A Word About Recycling with Ollie Maier
While currently being up in Minnesota enjoying the lakes and cooler weather, this item from Resource Recycling newsletter concerning a congressional representative from this state, Rep. Ilhan Omar, caught my eye. She introduced the Zero Waste Act, which creates federal grants to support municipalities in recycling and waste reduction efforts.
“The Zero Waste Act provides federal funding to help municipalities invest in waste recovery and reduction initiatives,” The bill is supported by a number of organizations. Some of which are: Eureka Recycling, the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA), the Texas Campaign for the Environment, and the U.S. Composting Council.
I don’t know whether the bill will be passed, but it sounds like something that can help many cities, especially smaller ones, those with limited funds for such efforts. The introduction of the Zero Waste Act also coincides with an upcoming introduction of national legislation targeting plastic waste by other federal lawmakers.
Switching subjects, some of us use/have used boards made from a combination of wood and plastic. Although somewhat more expensive, they are longer lasting in many applications (decks, walkways, etc). Thus this item, from the same newsletter, also caught my eye.
With the title "Major user of recycled film says it will be buying more," it mentions the company, Trex, uses millions of pounds of PE film every year. Trex is already North America’s largest consumer of recovered film; however, it has plans to use considerably more in the future.
They use the recycled film to make composite lumber, using over 800 million pounds of PE film, wood chips and sawdust every year. The split is about 50-50 between plastic and wood fiber. For the plastic, most of what they use is linear low-density polyethylene (LLDPE) film which comes from stretch wrap used in warehouses and stores.
Another 5 to 10 percent is from front-of-store consumer plastic bag collection bins. The company is the largest recycler of plastic bags in North America. It’s great to know those plastic bags from grocery stores — when we forget our cloth bags — and newspapers, which we put in those containers, are being put to good use.
With the Trex’s products already having 95 percent recycled content, they intend to expand into more and improved products. Their plans include spending roughly $200 million to boost its composite lumber production capacity in future years. With full expanded production, part of which will come online this year, the company will recycle a total of 1.4 billion pounds of PE and wood fiber per year.
The company gets its materials primarily from about 32,000 stores nationwide. They recently reached a milestone of 1 billion pounds of recycled materials collected over the life of the program.
It is also offering free recyclability testing to packaging engineers, manufacturers and brand owners through a new program. Through this testing, they hope to ensure what these companies put on the market can eventually be recycled by Trex. Obviously, this is the type of company I enjoy writing about.
Till next week, do have a great one...
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Ollie is a local citizen concerned with the environment and helping others. A retired Air Force fighter and instructor pilot, he is a graduate of Leadership San Marcos and received his degrees at Texas State University where he worked on staff before totally retiring. For questions or comments, he invites you to call him at 512-353-7432 or email omaier@txstate.edu.
