Edmonton company recycles polystyrene

An Edmonton manufacturer has installed Western Canada’s first polystyrene recycling machine. Polycore Canada, which builds foundations and walls from expanded polystyrene, now reduces its waste to bricks that it ships to China and Korea to be born again as CD cases, plastic cutlery and computer cabinets.

Polycore was wasting 4 to 7% of the material that it cuts to size from huge blocks, prompting the purchase of the recycling machine. The polystyrene is shredded, crushed, melted and molded into six-kilogram gold-coloured bricks of solid resin which are stacked on pallets, shrink-wrapped, and shipped to Asia.

Polycore has no excess capacity for processing other people’s waste, but has the North American rights to sell a line of polystyrene recycling machines that can be small enough to serve a home electronics store or big enough for a municipal waste-handling facility. See polycorecanada.com

(Source: Recycling Council of Alberta in March 2006 WasteWatch)

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