From Green Right Now Reports
Plant-based plastic has been finding more and more places in the marketplace, as cups, bottles and plates.
But while PLA, or Polylactic acid plastic, meets the environmental test at the front end, being made of eco-friendly and biodegradable ingredients, it has faced an end-of-life issue: It can’t be recycled with the bulk of petroleum-based plastics in the waste stream, the PETE and HDPE plastics that major recyclers collect and sell.
The PLA industry has been trying to solve that issue. It has looked at technology that would help recyclers separate PLA plastic from conventional plastics at processing plants.
Another solution is to recycle PLA plastic, melt it down, at its own special facilities. It’s already being done on a major scale in Europe. This week the industry announced that a newly formed U.S. PLA recycling company, Plarco Inc., will become a major collector of post-consumer PLA waste, helping to close the recycling loop for PLA.
Plarco, based in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, will be recycling PLA plastic by melting it back into lactic acid, which can then be used as a building block for virgin PLA plastic, the most widely used type of biodegradable plastic among the new generation of polymers made from plants instead of petroleum.
The new cradle-to-grave or as bioplastic industry like to call it ‘cradle-to-cradle’ supply chain (because new product can be built from waste) will look like this: Plarco will be contracting with BioCor, which purchases and resells scrap PLA, to be BioCor’s exclusive recycler of post-consumer PLA. Plarco will sell the recycled product to Minnesota-based NatureWorks, the world’s leading producer of PLA (marketed as Ingeo).
After the lactic acid is reclaimed by Plarco, NatureWorks will ship it to a Nebraska facility where it can be turned into the Ingeo biopolymer.
“Plarco’s recycling process will help to create true cradle-to-cradle reuse of post consumer and post industrial PLA,” said Plarco CEO Charles L. (Chuck) Terry, in a statement. “Our contractual relationships with both BioCor and NatureWorks and the trend toward greater use of biopolymers bode well for Plarco’s sustained business growth.”
Plarco is already able to convert certain types of PLA waste into lactic acid suitable for production of virgin PLA resin, and will soon it will accept all types of PLA waste at its Eau Claire facility.
Belgium-based Galactic, a world scale producer of lactic acid, and EnviroGreen are stockholders in the new venture.