A large variety of materials fall into the category of plastics. These versatile materials have found their way into almost every aspect of daily life. Often described as durable materials they unfortunately spend the majority of their long life in a land fill.

In 1998 the EPA found that over 21 million tons of plastics headed for land fills. They also estimated that only 5.2% of these materials were diverted for recycling that year. Why is this when a large percentage of these materials are considered recyclable?

The downfall of most recycling programs is that the materials were diverted for use in traditional plastic processing. This required separation, cleaning, removal of ink and labels, and other cost prohibitive operations that cause the price of these recovered materials to approach that of virgin resins. In addition some material groups such as thermo sets, co extrusions, and highly commingled or mixed plastics were labeled as un-recyclable.

This was the past, so what is the future of plastic recycling? Good Innovation has helped develop a non-traditional patented process that allows virtually any waste plastic to be economically recycled into useful composites for nearly endless recycled content product applications. The main advantage is that materials need no separation, cleaning, or pre-processing other than size reduction into chips or flakes. Commingled, mixed, contaminated, thermo set, co extruded plastic materials can all be used as feed stock. Products can be produced of 100% waste plastics or include a high percentage of contaminates like wood, paper, cloth, dirt, or non-ferrous metals and need no virgin materials to form durable composites. We have yet to find a polymer waste stream that could not be processed into a profitable product.

Designers can now engineer cost competitive plastic products with more material and strength then previously possible. By targeting waste streams that would be designated for costly disposal in a land fill manufactures can often obtain feed stock for free or even get paid to except materials. This allows heavy, solid, and durable recycled content products to be produced economically without concern for material cost.

This is truly Commingled Plastic Recycling and Molding!