ERIE, Pa. (PRWEB) September 09, 2020
International Recycling Group (IRG), an Erie, PA start-up planning to build the world’s first all-plastics, zero-landfill recycling facility, has joined with plastic packaging producers, brands, retailers, recyclers, waste management companies, policymakers, and other stakeholders to help establish a nationally unified, cross-sector approach to the utilization and re-utilization of plastics in the manufacturing ecosystem.
The US Plastic Pact (https://usplasticspact.org/) is a collaboration led by The Recycling Partnership, World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. Its purpose is to drive adoption of an initiative comprised of commercial, government and non-profit entities working together to reduce the enormous amount of unmarketable plastics that end up in landfills and encourage recycling. The Pact helps various sectors of the economy better coordinate comprehensive strategies for realizing impactful, practical, and scalable targets in a timely manner. These include:
1. Define a list of packaging that is to be designated as problematic or unnecessary by 2021 and take measures to eliminate them by 2025
2. By 2025, all plastic packaging is 100% reusable, recyclable, or compostable
3. Undertake ambitious actions to effectively recycle or compost 50% of plastic packaging by 2025
4. By 2025 the average recycled content or responsibly sourced bio-based content in plastic packaging will be 30%
Mitch Hecht, IRG’s Founder and Chairman, commented, “IRG looks forward to supporting the Pact’s efforts toward a streamlined and looped lifecycle for industrial and post-consumer resins. The development of our SuperPRF™ plastics recovery facility in Erie will benefit directly from greater coordination on product specifications and identifying those plastics that are particularly problematic and need to be removed from the supply chain.
Everyone seems to have their own idea of what will solve our plastics problem,” says Hecht. “The real solution is attacking it from every angle and supporting each other’s efforts throughout the process. Having the US Plastic Pact unifying our objectives will only strengthen our impact as a whole.”
About International Recycling Group
IRG is designing and building the world’s largest plastics recycling plant in northwest Pennsylvania with commissioning expected in 2022. The SuperPRF™ concept will accept all types and grades of waste plastic and in all forms. Recyclable resins will be sorted, cleaned, flaked and sold to downstream recycling processors. Non-recyclable material will be repurposed as an iron reducing agent for the integrated steel industry.
About US Plastics Pact
The U.S. Plastics Pact will bring together businesses, government entities, non-governmental organizations, researchers, and other stakeholders who will work collectively toward a common vision of a circular economy for plastics, as outlined by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s New Plastics Economy Initiative. This vision aims to ensure that plastics never become waste by eliminating the plastics we don’t need, innovating to ensure that the plastics we do need are reusable, recyclable, or compostable, and circulating all the plastic items we use to keep them in the economy and out of the environment.
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Doug Schrader
dschrader@internationalrecycling.com
internationalrecycling.com
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