SC Johnson, the 20-year owner of Ziploc brand, has developed a way to recycle the popular food storage bags in municipal curbside systems. As the Ziploc bag approaches the age of 50, recycling rates of this and similar products remain low – meaning the vast majority of the 1 trillion or so plastic bags used each year end up in a landfill.
Should the company’s pilot recycling project prove successful, this new process shows potential to expand curbside recycling across the U.S.
Few cities accept plastic bags — including Ziplocs and similar interlocking bags — within their waste collection streams. Single-stream collection facilities often cannot (or will not) separate plastic bags from the glass, metal, plastic bottles, and other recyclables because the thin material can easily become caught and tangled within machines. For years, supermarkets and other retail locations have stepped in to collect plastic bags in order to boost waste diversion efforts.
But only a tiny percentage of these bags end up recycled within this system. The first problem is that consumers need to remember to bring their used storage bags, plastic grocery bags, dry cleaning bags and other thin plastic film to a retail location for recycling. And upon collection, many plastic bag recyclers weed out soiled bags or other materials that are deemed unusable. SC Johnson acknowledged in Monday’s announcement that at best, 0.20 percent of Ziploc branded plastic bags are ultimately recycled.
SC Johnson claimed its research took the company to Europe, where it found examples of operations that could take plastic bags — soiled or not — and churn them into new products. The company that scored SC Johnson’s attention melts down thin plastic bags into pellets, which can then be turned into a resin suitable for manufacturing products like plastic garbage bags.
To read the full story, visit http://www.triplepundit.com/2017/05/ziploc-bags-now-recyclable-curbside-bins/.