Abandoned Plastics Find a Home!
Every year, tens of millions of pounds of plant nursery products are wasted. Bailing twine, flower
pots, and greenhouse plastics are regularly dumped, burned, or stacked after their useful life.
The agriculture industry throws away at least as much plastic as the total amount of curbside
recyclables collected across the country. No gardeners reuse plastic materials due to the
possibility of lingering diseases and no recyclers take them because of their difficulty to process
and their low market value.
Agri-Plas, Inc. has come to the rescue! Agri-Plas, Inc. is the only agricultural plastic recycling
center in the nation that collects all types of plastic—types that other recyclers won't touch, like
HOPE pots, pesticide containers, and styrene trays. There are more than 2,000 nurseries in
Oregon, only 50 of which send their plastic to Agri-Plas, but these alone create 80,000 pounds
of waste every week for the company to clean, chip, and resell.
At Agri-Plas, Inc., plastics are fed into large machines—the granulator, aspirator, and
extruder—where they are chipped and cleaned with high-pressure air. This process prevents the
waste water runoff problematic to other recycling facilities. Agri-Plas, Inc. sells the clean plastic
pellets to a variety of manufacturers to be melted into new products. Polypropelene from old
nursery pots is melted and blended into new plant containers, reducing the need for virgin
material by 10 to 20 percent. Bailing twine formerly used to hold hay is refashioned into auto
parts. The plastic film used to cover greenhouses—replaced every 1 to 4 years—is turned into
plastic lumber.
Recycling all types of plastic waste is a labor-intensive process that leads to high overhead
costs and low profits. But the husband-wife team that owns this facility doesn't run it to make a
fortune. Allen Jongsma declared: "We don't make a lot of money on this, but the overall goal is
that in years from now, you won't find piles of gardening refuse in the countryside or buried or
burned." Dari Jongsma makes it clear why she created this facility: "There's only so much
Mother Earth has to give, and if we don't start appreciating it, we won't have anything left."
For more information, contact Dari Jongsma, President, at 503 390-2381 or
.
United States Bivironmental Protection Agency
Cffice of Solid V\feste and Emergency Response (5306\Ai)
EFW30-F03-021
July 2003
www.epa.gov/epaoswer/non-hw/green
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