Instead, he says, it has some unique applications. ”It’s not a closed-loop system,” explains Herritt, saying that although there has been some interest, Styrofoam is rarely remade back into Styrofoam. The processed Styrofoam is then repurposed into dozens of other applications. The truck picks up the Styrofoam from participating facilities and processes it right on-site. They have a truck with a built-in Styrofoam compactor housed inside of it, and that one truck can process and transport the equivalent of eight 53-foot tractor-trailers. With Styro-Go, however, the process is not only comparable to sending that material to the landfill, it’s also far more convenient. That’s the equivalent of a 53-foot transport truck filled with Styrofoam from each store heading to the landfill each week. One big-box appliance store chain they approached conducted an audit of their waste stream and discovered that in each and every store, Styrofoam made up between 60 to 80 percent of their total waste output. Getting big companies to participate has been key to Styro-Go’s success, not only for their own business model but also for the impact they make environmentally. We had to make recycling Styrofoam the same price as putting it in the garbage, if not cheaper - then they wouldn’t have any excuse not to do it.” Multipurpose Material #Recycle styrofoam how to“The volume was out there the trick was how to make companies buy in. “We had to think out of the box, and it could only work at scale,” Herritt says. Herritt began to try to redesign the recycling process, filing a handful of patents to protect his inventions and then beginning to court the big Styrofoam producers to get them to buy in. I just remember watching this and thinking, ‘There’s got to be a better way.’ ” “ would come in and do stuff - installing appliances, roofing, etcetera - and there would be literally mounds of Styrofoam going in the garbage bins. “One of my areas of consulting was project management with new-home construction,” he says. When the bottom line is the biggest concern, asking businesses to pay to recycle has rarely offered promising results.įor Herritt, a former airline pilot, the inspiration to radically redefine the Styrofoam recycling business came when he transitioned into a new job as a consultant. This strategy may work in the short term for not-for-profit organizations like municipal recycling facilities, but getting businesses on board has always been a hard sell. Typically, those undertaking Styrofoam recycling have done so by operating at a loss - spending around $1,000 to recoup $200 worth of Styrofoam. Styro-Go is expanding nationally in 2019, according to its website. “You just can’t make money out of it,” Herritt says, bluntly. Styrofoam is recyclable, but there’s a reason that the process is not more commonplace. Last week, however, I chatted with Robert Herritt, president of Styro-Go, and I realized just how wrong I was. I brought my own containers when picking up takeout food, brought my own jars when going to smoothie places, and shopped secondhand to sidestep all the Styrofoam packaging associated with buying new products. I (somewhat naively, I now realize) assumed that we just lacked the technology or ability to do so, so I avoided using it altogether. It does not store any personal data.You know, for all of my environmental awareness, I was always under the mistaken impression that the reason no one recycled Styrofoam was that it just couldn’t be recycled. The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance". This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary". The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other. The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional". The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics". These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly.
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