Firstar Fiber: Making hard-to-recycle plastic circular
Firstar Fiber (Firstar) is a leading provider of recycling services across several Midwestern states, processing and marketing close to 100,000 tons per year of a wide variety of materials, including hard-to-recycle plastics like bags and films.
Project milestones
Improving plastics circularity in the USA
Firstar Fiber (Firstar) is a leading provider of recycling services across several Midwestern states, processing and marketing close to 120,000 tons per year of a wide variety of materials, including hard-to-recycle plastics like bags and films. A key barrier to improving the circularity of hard-to-recycle plastics is the lack of end markets. It has collected difficult-to-recycle plastic waste from participating households (e.g. candy wrappers, chip packets, juice pouches) since 2018 with the Hefty Renew™ program.
In 2021, the Alliance partnered with Firstar to expand their materials recovery facility (MRF) in Omaha, Nebraska, into an integrated recycling facility to convert difficult-to-recycle plastic waste to post consumer resin (PCR).
Over the next 3 years, Firstar and the Alliance worked together to develop a pre-processing facility where plastic waste can be sorted and hard-to recycle plastics can be sustainably and economically re-manufactured into marketable feedstocks and goods such as plastic lumber for decking and other non-structural applications. The company also plans to explore the potential of advanced recycling technologies to produce other plastic products from hard-to-recycle plastic waste.
The equipment for the plastic pre-processing facility was installed in Q1 2022. Since then, Firstar has started establishing end markets for the plastic lumber and pellets produced at the PPRF.
“The typical waste management system in the USA faces many barriers to recycling and reselling hard-to-recycle plastic waste because of the lack of end markets and the complex steps and partners involved in collecting, sorting, processing, and remanufacturing these plastics. With this project we have the opportunity to bring all of those elements together—literally under one roof—in order to find sustainable solutions and provide value to all plastic waste even those previously destined for the landfill or the environment.”
Dale Gubbels, , Firstar Fiber Corporation
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