On a hot and muggy June day, a horse-drawn buggy carrying two Mennonite women in long dresses and bonnets glides down Union Street, in the heart of this southwestern Ontario town’s industrial district.
It feels hot enough to melt plastic — and that’s exactly what’s happening inside a nondescript factory that’s clearly seen better days.
This is the home of EFS Plastics Inc., a cutting-edge recycling company owned and operated by German transplant Martin Vogt — a man whose knowledge of plastics goes right down to the molecular level.
“Plastic is a hundred years old,” he said, settling into an upstairs office and offering water — in a plastic bottle, of course.
Vogt believes that a century later, he is on the verge of revolutionizing plastics recycling in Canada.
His assortment of large machinery, deceptively low-tech on the outside, has the capability to optically sort all the plastic bottles and containers people throw into their blue boxes and, after a series of processes, transform them into barley-sized pellets that can be re-made into new consumer products.
He’s already getting ready to expand after receiving a $2-million grant from Stewardship Ontario.
“This is the technology that exists today in other countries such as Germany and Sweden,” Vogt said.
“What we do here was needed four years ago in Canada. Nobody was talking about mixed-plastics recycling. No one did rigid-mixed plastics and post-consumer film plastics. The ability to sort it and bring it back as a high-end material — that is the difference.”
Vogt recently added Kingston to his list of municipal clients prepared to sell the bulk of their plastics to his operation. Also on board are the Ontario communities of Waterloo, Hamilton, York and Ottawa, as well as Rochester, N.Y.
Kingstonians can now throw all of their plastic waste, except bags, into their blue box without having to check the little number inside the arrow triangle to sort out the non-recyclable types.
“In five years there will be no need to pre-sort,” Vogt predicts. “Municipalities should not be in a situation where they’re sorting any more. That’s not efficient.”
Instead, Vogt’s one-stop facility can divert the various plastics, grind them into flakes, wash and remove contaminants and pelletize them, all in one location.
Source: www.thewhig.com
By Paul Schiliesmann