Hannah Jiang, Erika Celeste, and Brittany Stephanis
Business Insider – October 3, 2020
Milk cartons, Styrofoam cups, grocery store bags — a new plant in Ashley, Indiana, wants them all.
Brightmark’s facility is the first of its kind in the US. It converts plastic waste into wax and eco-friendly fuels on a commercial scale, a process Brightmark hopes will revolutionize the plastic industry when it opens full time in 2021.
“We take a whole array of mixed waste that, until now, was not easily recyclable and reusable, and create circular economy solutions to some of our biggest environmental issues,” founder and CEO Bob Powell told Business Insider Today.
In its initial year, the plant will process close to 100,000 tons of plastic — about the weight of 600 blue whales — from waste management companies, manufacturers, and environmental groups.
The full conversion process is a company secret, but it begins with breaking bales of plastic apart, then shredding the plastic into small pellets.
“We’ve got employees that are basically refinery operators,” plant manager Jason Sasse added. “So they take the plastic pellet and they convert that into our finished products.”
Finished products include ultra-low sulfur diesel fuel, and companies like BP are already placing orders.
“The BPs of the world, who’ve been very forward-thinking and are looking to a net carbon-zero future, find our products to be really helpful,” Powell said. “And it’s much better than pulling crude oil out of the ground to make diesel.”
About Brightmark
Brightmark is a global waste solutions company with a mission to Reimagine Waste. The company takes a holistic, closed-loop, circular economy approach to tackle the planet’s most pressing environmental challenges with imagination and optimism for the future. Through the deployment of disruptive, breakthrough waste-to-energy solutions focused on plastics renewal (plastic waste-to-fuel) and renewable natural gas (organic waste-to-fuel), Brightmark enables programs specifically tailored to environmental needs in order to build scalable project solutions that have a positive impact on the world and communities in which its stakeholders live and work.
