With more more than 200 collection sites in the U.S. and Canada, EPS generates serveral million pounds of post-consumer EPS packaging. It can be easily recycled into new foam packaging or durable consumer goods such as cameras or video cassette casings, and due to its resiliency, can be recycled over and over again. We produce new parts out of recycled materials.
Source Reduction
By working with resin producers and equipment manufacturers to minimize the use of natural resources and air and water emissions, EPS processors are able to make packaging parts with less virgin material, while maintaining the same high level of performance. By improving the design of a single product line, one polystyrene manufacturer, for example, diverted more than 28,000 tons of waste from disposal in 1994. This is the equivalent of the amount of municipal solid waste a typical town of 35,000 - like Annapolis, MD - generates in an entire year.
Reuse
Expanded polystyrene loose fill is one of the most commonly reused packaging materials. Consumers and manufacturers reuse nearly 30 percent of all loose fill; for mailing services, the reuse rate is as high as 50 percent in some facilities. And, in special market applications, EPS molded parts can often be reused multiple times.
Polystyrene represents a tiny fraction - less than one percent by weight - of the solid waste stream Prior to 1988, there was essentially no recovery of post-consumer polystyrene for recycling. Although the availability of polystyrene recycling programs varies by community, in 1996, just eight years later, almost 54 million pounds of polystyrene were recycled. Davis Core & Pad is a collection site for clean EPS materials.
