It's time for a look behind the numbers of our annual ranking of North American recyclers and brokers.
The top 25 companies appear in print this week, plus all 177 companies appear in the directory. The companies that we list captured 13.9 billion pounds of material in 2020, that's up 3.4 percent from 2019.
Our numbers are fairly evenly split between post-consumer and post-industrial plastic — 42 percent vs. 58 percent. Some 77 percent, or 10.6 billion pounds, of the material was reprocessed. Some 23 percent, or 3.2 billion pounds, was brokered.
Many processors reuse their own scrap and many recycling houses are captive suppliers to processors That material should be captured in our other processor rankings under throughput. Our goal with this ranking is to report on how much material is moving on the open market in North America.
Following China's policy initiative, National Sword, we saw a drop in the number of brokers. Now we are seeing a slight movement back into brokering.
We see a very small decline in reprocessing of 1 percent for several reasons:
• In 2020, Plastic lumber maker, Tangent Technologies LLC acquired Bedford Technology LLC of Worthington, Minn., whose operation is now captive to Tangent's extrusions.
Both companies currently use post-consumer milk bottles as their primary raw material.
• Evergreen now splits its volumes with 60 percent toward parent company PolyChem Corp.'s strapping production.
• Polychem USA Inc. of Foxboro, Mass. reports lower total volumes as well as a lower percentage reprocessed.
• Waste Management Recycle America LLC of Houston reports higher total volumes but less reprocessed as well.
• CarbonLite Recycling LLC of Los Angeles had recent expansions with higher capacities.
• Eastern Recycling Services LLC of Baltimore; Penn-Tex Plastics Inc. of Fort Worth, Texas; Avangard Innovative LP of Houston and Bromley Plastics Corp. of Fletcher, N.C., all reported larger total volumes.
B&B Plastics Inc. of Rialto Calif. with an estimated 800 million pounds.
Waste Management Recycle America LLC of Houston with 788 million pounds.
Avangard Innovative LP of Houston with an estimated 700 million pounds.
Reprocessor Conigliaro Industries Inc. of Framingham, Mass.
Post-industrial recycler Panamerican Trading Co. of El Paso, Texas.
Post-industrial broker, Polyall International Inc. of Meadows Place, Texas.
PET recycler PolyQuest Inc. of Wilmington, N.C. Whose listing includes previously listed PQ Recycling LLC
Reprocessor Reterra Corp. of Houston.
You can find the full ranking and directory online at www.plasticsnews.com/rankings/recyclers.
We also offer the full data in MS Excel format, for sale in the Plastics News Store at www.plasticsnews.com/data.
If you don't see your firm on this list, we would very much like to hear from you. Just sent a note to Hollee Keller at [email protected] or complete our survey form, you can find it online at www.plasticsnews.com/assets/surveys/RecyForm.pdf
Do you have an opinion about this story? Do you have some thoughts you'd like to share with our readers? Plastics News would love to hear from you. Email your letter to Editor at [email protected]