Through the American Chemistry Council (ACC), America’s plastics makers are actively engaged in efforts to reduce marine debris from both consumer and industrial sources. For many years, we’ve been working to create and strengthen a nationwide infrastructure for recycling plastics. Recently, we’ve focused some of those efforts on placing hundreds of recycling bins on California’s beaches and parks and in coastal communities.
Last week, we read about one of the most exciting developments in recycling that we’ve come across in a long time. Consumer products maker Method and recycler Envision Plastics – which has operations in Southern California – announced a partnership through which they’re making new bottles out of plastic recovered from beaches in Hawaii, which sits on the edge of the North Pacific Gyre.
You can read more by clicking the link, but here are a few excerpts from a September 13 post that Adam Lowry, Chief Greenskeeper and co-founder of Method, contributed to Envision’s blog:
“The idea was born when, after achieving 100% post-consumer material in our packaging, we started asking ourselves a simple question: what is the ultimate post-consumer material?”
“Well, we’ve done it. Recently, method was able to make bottles out of Ocean PCR. It is 100% post-consumer HDPE, 25% of which is plastic we have collected from the Gyre.”
“The goal is to raise awareness about the issue of plastic pollution, and to point us toward the solution already in front of us – using the plastic that we already have.”
Method worked with a group of clean-up organizations that collected plastics from the gyre that had washed up on the Hawaiian Islands. According to Lowry, Envision “donated line time, invented new processes, and busted through barriers to help (Method) engineer Ocean PCR that has similar product performance to virgin HDPE resin.”
We’ve always said that “Plastics don’t belong in the oceans; they belong in recycling bins.” Congratulations to these two companies for finding a new way for used plastics to get a second chance.
From Floating to Gloating – and with Good Reason!
