Washington company recycles packing foam, for free

WASHINGTON — A business in Washington will gladly take the packaging foam that comes with your bulkier holiday presents this year, repurposing the material for use in other products, rather than letting it take up space in a landfill.

Atlas Molded Products manufactures expanded polystyrene. While most consumers might call the white stuff “Styrofoam,” Atlas employees are quick to point out that that’s a brand-name product, on that most people rarely interact with.

Styrofoam is used in construction, and it’s usually pink or blue. The material that makes up disposable cups, pressure cooker packaging, TV box liners and some lightweight, custom-made signage is usually expanded polystyrene, also called EPS.

Names aside, if it’s a lightweight foam that ends up on your living room floor come Christmas morning, the odds are pretty good that Atlas can recycle it.

“EPS is 100% recyclable,” said Atlas Production Manager Mark Langr. “There’s nothing that’s got that 6 PS sign on it that’s not 100% recyclable. That’s the part that they leave out when we end up having conversations about recyclability and sustainability … we break it down into little chunks, and then we ship it to where it should go.”

The material can be recycled infinitely, in theory. The molded foam is an oil-based product, and even in ideal conditions, it takes centuries to decompose. Conversely, its particulates can be broken up and recombined time and time again, taking new shapes for new applications with no lapse in quality, according to Langr.

Not all packing foam meets the requirements, however. Those interested in tossing their packaging should look for the three-arrow recycling symbol with number six inside, indicating the type of polystyrene. Packing peanuts and flexible cloth-like foam, for instance, don’t typically use the recyclable material. The foam also has to be clean for the recycling process to work.

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But plenty of the product does fit the criteria. Langr said Atlas shipped about half a million pounds of recycled polystyrene in 2023, although only a fraction of that was postconsumer product left in the bin outside the facility’s front door. The rest was scrap from its own products. Atlas started tracking the exact quantity of its postconsumer intake earlier this month.

The repurposing process is fairly straightforward. Donated EPS is shredded, pumped into a machine, and “densified” into blocks of foam.

Atlas doesn’t mix donated foam into its own product, however. The company’s blocks are usually used in construction, and must be treated for fire insulation in a way that a refrigerator packing piece, for example, is not. Instead, recycle-built blocks are loaded onto trucks, and shipped to other manufacturers who can use it.

“If it’s in-house, I have to have a flame retardant in a lot of stuff, because my stuff is going in homes,” Langr said. “It can catch fire, it’s still a petroleum fire but it goes out … in six inches, it’s got a flame-spread rating. And when we have a product from outside, it might not have the same standards for some stuff.”

While the approach is simple, it’s not usually practical in curbside recycling systems. Expanded polystyrene breaks apart easily, and its static-charged pieces can cling to other trash like cardboard, making it difficult to sort out at general-purpose, single-stream recycling facilities.

It’s also not especially cost-effective. A trailer full of expanded polystyrene is lighter than any truck that hauls it, and the low-cost, recycled material brings in less revenue for Atlas than it costs in labor to produce. It also relies on dedicated, expensive equipment that has little use outside the EPS industry.

Still, Langr said it was an important service for the company to provide.

“We do it because we’re in the field, and it’s our way of making sure that this product doesn’t end up where it shouldn’t,” Langr said. “We already have the machines here to do it, so it’s not as large of a draw on it here for us to do it, but … it doesn’t pay for a person by any means.”

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Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com