plastic pellets and a little smaller than a pea.
Dart faces a few difficulties in this recycling system, first is transportation and second is finding suitable end-users, or basically what to do with all the plastic resin they reclaim. Lets start with transportation: recyclers get paid in weight; Styrofoam is 90% air and therefore, a truckload of polystyrene is not worth much to traditional recyclers. Long haul drivers are expensive because of this. For these reasons, getting truckloads of Styrofoam can become very costly.
Finding end-users who can use this product and put it back out into the mainstream is a whole task in and of its self. Currently their recycled polystyrene is being made into picture frames, rulers, Frisbees, toys, it has even been used as filler underneath concrete. Still it remains a continuous effort to find enough end-users to take their product because some industries cannot use it, such as the food service industry. The regulations will not allow post-consumer content unless they were returned to them within forty-eight hours for the original point of use, which is usually impossible. Ideally, Dart would like to go directly to the end user, knowing where and what their product is turned into. Since they cannot find enough end users, they have to occasionally sell to brokers. These are people who are in the business of buying from product and selling it to end users for a profit.
Next lets dispel some myths about polystyrene; all foam is simply not the same. At Dart, they deal exclusively with #6 polystyrene, which was created and patented by Dow Chemical. Though Styrofoam is petroleum based, it actually takes very little compared to other plastic products. Only twelve to fourteen little teeny tiny beads go into a coffee cup. If you are interested in learning more about polystyrene, it’s life cycle analysis and how it stacks up compared to paper, corn and other plastic products please visit their website.
For more information visit please visit Dart Environment on Facebook here.
Below are some pictures of from my tour of Dart’s recycling facility, enjoy!
