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Recycling tech firm inks supply deals, still seeking funding

AKRON, OHIO (Aug. 25, 12:20 p.m. ET) --Recycling technology firm Polyflow Corp. has reached verbal agreements with an Ohio city and college to supply plastic waste that Polyflow can convert into industrial chemicals.

Akron, Ohio-based Polyflow is working with officials in Stow — an Akron-area city of about 35,000 — to secure the city’s plastic waste. Polyflow is doing the same with Hiram College, a private college with about 1,300 students in Hiram, Ohio, not far from Stow.

“We want to work with Polyflow because it’s helping the environment,” Stow Mayor Karen Fritschel said in by phone Aug. 24. Fritschel added that the city’s economy would be helped if Polyflow locates a processing site and corporate office there.

Currently, trash haulers in Stow separate PET and high density polyethylene bottles, but all other plastic waste generated by the city is taken to a landfill, Fritschel said.

In Hiram, Polyflow CEO Joseph Hensel said Portage County officials have agreed to transport the college’s plastic waste to a Polyflow site. The firm has narrowed down its site selection to four properties in the Cleveland/Akron area, he added.

The agreements are steps in the right direction for Polyflow, according to Hensel. The firm has been working to commercialize its technology since 2005, and next needs to secure financing for its first commercial plant, which is likely to cost about $10 million.

Polyflow raised almost $1 million from angel investors in 2008, but with the economy slowing down, the firm has generated less than $500,000 in investments this year, Hensel said in a recent phone interview.

The technology used by Polyflow was developed in the late 1970s by Charles Grispin, an Akron-area inventor who now serves as Polyflow’s chief information officer. In the process, scrap is placed into a tank and cooked at nearly 1,000° F until vaporized. The vapor is then condensed; the resulting liquid contains aromatic chemicals including styrene and benzene.

Only 6 percent of the waste items used by Polyflow currently are recycled, according to Hensel. The remaining 94 percent otherwise would end up in landfills. Since scrap used in the Polyflow process is melted down, contamination is not a factor. Items processed at the firm’s pilot plant in Akron include carpet, tires, children’s toys, leftover plastic compounds and polystyrene foam. Chemicals refined from the slurry liquid can be reused by petrochemical firms or used in paints, coatings, solvents or other products.

Polyflow also recently made its first sale of chemicals made by its process, delivering five tons of material to petrochemicals supplier Bulk Trading &Transport Co. of Cleveland. Hensel pointed out that the sale was made at a unit price higher than that of crude oil. The shipment consisted of material that Polyflow had produced during more than 40 test runs and demonstrations of its process done in the last year.

I'm looking at the plastics problem as one of reducing the pile with economical and energical efficiency and minimal residue and/or effluent. Surely the pile reduction is tempting but does your process capture enough useful material at a low enough energy to be sustainable?

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Mechanical recycling has serious limitations for mixed and contaminated plastics, as we all know.It works for large runs of recollected and relatively clean items like bottles.Plastics mean energy, they are energy and when they are buried that means buried energy. Educating people would be a next stage to have more plastics available for chemical recycling less contaminated than recovering mixed plastics back from landfills. The world has changed consistently regarding environmental concern; why can not more people change their atitude regarding post consumer waste? AMB

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More chemical recycling. Proposed many years ago for PET bottles, it is thermally negative -- that is, it uses up more energy than it saves, when you consider the breaking of all the chemical bonds in the molecules. The advantage is that less landfill space is needed. Someone has to decide if plastics' share of the landfill energy (collection, trucks, bulldozers) is more than the losses of this process, which would support any claims of energy advantage. I also suspect that the energy consumed to melt/depolymerize the plastic is generated by hydrocarbon fuel, so that the carbon footprint is environegative. I wonder if the Stow officials realize all this. ALG

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