Plastics recyclers in BC, Canada are discovering opportunities that are making recycling plastic economically viable. From buckets, to growing towers, to soap dishes, there is an opportunity to use recycled plastic material to displace virgin plastic when manufacturing plastic products.
Companies such as Better Buckets, Langley Plastics, former company Flipside Plastics, and Ocean Legacy are all collecting plastics that are not typically being recycled, and bringing them to market via finished products or pellets.
This piece identifies the cases where recycling plastic is economically viable. Then I look at how products made from recycled plastic can capture market share.
Part 1: Opportunities to Capture Waste Plastic
There Are Easy and Cheap Scenarios to Recycle Plastic
It’s often said that recycling plastic is too difficult or too expensive, but these BC recycling companies have proven that that’s not true.
It’s bizarre that there is such a negative mindset towards recycled plastic when most industrial operations are keen on reducing waste and making processes efficient. Manufacturers, sellers, and consumers would all benefit from reusing plastic rather than wasting it, yet the negative attitude prevails.
The market has previously allowed for a lot of waste, and this leeway has allowed virgin plastic sellers to overtake the market.
However, efficiency has a chance to win. With this mindset we can build plastic recycling and manufacturing companies.
Collecting Post Industrial Waste
There’s low-hanging fruit in industrial waste that’s not being taken advantage of.
Collecting waste plastic makes sense when you collect it from big companies that are using significant amounts of one particular product. A perfect situation for recycling plastic is as follows: a company that uses many of the same containers, uses each container once, doesn’t make the packages dirty, and collects the waste in a single place. If you get a truck load of the same stuff delivered to your recycling company, it’s very economical to recycle.
This perfect case for recycling happens in these scenarios:
- Food processing companies, i.e. plastic coverings for food that don’t get used twice.
- Construction companies, i.e. casings/coverings for materials on a construction site that are too damaged to use again.
- Agricultural processes, i.e. covers for the land that stop sunlight from hitting the weeds.
- Nurseries, i.e. the plastic pots that they grow seedlings in.
- Paint companies, i.e. 4 gallon pails that are made of virgin plastic to contain industrial quantities of paint.
If you collect a large quantity of consistent plastics, and you already have the washlines and extruders to deal with it, it can be pelletized at a cost of 25-30 cents Canadian a pound.
Producing these recycled plastic pellets is ⅓ the cost of producing raw material, which is over $1 Canadian per pound.
Knowing the source of your plastic makes it much easier to recycle. A major challenge with collecting waste plastic is the unknown quality of the plastic. There’s such a wide-array of additives and plastics, knowing the source of the plastic helps increase confidence that there isn’t an unknown additive.
However, it’s possible to test and identify the unknown additives in plastics. Doing so makes the process of recycling more expensive, so it’s better to know the source. However, it’s not impossible to make high quality recycled plastics from unknown sources because it can be tested.
Having a local supplier of waste plastic makes it much cheaper to recycle because you don’t need to pay shipping costs. Virgin plastic is usually supplied by major petrochemical companies, such as Dow or Dupont, and often needs to be shipped far distances to the consumer. The shipping costs add to the price of purchasing raw plastic, making new plastic more expensive than locally sourced recycled plastic.
Collecting Post Consumer Waste
Post consumer plastic is too labor intensive to collect and recycle in most cases.
However, it is very easy to recycle plastic from companies that produce a lot of plastic containers and run programs to collect the used containers from their customers.
In the case where there is a large quantity of consistent plastic types, it is cost effective to clean, shred and pelletize the plastic.
Collecting Difficult to Recycle Plastics and Plastic Pollution
An example of a difficult-to-recycle plastic is plastic that is currently floating in the ocean. Capturing those plastics, cleaning them, and making them usable again is very hard. Of course, a foundation like Ocean Legacy has proved that it is possible. Hard, but possible.
Other difficult-to-recycle plastics include construction waste, odd shapes, plastics mixed in with other things, or agriculture waste. These are plastics that are used abundantly but there’s no existing process for collecting them and recycling them.
Ocean Legacy is capable of offsetting the extra cost of collecting pollution through grant funding. There are several government agencies interested in the preservation of the environment, therefore Ocean Legacy can make use of their funding to capture the pollution, and then make money by reshaping and selling the pollution.
Using grant money for doing something good and difficult, such as cleaning up difficult pollution, is an economically viable way to produce recycled plastic products.
It can also be possible to collect pollution without grant money. For example, the company Seven Seas: https://www.sevencleanseas.com/.
Keeping Used Plastic Collection Local Makes it Cheaper
Plastic costs money to move over any distance. It costs more money to move large volumes of plastic over a farther distance. This is especially true if it's inefficiently packed such as a truck load full of molded buckets (lots of air in between stacks and rows of buckets).
The best scenario for reusing plastic is to collect it in a specific locality, recycle it and resell it in the same locality. If the distances are kept short enough it is easy to undercut virgin plastic.
If a plastic recycler can compact the plastic enough that it keeps the shipping cost low per pound of plastic, it is possible to undercut a virgin plastic supplier even when supplying recycled plastic over a long distance.
