Sustainability In Your Ear: Trex Makes Circularity Work

Less than 2% of Americans can place plastic film in curbside recycling, while millions of pounds of bags, pallet wrap, bubble mailers, and dry cleaner sleeves are rejected by materials recovery facilities. Plastic film recycling has remained difficult due to contamination and unfavorable economics. Trex began decades ago by designing its supply chain around plastic film and by the end of 2024 upcycled more than 5.5 billion pounds into composite decking. The manufacturing process accommodates feedstock variability using thousands of production recipes and AI that reads feedstock streams in real time to adjust extrusion temperatures and line speeds. In 2024, Trex sourced over 1 billion pounds of reclaimed PE film and wood scrap through a national drop-off network and community partners.

"Less than 2% of Americans can put plastic film in their curbside recycling bin, according to The Recycling Partnership. Meanwhile, the country generates millions of pounds of bags, pallet wrap, bubble mailers, and dry cleaner sleeves every year that machinery at materials recovery facilities is designed to reject. The plastic film problem has been the recycling industry's white whale for three decades - too contaminated for most processors, too light for most economics."

"More than 30 years ago, Trex Company, then a small operation in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, decided to build its supply chain around exactly this material. By the end of 2024, Trex had upcycled more than 5.5 billion pounds of waste plastic film into composite decking and had become one of the largest plastic film recyclers in North America."

"Most manufacturers spend their engineering effort narrowing input tolerances. Trex went the other direction. Zach described thousands of recipes the production lines can run through, swapping between cleaner stretch film one day and heavily contaminated industrial trimmings the next. Artificial intelligence reads each feedstock stream in real time and adjusts extrusion temperatures and line speeds to keep the finished board within specification."

"In 2024, the company sourced over 1 billion pounds of reclaimed PE film and wood scrap, including 377 million pounds of waste plastic, through a national collection network of more than 10,000 retail drop-off locations and hundreds of school and community partners enrolled in its NexTrex program."

Read at Earth911