Phoenix may be the first U.S. city to build a mill to remanufacture plastic containers. It’s an effort to clean up one part of a global trash problem that’s been mounting for decades — and is only getting worse. Curbside is where recycling ends for most of us, but for the city of Phoenix, it is just the beginning of the process.
“Yogurt cups, different things, not the common ones like your water bottles and soda bottles because we have good markets for those but other types of mixed plastics,” said Joe Giudice is Phoenix’s assistant public works director. He’s in the process of collecting bids from contractors so Phoenix can remanufacture specific plastic containers into new goods and also fuel.
“Phoenix’s approach is, ‘Hey, we want to develop new markets,’ ideally domestic markets, and we want to have something right here in Phoenix,” he said.
It’s been six months since China stopped importing most plastic and paper waste from U.S. cities, which it was remanufacturing and selling there. And the void left is massive. There is no other market in the world as large, that consumes as much as China — not even the U.S. That means, the business flow of recycling has essentially stopped worldwide. And paper and plastic are getting sent to the landfill.
Read the full story at https://kjzz.org/content/672888/phoenix-accepts-bids-plastics-recycling-mill-combating-landfill-waste.