Novolex sees only more plastics recycling in its future

North Vernon, Ind. — Troy Cook isn't about to put any limits on plastics recycling at the Novolex Holdings Inc. plant he oversees in rural Indiana.

He's been around long enough as manager at the company's Hilex Poly recycling facility in North Vernon to witness research, development and technology push higher the recycled content in high density polyethylene bags made for retailers.

North Vernon, a small town south of Indianapolis and west of Cincinnati, is home to a pair of interconnected Hilex Poly plants — one makes new retail plastic bags and the other recycles used bags into resin used to help make those new bags.

Hilex Poly, a subsidiary of Hartsville, S.C.-based Novolex, is pushing 50 percent recycled content in retail bags the company makes in North Vernon these days, an unheard of amount even just a few years ago. Cook would not be surprised if the number goes even higher over time.

Plastics recycling in North Vernon currently consists of two lines — one for post-consumer material, the other for post-industrial. Millions of pounds of used or rejected product are pushed through each year, with pellet output sent to the adjacent bag plant as well as sister bag plants in Milesburg, Pa.; Richmond, Va.; and Jacksonville, Fla.

With the expansion, the idea is to bring more recycled processing in-house to allow the company to supply recovered resin to additional company locations, including those that make trash can liners.

Equipment now is being installed for another recycling line that will allow the company to take in even more post-consumer plastic, a move that will allow Novolex to supply recycled resin to additional company manufacturing sites. And the move will add 16 jobs, a 20 percent increase.

"I would say five years ago, you couldn't get over 40 percent. Now we're at 50 percent," Cook said. "I would not say we're at the limit now. We'll continue to innovate and continue to use our R&D guys and corporate engineering to push even higher," he said.

Phil Rozenski is vice president of public affairs for Novolex, but he also spent time overseeing sustainability efforts in the past. Novolex, he said, wants to continue pushing recycled content as a matter of course.

Those who buy Novolex bags, and the public, have spoken. And they want more recycled content.

"We're always looking to see how we can do more. We'll never say, 'This is it,'" Rozenski said. "We're focused on making our products more circular, designing them to be more easily recycled."

When the new recycling project recently was announced, Novolex said the company would add 28 million pounds of new recycling capacity to its existing 49 million pounds of annual recycled-content production in North Vernon.

Today's call for increasing recycled content is a change from even when Rozenski joined the company more than a decade ago.

The North Vernon plant has been operating since 2006, and those early years required more explanation about the importance of recycled content, Rozenski remembered.

"I would go to a customer in 2009 with the sales team to talk about sustainability and what we're doing with recycling. They might have a person who was interested," he said. "Then a year or two later, they had somebody [but] it was their secondary job.

"Then, maybe 2014, you are seeing our customers have a person that's doing packaging sustainability. By 2016, they had teams of people doing this. That's the story of the importance of sustainability and how much people are focused on it, especially on the packaging side," Rozenski said.

Those earlier days had Novolex having to sell the concept of recycled content to customers. Now the customers are clamoring for more.

"They are asking for it now. They want it. When we started out 10-15 years ago, we had to sell it. Now they want it and they are asking. We are doing various trials to put more in. More and more with each passing year it seems. And that does make it easier for us; people want our product," Rozenski said.

"Whatever product we make in that category, we want to be the leader in sustainability for whatever that is. With plastic retail bags, recycled content, from the very beginning, is where we wanted to go," he said.

The North Vernon location pulls most of its post-consumer film from retail drop-off locations in the Cincinnati area, although some comes from the Indianapolis market. The material is collected at retailers' distribution centers before being transported to Novolex for processing.

"The Midwest is incredibly well positioned to be a recycler," Rozenski said. That's because the transportation system allows for the easy transportation of material and the region is separated from the influences of the import and export markets on both coasts.

Most of the film is from customers returning their used bags and wraps, but some of the plastic also comes from back-of-store operations, Cook explained.

Novolex uses machines to sort and process the plastics that make their way to North Vernon, but the human touch continues to play a role as pickers work sortation lines to remove contaminates that find their way into the recycling stream.

While these employees remain key to the operations, the overall quality of the material has greatly improved over the years as customers better understand what is appropriate for the drop-off bins. Yield loss once hovered around 25 percent due to contamination, but that has dropped over time to between 10-15 percent, Cook said.

"We had a real hard time at one point working with our partners. They did not have a real healthy appetite to help us do some sortation. They just handed us everything. Anything and everything was coming in from the retailers," Cook said.

"Over the years we've been able to get some better streams of material, a lot cleaner. We still have that hand-sorting operation. But the material itself is a lot cleaner and a lot more consistent, easier to process," he said.

Having a consistent input makes for a consistent end product, Rozenski said.

For Hilex Poly and Novolex, recycling is part of the company's core approach to manufacturing and marketing, Cook said. "It's part of the strategy. It's part of the Hilex message that this recycling plant is here and providing that service."

The types of bags made in North Vernon have long been under scrutiny. These so-called T-shirt bags — because their shape resembles a T-shirt's shape — have faced both bans and scrutiny by opponents, but they remain a staple for so many retailers and customers. Rozenski said he believes the opposition to T-shirt bags has reached a leveling point where locations that want to outlaw the bags have done so and business remains stable elsewhere.

"There's almost a transition going on right now," Rozenski maintained, where talk of regulation is now starting to focus more on extended producer responsibility instead of bans in many places.

EPR, as a concept, has been around for a long time, but the idea has been gaining traction on the state level around the country in recent years as legislators look to address various waste streams. The idea is that those producing the targeted items also pay for their collection and recycling after use. It's an approach that was once almost universally derided by industry as a governmental overreach. But faced with the potential for even more stringent regulations, business has grown to accept the EPR concept to a much greater degree over time.

"That's what we're interested in because well-written extended producer responsibility is about building the infrastructure to make this easier and on a larger scale. That's what we're seeing, now there is an opportunity. Some of the people talking about banning products are now saying let's build recycling. That's very interesting because there is an opportunity," Rozenski said.

"There's almost a transition going on right now. The last decade there were talks [to] ban this," he said. "Now, the pivot is to extended producer responsibility."