Coon Rapids buying $45,000 machine to repurpose recycled plastic foam

In Coon Rapids, the plastic foam woes are over.

While cities like Washington, New York, San Francisco and even Minneapolis are pushing to ban plastic foam products, Coon Rapids is embracing these hard-to-recycle items and giving them a new life.

With financial help from Anoka County, the city's recycling center will soon be the proud owner of a $45,000 machine that will take plastic foam pieces, and process them so they can be resold and reused. (The material is commonly called Styrofoam, although not all plastic foam is that Dow Chemical product.)

It's an innovative move: Coon Rapids is on a shortlist of U.S. cities that recycle plastic foam. And it soon will be part of an even smaller group to have this type of processing machine.

The Coon Rapids Recycling Center is already helping to process plastic foamware from all of the state's seven Chick-fil-A restaurants.

Colleen Sinclair, recycling coordinator for the city, said recycling plastic foam products is a "missed market."

"It's a big cost investment, [but] the demand is very high, and the profit margin is crazy," Sinclair said. "It pays for the machine in several years. It's doable — we are doing it."

Since the Coon Rapids Recycling Center opened about five years ago, it has partnered with HOM Furniture to recycle the plastic foam pieces. The furniture store currently picks up the foam dropped off at the recycling center for free and recycles it along with its furniture-packaging material.

"It's a great partnership," Sinclair said. "But we maxed out what they can process and the type of material they can process. Just to keep up with the demands. We turn people away every day."

Sinclair has fielded calls from people in Burnsville and White Bear Lake who are willing to drive 45 minutes across the Twin Cities to bring her the "four pieces of foam from a TV they just bought."

Finding a processing machine wasn't easy.

There are only a handful in the state. There's no catalog for them.

So she turned to her immediate network and asked companies she works with where they bought their machines.

There are two types of processing machines: one that melts the foam and another that condenses it. She wanted to see firsthand how the machines work, so her team visited several sites.

Sinclair opted for the machine that condenses and pushes the air out of the foam. First, the foam items are put into a bucket and, similar to a paper shredder, they are broken down into smaller pieces. The pieces then go into another chamber, where they're smashed and squeezed so the air is taken out and the material becomes flat. From there, the piece comes out in a square shape, similar to a salt lick block.

The blocks are stored until there are enough to sell to companies.

Sharon Legg, the city's finance director, said plastic foam sells for about $300 a ton. In 2013, the city processed about 22 tons of plastic foam, she said.

But, she said, "our bigger goal here is to get that stuff out of the waste stream. That's what the recycling center is trying to do."

Sinclair said plastic foam is an underutilized resource. A 2013 study from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency found about 1 percent of the state's trash was polystyrene or plastic foam, which is used in construction, packaging, and even CD cases.

The world is not changing and people are still using plastic foam in large amounts, Sinclair said.

"It's always out there and never going away, and there's no really great environmental outlet for it," Sinclair said. "There's not a lot of options for this material."

Karen Zamora • 612-673-4647