Here are my thoughts as Tuesday’s midterm elections come to a feverish conclusion. The next time you pass a patch of political garden signs, many of them will be turned into recyclable resin in a matter of weeks.
The sign reuse project, which began in Volusia County in 2018 and is now expanding to Seminole and Orange Counties, this year involved an Orlando-based company to clean signs and create new ones. Claims to transform into usable material. Food containers, carpets, car parts, anything made of polypropylene (Plastic No. 5).
Suze Peace, a DeLand resident and member of the Volusia County Women’s Voters League, said after the 2016 election that her campaign signs had become a “blizzard” and she began thinking about how they could be recycled. said. When she contacted the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to ask if this was being done elsewhere in the state, they said no.
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So, in 2018 and 2020, Peace and Other Volunteers partnered with Republican and Democratic clubs to launch a project to collect and recycle autographs at Thouseard’s Recycling in New Smyrna Beach. But the amount of signage was more than a “family run” thrift store could handle.
“So,” said Pease.
She found partners for the League of Women Voters in Orange and Seminole counties to help organize a collection of nearly 15,000 political signs.
She also found PureCycle Technologies Inc. This is her NASDAQ-indexed publicly traded company based in Orlando, which is positive about recycling billboards. PureCycle officials estimate that about 10,000 pounds of polypropylene could be diverted from landfills.
plastic problem
Huge patches of plastic debris, many of which shatter into smaller pieces, swirl in the ocean’s circulation.
The Pew Charitable Trusts reports that 13 million tonnes of plastic enter the Earth’s oceans each year, threatening marine life and polluting coastlines.
The Center for Biodiversity has called the accumulation of plastic in the oceans a “global crisis” and is estimated to outnumber all the world’s fish if our dependence on plastic continues to grow at its current rate. I’m here.
“The tragedy is that no one knows how long it will take for them to biodegrade,” Peace said. They say it takes at least 125 years to biodegrade, so if it can be reused, it makes sense.”
Both Republican and Democratic clubs are involved in the project, with support from Volusia County, election administrator Lisa Lewis, and the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.
“We don’t remove signs from the road at all,” said Nancy Vaughan, chairman of the Volusia County Women’s Voters’ Natural Resources Team. We don’t take them. We only take them from Democratic and Republican campaign offices.”
Other candidates and volunteers can bring signs to the Volusia County Fairgrounds on November 19th and 20th. There, the League of Women Voters prepares to load volunteers into trucks and take them first to her GEL Corporation in Orange City. Distributed on PureCycle.
Vaughan said he appreciated this as an effort to bridge the political divide seen in recent American elections.
“That’s the beauty of this. It’s a nonpartisan effort,” she said. It’s the perfect combination of working in a non-partisan outreach.”
PureCycle process
PureCycle CEO Dustin Olson welcomed Peace’s appeal, saying his company is scaling up and “searching the country” looking for sources of plastic to recycle.
Labels and other materials that PureCycle collects are sent to our plant in Ironton, Ohio, where the materials are washed and ground into UPR (Ultra High Purity Resin).
PureCycle’s customers are converters and compounders that use UPR to make plastic products.
“They make car bumpers, they make polypropylene carpets, they make toys at IKEA, they make cups at McDonald’s,” Olson said. put it in the product.”
According to Olson, there are three types of plastic recycling: mechanical, chemical and advanced.
“Mechanical recycling is to mix all the plastics together. You end up with odor performance and poor color performance. So the color is grey. The odor is not perfect,” he said. “Chemical recycling takes the plastic and basically uses a lot of energy to break it down into molecules and turn it into the equivalent of crude oil.”
PureCycle is committed to “advanced recycling,” Olson said.
“It’s like a molecular washer, literally.” That way all contaminants in the plastic will be washed away. ”
Olson said he hopes the program will expand statewide or even nationwide in the next election.
So is peace.
“Florida has 67 counties and only three of them (we recycle plastic political signs),” Peace said. “It’s just sad.”
Florida law requires signs to be removed within 30 days after the election. Peace wants to tweak it. She tried to contact one of her lawmakers to see if the law could be amended to require recycling of signs.
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