Tracking plastics recycling: 90.3 billion pounds and growing

Did you know our very first recyclers and brokers ranking wasn't a ranking at all?

We published a directory of companies in 1993. Our first sales-based ranking came out in 1998, and for these 22 years, we have tracked 459 unique firms that have sold material on the open market.

In 2010, we changed our method of ranking to reflect reprocessed volume of material, rather than material sales. Some 78.3 billion pounds have been tracked since that change. The average volume per company has risen 113 percent to 55.8 million pounds annually.

KW Plastics Recycling of Troy, Ala., came in at No. 1, both then and now.

To date, companies in our ranking have reported recycling 90.3 billion pounds of resin, and 87 percent of the volume was reprocessed for in-house use.

Here is some plastics recycling trivia: Quite a few media reports in the past year have noted that China's National Sword policy has crippled the global plastics recycling market. Our first mention of National Sword in print was in our Feb. 20, 2017, issue.

A few weeks later, we published an editorial comparing National Sword to the previous Green Fence policy.

It's hard to believe that just a few years ago, we were reporting on arrests of recyclers who were buying stolen polyethylene crates and exporting the regrind.