We know of one Mexican plastic recycling company that is undercutting American virgin plastic producers when supplying plastic to Canada, although this scenario is not common. Of course, shipping over borders adds tariffs, making it more difficult to win on price as well.
Collecting plastic is economically viable when it’s consistent, cleanable, and sourced locally.
Part 2: Market Possibilities for Recycled Plastic
Identifying the market for recycled plastic is a challenge but it’s there. Selling recycled plastic products entails going against the grain.
This section identifies our target markets for recycled plastics, the challenges, and outlines the characteristics of the opportunity.
Downcycling
If a plastic can’t be tested to see if it’s allowable for food surfaces, and its source is unknown, it can be repurposed for something that doesn’t touch food surfaces.
This is called “down cycling”, where you take what used to be a high quality plastic and use it for something that doesn’t need quality.
Examples of this are:
- Plastic lumber
- Roofing tiles, *UV additives needed to make sure it can hold up in the sun
- Patio furniture
- Craft materials
- Shoe soles
- Bricks
Food Safe Containers Are a Possibility with Full Testing Equipment
It is possible to use recycled plastic for food safe containers. Nothing about the plastic itself makes it impossible to shred, remelt, and recreate a food-safe container. The issue comes from contamination due to unknown additives to the plastic.
Testing in a thorough way that allows for food safe certification is expensive. This makes it more difficult to undercut virgin plastic, however it can be done in the right scenarios.
Competing in Niche Products
Very niche products are a great way to find a market for recycled plastics. For products that are being made by local manufacturers, where a personal relationship with the manufacturer might cause them to choose you rather than a competitor, it makes a lot of sense to go with a recycled plastic product.
These are products such as:
- Former company Flipside’s recycled plastic soap dish
- Custom products like key chains and merch for local companies
- License plate frames for a local car dealer
- Boxes to house speakers
- Buckets for a local manufacturer or agriculture company
Working Directly with Industrial Consumers
Making a partnership directly with an industrial producer enables a supply of consistent, clean, and local plastic. This plastic can then be used to make containers and materials that are needed by that same company.
For example, a car manufacturing company has both waste plastic and needs new plastic parts. Food processing companies have excess plastic waste and they need tons of containers.
Several companies have scenarios like this where there is an opportunity to both recycle their plastic and supply them with parts. Doing this will undercut the existing method.
Identifying Localities Where There is Both Supply and Demand
Keeping the price of recycled plastic competitive means keeping operations local. Once a manufacturer starts shipping recycled plastics far distances the price gets too high. If you can’t consume and produce for a single company in a single location, work with multiple companies in a single location.
To make plastic recycling economically viable, we need to identify localities where there is both a large supply of used plastic that needs to be removed, as well as a large demand for plastic products. We need to put the recycler and the parts molder in those localities.
For example, major growing and food processing regions that use a lot of pails and containers have a huge supply of waste plastic. You can consume those plastics and produce recycled plastic products for those growers. This makes that entire region more sustainable and competitive.
There is Some Demand for Recycled Plastic That is More Expensive Than Virgin
While most consumers of plastic, either on the industrial or the consumer side, are price motivated, there is some demand for recycled plastic even when it’s more expensive than virgin.
This can happen with luxury goods products that have an eco-friendly brand, or when there is an environmentally conscious consumer.
Changing Mindsets: A Prevalent Negative Attitude Towards Recycled Plastics
Today, it’s difficult to sell recycled plastic because consumers don’t believe recycled plastic is valuable. Recycled plastic has a bad reputation as an unclean and useless product.
The reality is recycling plastic doesn’t change the material at all. Plastic can be shredded, pelletized, and remolded several times without any degradation of the material.
With testing, we can identify if there are any additives in the plastic, even when it comes from a completely unknown source.
There is an ingrained trust in major petrochemical companies that the products they are making are clean and safe. Why do we trust them so much?
Why do we trust them more than a small recycler, even when the small recycler has all of the certifications?
Selling recycled plastic goes against a long history of anti-recycling attitudes. This can be overcome by partnership building and proving to consumers that the product is better and cheaper than virgin plastic.
Chipping Away at an Ingrained System: a David and Goliath Story
Replacing virgin plastic with recycled plastic means building new processes and competing with a lot of existing infrastructure.
Any new product made of recycled plastic already has a competitor made of virgin plastic. That competitor might not always win on price: recycled plastics products can absolutely be cheaper.
But there’s more categories to compete in than just price.
The virgin plastic product has:
- An existing supply-chain relationship with their buyer
- Exclusivity contracts
- The trust in the brand of virgin plastic, i.e. “virgin” plastic is clean and stronger
- Years of product development in partnership with their suppliers, there is a loyalty factor in changing away from virgin plastic even if an actual contract isn’t there.
- Consistent supply of virgin plastic (recyclers often have varying supply, especially when getting started)
On the collection side: anyone trying to collect plastic is competing with the easier alternative: just throwing it out.
Conclusion: Accelerate on the Selling Points
Human society loves efficiency. We love to save money, and we love to be organized. We know recycled plastic is a good product that can save our customers money and time. There is displacement work to be done to dismantle virgin plastic’s strong foothold, but the selling points exist for recycled plastic.
There is a better way than just constantly creating new plastic products and never recycling them. Let’s lean into it.
