SHAWANO — Plastics recycling is many years old, but not all plastic has been recyclable.

LKK

Among the materials difficult for reuse was polyethylene film — the type of plastic wrapped around pallets of products to hold them together, or around furniture by moving companies. It can now be stricken from the “can't do it” list.

Wisconsin Film & Bag invested more than $8.5 million during the past 2½ years to develop a system for reusing polyethylene film. Its patent-pending processes are housed in the Riopelle-Bush Recycling Center on Airport Drive.

The company pretty much had to invent its own processes. Among the biggest problems was cleaning the film well enough to be able to break it down and reprocess it to make new products.

“That's the trick. To get it from film to pellets is a pretty expensive process,” said Jim Feeney, president. “You know you've got a task head of you when you open the owner's manual and all the pages are blank.”

They filled in those pages.

The process involves shredding the film scrap into flakes then cleaning the film well enough to remove labels and other unwanted debris. The cleaned flake is then hardened so it can be easily stored and transported.

“Moving the flaked material would be like moving a cloud,” Feeney said.

The material is reconstituted into small pellets that can be combined with virgin resin to make new products.

“It's designed to make it as close to virgin resin as possible,” Feeney said.

The plan is to turn the unusable leftovers into fuel pellets, so that in the end virtually all of the materials are used.

The Riopelle-Bush Recycling Center is in the former Kamatsu America building about ½ mile from the main plant on Richmond Road. Feeney said the large structure was perfect for their new venture.

The center is named after former Film & Bag president Jack Riopelle and Green Bay entrepreneur Bob Bush. The men were key advisers in developing the recycling center, Feeney said.

The center can produce 30 million pounds of resin from recycled film scrap. It's not quite up to full speed, but Feeney said they're already thinking about expansion.

“We are not profitable at the recycling center at the moment, but we are moving there as we increase our volume,” Feeney said.

Profitability and performance were key elements. Recycled resin performance has to be equal to virgin resin and cannot cost more than virgin resign.

“Failure on either issue would be a cause for rejection by the market, no matter how interested the customer is in environmentally sensitive products and sustainability,” Feeney said.

The company purchases used film from companies and brokers around the state, which Feeney says helps create a market for the scrap. Film & Bag uses all the recycled resin internally.

Feeney said Film & Bag leaders were motivated by their history of working with the paper industry, where recycling now is a matter of course, and by an emphasis on recycling by the state Department of Natural Resources. The DNR commissioned a study by Foth Infrastructure & Environment, headquartered in Green Bay, and Moore Recycling Associates of Sonoma, Calif., that determined that in Wisconsin $64 million in recyclable plastic ended up in landfills every year.

“It showed us there is a lot to do in the state,” Feeney said.

The Flexible Film Recycling Group, an organization of the American Chemistry Council, is working with Moore Recycling Associates to implement a statewide initiative to increase polyethylene film recycling in the state. The goal is divert 100,000 tons per year by 2020.

The recycling center spurred the growth Film & Bag experienced during the past four years, when it grew from 109 to 154 employees. Twenty-nine employees work in the recycling center and 16 more were hired to meet increased production demands for its recycled ECO Blend products.

The company makes a broad lineup of custom polyethylene film and bags for packaging made from virgin resign, including U.S. Food & Drug Administration-approved material for food applications. It reports about $50 million in sales in 20 states.

Feeney said business declined 6 percent during the recession — “it felt like 100 percent” — but overall the company came through the downturn in good shape. It opened the Riopelle-Bush Recycling Center in 2011, using much of the time since to work out the bugs.

 

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