Milk Jugs To Patios
How One Person’s Trash Becomes Another’s Treasure
By Mark Kuhl
For the GPHN
Most people agree it feels good to recycle. Many are curious about how one’s trash becomes another one’s treasure.
The recycled materials industry is fluid, responding to the ups and downs of supply, demand, and price. Your used milk jug may one day be routed to Trex, which uses these and plastic grocery bags to make faux wood patio deck boards. The next day a milk jug may sold to a toy company. Your PET soda bottles often make their way to carpet-making companies in Georgia. PET is also used to make new bottles and is often spun in to polyester yarns used for a variety of products, including Patagonia fleeces, Adidas shoes, and the NORDEN brand Matias jacket made from 98 percent recycled bottles.
Paper mills across the country gobble up our spent office paper and corrugated boxes, turning them to pulp and remaking them into new paper products. Milk cartons and paper cups tossed in to your purple bin are baled and shipped to Sustana in Wisconsin, where they are processed back into raw material for companies that make toilet paper, tissues, and paper towels.
In Colorado, Applegate Insulation turns yesterday’s newspaper into spray-on insulation. Momentum Recycling cleans, refines, and sorts your glass bottles in Broomfield and sells the material to Colorado glass bottle manufacturers. Ball Corp. in Broomfield buys used aluminum to create new beer and soda cans.
Product manufacturers are paying attention to the growing public interest in reducing waste and are utilizing more recycled materials. Additionally, federal and local governments are beginning to incentivize recycling, so expect more recycling opportunities in the near future.
Mark Kuhl is an environmental advocate who lives in Park Hill with his family. His handy tips and news about recycling household items appear every month in these pages. A directory of his past columns for recycling everything from paint to Styrofoam to shoes is at greaterparkhill.org/sustainability/
recycling-directory/.