Going green means green for plastics firms
Using recycled material isn’t just about the environment, thanks to sky rocketing oil prices
For area plastics firms, recycling isn’t just about the "green" concepts of environmental stewardship and social responsibility.
These days, it’s about making green, too.
With petroleum costs through the roof, plastic molders and manufacturers are paying more and more for the raw polymers they process. Enter, for some, recycled materials – cheaper, increasingly high-quality and, sometimes, just as good as the "virgin" stuff.
While using recycled bases – or regrind, as it’s called within the industry – is still out of bounds for the makers of a lot of high-tech or sensitive products – reclaimed Dr. Pepper bottles are good for few medical uses – more and more "wide-spec" producers are cashing in on recycling.
"There is as much economic reason as there is a social reason," said Roger Fluet, the president of Leominster’s Innovend LLC, which fashions razors out of recycled materials to be sold under the Recycline brand. "There’s a value to the scrap. If you have to landfill it, landfilling is expensive.
"As gas goes up, everybody gets a little more green-conscious."
Different types, different savings
In the plastics industry, "recycling" can mean anything from re-grinding and re-using run-off from the molding process to buying clean, pelletized material from specialty firms, like Framingham’s Conigliaro Industries Inc.
Founded in 1990 as Conigliaro Engineering, the company specializes in what it calls "total recycling," by accepting and processing plastic, rubber, wood, corrugated, glass and textile materials.
In addition to manufacturing some of its own products, the Framingham company sells re-ground material to molders and manufacturers. Depending on a recycled material’s source and the product into which it’s re-molded, the end manufacturer uses varying percentages of the "regrind" material, according to Rich Garrison, Conigliaro’s vice president for operations.
"They’re not all the same," he said. "Some come from a very high-quality source ... Of course, those demand a higher price, and can be used more readily.
"Others are post-consumer, maybe plastic things we used in our lives and recycled. They tend to be less homogenous, with a little more contamination."
No matter how much recycled material a manufacturer uses in a given product, it usually comes with a savings. According to Garrison, the market for recycled materials follows the virgin market’s volatile ups and downs, but at a lower price rate.
"It’s always less," he said. "Sometimes, it’s much, much less."
Value on both ends
Recycling’s economic benefits for plastics manufacturers come from more than reduced material costs. They can make out on the back end, too – good quality manufacturing waste can be reused in-house, or sold to recycling companies for processing and resale to another maker.
"[Sometimes] someone can pick up their scrap plastic at a cost less than the alternative to throw it away," Garrison said. "In many cases, the material has value."
Others specialize in replicating non-recyclable products in recycling-friendly plastic form. TPE Solutions Inc. of Shirley makes rubber substitutes out of recyclable plastics.
Though TPE Solutions uses virgin materials in its manufacturing, its products carry a value in their potential for reuse.
"We do not go in and make recycled material and reuse it," said Jonas Angus, president and CEO of TPE. "We try to resolve the problem before it becomes one. That’s a different aspect of recycled materials. Our technology reduces potential materials that cannot be recycled."
Cautions and caveats
Though the use of recycled materials is unquestionably growing – over 2 billion pounds of post-consumer plastic bottles were recycled in 2005, a four-fold increase from 1990, according to an American Chemistry Council study – it’s not for every company.
Recycled materials are rarely turned into the same product they began as – a milk bottle, for instance, often becomes something else made of the same polymer – and rates of imperfections and impurities are much higher in the second-hand stuff.
The potential issues mean makers must be extremely selective as to which products it manufactures with recycled material. It’s rare for a company to manufacture a consumer product that’s 100 percent recycled.
"The average company that makes products isn’t generally going to switch just because of price," said Robert Malloy, the chairperson of the University of Massachusetts-Lowell’s plastics engineering department. "It depends on the nature of the product and how tight the tolerances are."
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