A recent article in Recycling Product News entitled “Profitable and Practical Plastics: Reuse and Recycling for the Circular Economy” featured HPRC’s Chicago regional recycling project as a real-world example of what’s possible in plastics recycling.
The article, co-authored by Dr. Ramesh Srinivasan, CEO of Eco-Catalyst, Antea Group Senior Consultant Pamela Gordon, and Andy Fergurson from COPE Plastics, focuses on operational strategies to make money in plastics recycling:
“Profitable and responsible reuse and recycling of plastics from products, packaging and scrap is an enormous business opportunity – especially given today’s economic and environmental waste of most plastics. Realizing this opportunity requires a keen understanding of markets, material, equipment, input-output data and environmental metrics, as well as effective collaboration among multiple stakeholders in the plastics value chain.
With the currently low price of petroleum reducing the cost of virgin plastics, a successful plastics reuse and recycling business needs to carefully balance material- dependent processing costs with what the market will bear. Pilots in the healthcare and industrial sectors are currently being conducted to discover the most practical, profitable and responsible ways of doing so. All industries can
learn from these two examples.”
The full issue is available here (the article is found on page 24.)