The Haines Friend’s of Recycling is looking for a way to process the community’s  plastic waste closer to home. And they think a small mobile unit could do the trick.

The US produces over 35 million tons of plastic every year. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, (EPA), in 2018 not even 10 percent  of waste plastics were recycled. The Haines Friends of Recycling formed in 1999 in part to address this issue. 

Each year, they would ship out a 40- foot container of plastics -about 25,000 pounds-  to be recycled.

But the profitability of recycling operations vary with oil prices – sometimes it is just cheaper to produce new plastics. And then the recycling stream stops. 

Kate Saunders, vice chair of the Friends of Recycling, sums up the current situation.

Saunders: “China’s quit taking it, currently it’s shut down everywhere. It really depends on fuel costs, and when the fuel went down this last year, all the companies quit buying plastic for recycling. And so at this point in the Seattle area no one is recycling, in fact what we ship is going down to the landfill. I heard the same is true in Canada, they have shut down and haven’t taken any plastics for a year now. So Whitehorse is stockpiling like we are.”

Many thousands of pounds of plastics are now sitting at the recycling center waiting for the next stage in its lifecycle. A few months ago, Saunders heard a story about a man who might be able to help Haines with its problem. He  has a mobile recycling unit built in a shipping container. 

Saunders: “He’s got a large machine, and he is taking marine debris and also plastics of all sorts and melting them down and making them into lumber.”

This man is Patrick Simpson of Anchorage, and he founded Alaska Plastics Recovery  in 2020. Here Simpson explains the process.

Simpson: “So the plastics are brought in and sorted, and we grind that up, and then we run the ground material through an extruder, which is like a big metal auger that is heated, and it melts that plastic as it moves through this auger. Coming out the end, almost like a tube of toothpaste. It’s an extrusion of plastic that’s molten. And that’s squeezed into a form, and it takes on the shape of whatever it’s squeezed in.”

Simpson says the lumber produced can be used in decks and other non structural applications. It doesn’t need to be treated and has a lifespan of up to 25 years. 

The playground at TLingit park is built of similar material. 

According to Simpson, the technology has been around for decades, but was adapted to be mobile only recently. 

Saunders and friends wanted Simpson to bring his machine to Haines.

Saunders: “We tried to get on his list to get him to come here. Unfortunately, financially this doesn’t look like it’s going to work out. He would be willing to come but it would be very expensive.”

So they kept looking, and contacted the company that built Simpson’s machine. 

Saunders: “We could buy a smaller machine here in town and have it here. It’s a pretty fun project because we would be able to take (plastic) ones and twos but we’d also be able to expand and take fours, fives and sevens, and that includes fish nets, it would all stay here locally, we’d shred them up and melt them down and we could make, well basically anything out of plastic.”  

Saunders says it’s a clean process. The plastic can be melted at low temperatures so it doesn’t release any gas. And the final product doesn’t have to be lumber. With the proper mold, buckets or flower pots can come out at the end. And the machine is really small.

Saunders: “It’s about the size that can fit on a snowmachine trailer is my understanding. That would be pretty fun you know, we could actually have it at the fair and people could see lumber being made on site.”

This is the early planning stage. Soon the Friends of Recycling will have a meeting with the manufacturer, and work out the details of the machine. They will decide whether to go forward at their next board meeting. The anticipated cost of the machine is $65.000. They are already writing grants. 

If all goes well, the group anticipates taking around fifty thousand pounds out of the waste stream every year, and turning it into useful objects, right here at home.