The PET recycling rate is increasing in South Africa, and a PVC recycling program in the U.K. gets kudos.
The PET recycling rate is increasing in South Africa, and a PVC recycling program in the U.K. gets kudos.
Flexible film packaging is being accepted at the curb in one Midwest city, and thousands of plastic bags have been diverted from landfill thanks to a group of charitable women.
The Dow Chemical Company is committing nearly $3 million toward recycling education and outreach programs as well as research into plastics recycling technology.
Another county has joined the WRAP (Wrap Recycling Action Program) initiative, an effort by the Flexible Film Recycling Group of the American Chemistry Council to collect more plastic bags and film at local stores.
Dow officials say more brands are beginning to adopt its recently released stand-up pouch, which is made from one polymer and is recyclable through retail bag drop-off locations.
A facility near London is using a new baffled oscillation technology to separate PP and PE in a water tank, and a study says more rPET could be used in hot-fill containers.
Existing sortation equipment at materials recovery facilities could potentially be used to create bales of flexible film packaging, a study found. And an industry group is targeting the material with a grant program.
ExxonMobil is part of a project developing a type of flexible film that could be more easily integrated into the PE collection stream, and a detergent bottle maker focuses on recycled HDPE.
The Reflex project successfully demonstrated flexible film packaging could be recycled into items such as boxes and crates or drainage pipes. That was one of the successes of the two-year research effort, according to the project coordinator.
Novolex, a company that makes and recycles plastic bags, has been sold to The Carlyle Group, an investment firm based in Chicago.