HydroBlox creates permeable blocks and slabs of 100% PCR that act as drainage and channel water away from roads, parking lots, yards and other areas. | Photo Courtesy The Recycling Partnership
Bolstering end markets for hard-to-recycle materials is a slow process, but The Recycling Partnership’s Film and Flexibles Recycling Coalition recently released a case study highlighting a success story in HydroBlox.
An April grant from The Recycling Partnership’s Film and Flexibles Recycling Coalition allowed Pittsburgh-based HydroBlox to add a film and fiber shredder, boosting its annual capacity by 50%. The additional 3,000 tons of film and flexibles will help relieve a bottleneck in the business, HydroBlox CEO Ed Grieser said in a case study. The equipment will be up and running in early 2025.
HydroBlox, which provides an alternative to drainage pipes, now makes its products from 100% post-consumer film and flexibles, including coffee bags and snack pouches made of multilayer film. That’s up from 30% PCR – and when the company started over a decade ago, it was post-industural regrind. Grieser said that shift shows how times have changed.
“All we have to do is stand still, and more trucks show up on our loading docks filled with that type of film,” Grieser said.
Cody Marshall, chief system optimization officer at TRP, echoed that changing tide in an interview with Plastics Recycling Update.
“It’s all about demand and the recycling world,” he said, and TRP’s coalition is focused on supporting the end markets that help create demand for film and flexibles. That’s especially relevant now that more states are passing extended producer responsibility laws for packaging..
“In order for material to get recycled, we need solid end markets,” he said. “So even though geographically HydroBlox isn’t in an EPR state, it’s critical to have these types of end markets available through the U.S.”
While HydroBlox is just one company, Marshall said it helps provide a “proof point,” giving TRP more information “to see if and how we can scale this around the country.”
“The power of public private partnerships is also a throughline here,” he added. “The Recycling Partnership sits really nicely in the middle of the public and private sectors. In the recycling system, you often need these 501(c)(3)’s to take risks and do research and really understand where the private sector might not want to take the jump.”
Marshall emphasized that there’s still a lot of work to be done, especially in the film and flexibles sector, but the coalition has given out 470 grants to date and is focused on building up robust pathways for the material all over the U.S.
“There’s a lot of issues that are not solved for, and we need to have proof points like HydroBlox to understand how to get the right quality of material for an end product that’s useful,” he said. “I do want to make it clear that we have a ways to go. This is one case study that we’re proud of and work that we’re proud of, but the recycling of film and flexibles is very much regional at the moment and we need more robust end markets and demand.”
There’s also work to be done around collection streams and sortation, he added, and EPR investment could help move that innovation forward at a faster pace.
“We don’t want material destined to landfill, so it’s a tricky conversation because it’s a difficult product and package to manage through the collection and the MRF infrastructure,” Marshall said. “But it’s there already. We need to invest in a system that tries to capture it and get best use out of it.”