The holiday season brings lots of foam packing into our homes and it usually gets tossed in the trash. This year, Mecklenburg County will recycle that foam for you.
We're talking about the kind of rigid, white, foam packaging that protects new televisions and computers or comes under your beef at the meat counter. It's called "expanded polystyrene" or EPS. It can quickly fill a home trash bin and takes up lots of space in the landfill.
Plastics are also a climate problem, emitting greenhouse gases from production to when they decay in landfills.
But now you can drop foam off at one of Mecklenburg County's four full-service recycling centers, where it will be shredded, compacted into ingots and sold to companies that reuse it.
"One of the ones that we're working with is a company that takes it and they do extrusion. And they make picture frames and molding. So a lot of the crown molding that you might get in your home is no longer made out of wood. It's made out of expanded polystyrene," Jeff Smithberger, county solid waste director, said this week.
Smithberger was promoting the new service at last weekend's North Mecklenburg Christmas Parade, where a county recycling truck with a long trash bin advertised the program. A cartoon dinosaur was painted on the side with the slogan "Please feed our Foam-a-Saurus Rex."
The county bought the equipment with a $50,000 grant from the national Foam Recycling Council. "Yes, there is such a thing," Smithberger said.
Foam joins a list of other hard-to-recycle materials now accepted at the recycling centers, such as books, shredded paper, and used clothing and textiles.
"We're trying to reduce things that take up lots of volume in landfill," Smithberger said. "We started this a couple of years ago with our mattress recycling program. And now we're moving on to EPS foam."
For now, it's only white rigid foam. Buyers don't want it contaminated with other colors such as pink or yellow.
The county's four recycling centers are Foxhole, on Lancaster Highway in south Charlotte; North Mecklenburg, off Statesville Road in Huntersville; Hickory Grove, on Pence Road in east Charlotte; and Compost Central and Recycling on Valleydale Road. See a flyer about the program and find out more at WipeOutWaste.com.
Learning the lingo: In reporting this story, I also learned that we shouldn't call all white plastic Styrofoam. That's a brand name for a specific type of insulating building material that can't be recycled. So, "rigid foam" it is.
This story originally appeared in WFAE's weekly Climate newsletter, published Thursdays. Subscribe below.
