A Burnaby recycling facility – Reclaim Plastics – has received provincial funding to help them divert hard-to-recycle automotive plastics from the landfill.
The $667,000 in funding is from the CleanBC Plastics Action Fund and Reclaim Plastics plans on investing in technology to improve the sorting of hard-to-recycle automotive plastics, including their ability to recycle more car bumpers, headlights and other automotive plastics.
“With automotive plastics being the second highest contributor to plastic waste after packaging, our goal has always been to prevent automotive plastic waste from entering the landfill,” said Al Boflo, a partner at Reclaim Plastics. “Now, we will be able to expand our operation and contribute to a more sustainable province – helping auto body shops and auto recyclers to become more environmentally-conscious – and enable automotive plastics to be repurposed in the economy.”
According to the CleanBC Plastics Action Plan, the use of plastics in manufacturing is growing rapidly, but only a small fraction is recycled back into the plastic supply chain. The goal of the CleanBC Plastics Action Fund – created and funded by the Government of B.C. and administered by Alacrity Canada – is to provide local businesses with the financial means to expand the marketplace for reusable plastics, in order to support the circular economy and create new jobs.
“There is enormous potential for plastic waste to be source material for new products – keeping it out of landfills and protecting our environment – another strategy in our CleanBC Plastics Action Plan,” said George Heyman, minister of Environment and Climate Change Strategy.
Previously, the automotive recycling process was only concerned with the extraction of metals and fluids from end-of-life vehicles, with no focus on the recovery of plastics. As the average vehicle volume is 50% plastic (or approximately 440 pounds of plastic), there is an opportunity to recycle more automotive plastics and integrate this post-consumer resin (PCR) into B.C.’s circular economy to create landscape edging, piping, or even new plastic car parts.
Currently, Metro Vancouver has implemented a disposal ban on auto bodies and parts, but this ban has not been mandated by the rest of the province, so many auto body shops and auto recyclers continue to discard their automotive plastic waste, as it is cheaper than recycling, said a news release.
Reclaim Plastics receives hundreds of automotive plastic parts daily at its Burnaby facility, which needs to be sorted, decontaminated and processed, before it can be recycled. With approximately 850 car accidents in B.C. each day and 200,000 end-of-life vehicles being scrapped each year, Reclaim Plastics is only receiving a fraction of the 80 million pounds of automotive plastic waste that is accumulated from collision shops and end-of-life vehicles each year.
