At first glance, plastics recycling looks like an economic and environmental success story.
Consider, for example, that about 25 percent of the polyethylene fiber in Tyvek -- a DuPont product used in envelopes, disposable medical suits and insulation -- comes from jugs that once held milk or water. Fleece garments are increasingly made of old soda bottles. "Plastic lumber" made in part from milk jugs increasingly substitutes for wood in decking and outdoor furniture, and the Plastic Lumber Trade Association is testing the product for rot-resistant bridges.
EvCo Research, an Atlanta company, is using recycled beverage bottles to make water-repellent coatings on boxes for shipping fruits and meats. The TEWA Technology Corp of Albuquerque, New Mexico, is using shredded plastic in asphalt.
Yet few companies have achieved the economies of scale that could make recycling pay.
Manufacturers say they cannot get a stream of high-quality material at a reasonable price. Recycling companies say they cannot guarantee such a stream until sales grow robust enough to drive down costs.
"It's a chicken-and-egg situation," said Gil Friend, president of Natural Logic, an environmental consulting firm in Berkeley, Califoirnia. Two years ago, environmentalists, manufacturers and recyclers founded Business and Environmentalists in an Alliance for Recycling -- known as BEAR -- to jump-start plastics recycling. So far, it has only compiled data.
"We had a high objective, finding a way to recycle 80 percent of plastics," said the manager of the alliance, Edward Boisson, an environmental consultant in Pittsboro, Norht Carolina. "We didn't get there."
The results of the impasse are easy to spot. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, nearly 95 percent of the 24.2 million tons of plastic waste generated each year goes unreclaimed. Plastics already take up a disproportionate amount of landfill space, and the glut is likely to worsen: Studies show that as many as 500 million computers will be discarded over the next five years.
"Billions of pounds of plastics will not be dealt with in an environmentally benign way," said Ted Smith, executive director of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, an environmental group in San Jose, California.
Manufacturers acknowledge the problem. Beverage companies, although opposed to the spread of bills mandating return deposits on bottles beyond the 10 states that have such laws, are setting up their own retrieval programs. On Jan. 8, carpet manufacturers, environmental advocates and regulators signed the National Carpet Recycling Agreement, to promote carpet recycling.
Electronics companies have started "take back" programs to collect discarded computers, printers and such. Similar programs are mandatory in much of Europe. Many companies are designing products to be easily disassembled, and stamping components with codes signifying their chemical composition.
Failed initiatives
But so far, few manufacturers are funneling all of their used plastics back into their products. PepsiCo experimented with a recycled bottle in the early 1990s, but "the economics were just not there," a spokesman recalled. Honeywell International tried making new fibers from old carpets; it "didn't pan out," a spokesman said, and Honeywell sold the business last year.
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