Cincinnati adding hard-to-recycle plastics collection program

Cincinnati — A major regional solid waste and recycling company is making new efforts to divert difficult-to-recycle plastics from landfill disposal.

Rumpke Waste & Recycling is one of the largest family-owned trash and recycling firms in the nation and a regional powerhouse operating in Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky and West Virginia. The Cincinnati-based firm is joining the Hefty ReNew program, which already operates in a handful of other communities around the country, to tackle plastics that otherwise would be trashed.

Hefty ReNew was previously known as the Hefty EnergyBag program because earlier efforts to divert the hard-to-recycle plastics included sending the material off to be used as fuel in cement kilns.

The program as evolved over time to capture the hard-to-recycle plastics for reuse in products including plastic lumber as well as blocks for construction projects.

"We want to continue to find avenues to help our customers, which are the people who live in Cincinnati, to have an avenue to [divert] flexible packaging. This is just a great way to do it," Snyder said at the Baerlocher Recycling Summit in Cincinnati. "It's just another great way for us to pull things out of the landfill.

"My job, at the end of the day, is to continue to pull things out of the landfill and get [them] into end markets," he said.

The program allows consumers to purchase special orange bags that are used to collect difficult-to-recycle plastics such as certain packaging, bags, wraps, expanded polystyrene and dinnerware. The orange bags are used to segregate these items from traditional recyclables in household recycling containers. Workers at recycling facilities can then pluck those bags away from the rest of the recyclables, aggregating them on-site before sending them off in bulk to be recycled.

The original EnergyBag pilot program used purple bags, but the color was changed to orange once Hefty and its famously orange branded packaging came on board as a program sponsor. The name eventually was changed to Hefty ReNew to represent the expanded markets for the collected materials.

Rumpke expects to send its Hefty ReNew bags off to be reincarnated into plastic lumber, blocks and pallets, Snyder said. If needed, the material also can be sent to chemical recycling facilities and processed into fuel.

Rumpke took a long look at the program before deciding to join. The company wanted to be certain that the orange bags could withstand the abuse associated with collection and sortation without breaking open, Snyder said. He also did not want to offer a new service but then be forced to discontinue the offering if problems arose. After about 18 months of research, including visiting other Hefty ReNew programs around the country, the recycling director is now a believer.

"It's a leap of faith and it's something we've vetted out over a long period of time," he said.

Rumpke initially will offer the service in the Greater Cincinnati area but Snyder said the program could be expanded to other service areas over time. Rumpke is building a new recycling facility in Columbus, Ohio, and that market eventually could become another candidate for the program.

"We always want to be cutting edge. We always want to be on the front of plastics recycling. This is a great way for us to continue to do that," he said at the second annual recycling summit organized by additives maker Baerlocher.

Other communities in the Hefty ReNew program include Omaha and Lincoln, Neb.; Boise, Idaho; Cobb County, Ga.; and Chattanooga, Tenn.