My recycling friends and I got into a discussion about what happens to the plastic grocery bags that I religiously return to the collection sites at the three major grocery chains in town. Some claim that the bags are really just thrown into the stores’ trash bins, where they are headed for the landfill. Am I naive to believe that my bags are being reprocessed properly for another purpose by these stores? Or am I just being hoodwinked into thinking that I am doing my green thing? What is truly happening to these plastic bags at these stores? And what are they recycled into?
— Sandy Hubbard, Vancouver
Not only do they really recycle those bags, Sandy, but it’s possible you may be sitting on some of them right now.
According to Melinda Merrill, spokeswoman for Portland-area Fred Meyer stores, all the plastic bags that folks who care — folks like you — bother to bring back to the store and stuff into those plastic-bag-recycling bins wind up the property of a company that makes “wood-alternative” decking, railing and fencing products.
“The bags go on our trucks back to our warehouse, where all that plastic from all our stores is combined with plastic from the warehouse — the plastic we use to wrap pallets and things like that,” Merrill said. “We sell it to a company called Trex.”
A spokesman for WinCo Foods said the same thing: plastic bags returned by customers get baled and sold to Trex, which is based in Winchester, Va., and Fernley, Nev.
According to its Web site, “Trex Company turns millions of pounds of recycled and reclaimed plastic and waste wood each year into Trex products. Most of these raw materials come from recovered plastic grocery bags, plastic film and waste wood fiber. Trex Company purchases approximately 300 million pounds of used polyethylene and an equal amount of hardwood sawdust each year, materials that would normally end up in a landfill. The company recycles over 1.3 billion grocery retail bags annually.”
Fred Meyer recycled approximately 35 tons of plastic bags through Trex in 2008, Merrill said.
So if you’re hanging out on a deck that’s made of what seems like faux-wood — you may be hanging out with Trex. If you’ve ever rested on a bench at a Fred Meyer store, it’s almost certainly a Trex bench, Merrill said.
“We really like to see people recycle plastic bags,” she said. “It’s better to do that than use the bags as garbage can liners or dog poop picker-uppers, because the whole idea is to keep them out of landfills.”
Most grocers these days offer a nominal incentive to bring in your own bags rather than using their plastic ones. Fred Meyer will subtract 5 cents per bag from your total bill; at WinCo it’s 6 cents.
Plastic bags are increasingly considered an environmental problem worldwide; cities from San Francisco, Calif., to Mumbai, India, have banned them, along with whole nations, including Ireland, Germany and China.
— Scott Hewitt
Got a question about your neighborhood? We’ll get it answered. Send “What’s up with that?” questions to neighbors@columbian.com.
