Mitch Hecht

International Recycling Group (IRG), is building the world’s largest plastics recycling plant to process all types and grades of plastic scrap. Resin #1 and 2 will be processed and returned to the container/packaging industry and #4-7 will be engineered for repurposing it as a blast furnace reducing agent for the integrated steel industry. Our primary raw material is plastic scrap with little economic resale value which would otherwise end up being landfilled. After sorting and processing using the latest technology, a portion of the formerly uneconomical plastic scrap is sold as high-grade regrind; the remainder is engineered into a tightly controlled specification for our steel industry customers. In the United States, according to EPA estimates, only about 7% of all plastics that enter the municipal solid waste stream ("MSW") are recycled. Combined with plastic scrap generated by industrial and commercial industries, we estimate that over 50 million tons annually of plastic scrap are destined for landfills. Plastic scrap has considerable potential to be repurposed and IRG plans to efficiently utilize this untapped resource. Located in NW Indiana, IRG’s new “hyper-plant” will be able to accept ALL types of plastic—not just bottles (the “#1s and #2s”). Thus, “single streaming”, or combining all plastics into a recycling bin or cart for pickup, will now be economically viable. With this model, by 2035, 100% of the world's post-consumer plastics will have a re-use either as recycled content in finished products where practicable, or as an iron reducing agent in steel production. Today's grossly inefficient system of manual sortation of plastics-- relying as it does on an unholy trinity of duplicative collection bins and pickups, exploitation of the world's poorest, and taxes on plastic packaging-- will soon be a thing of the past. Plastics recycling must move to 100% co-mingled aggregation and 100% mechanical sortation for it to become sustainable.