Styrofoam waste: Not just peanuts

This holiday season, the people who run Roseville's solid waste utility have visions of toys, computers and high-definition televisions dancing in their heads.

But their eyes aren't all aglow over shiny, new gifts – it's the stuff they're packaged in.

On Monday, Roseville launched the region's first Styrofoam recycling program, just in time for the holiday shopping frenzy.

"Styrofoam is the holy grail of recycling," Sean Bigley, an Environmental Utilities analyst, who led the city's Green Team, which was organized to find ways to make the city more environmentally sustainable.

"It's one of those materials that make up a very large amount of waste in terms of volume, but there wasn't any apparent way to recycle it."

Expanded polystyrene, commonly known by its trademark name Styrofoam, is used to cushion products during transit or for retail distribution.

It's also used to make packaging peanuts and the food containers that have been banned in some cities such as San Francisco and Oakland.

While most shipping stores will reuse packing peanuts, there are few recycling programs that take the specially shaped Styrofoam used to package electronics and few companies that use the recycled material.

Roseville's road to becoming the first local community to start such a program began when city Public Utilities Commissioner Jeffrey Ray heard about Timbron International, a Stockton company that uses recycled Styrofoam to make interior moldings such as baseboard and crown molding.

"It piqued my interest because I have three young children at home. Every Christmas and whenever we have a birthday, my trash can is brimming to the top with Styrofoam, which is mostly just air," Ray said.

Timbron collects Styrofoam from as far away as Slovakia to manufacture moldings, which are made mostly of post-consumer recycled material and sold in about 2,000 Home Depot stores across North America, said Plant Manager Zion Dunn.

Timbron uses roughly 8 million pounds of Styrofoam every year and has recycled enough to fill the Empire State building.

"It's not that Styrofoam can't be recycled, it's just more difficult than other plastics," Dunn said.

Transporting it is among the chief challenges. It doesn't weigh much, but takes up so much space that a typical big-rig carries only about a thousand pounds.

"The transportation costs are very, very high," Dunn said. "What we've done is work with different companies that have machines that can pack Styrofoam, so now we can fit 35,000 pounds on a truck. It's made the logistics of recycling much more economical."

Most of Timbron's Styrofoam comes from furniture warehouses and electronics manufacturing plants. Recently, the company began taking Styrofoam from a curbside recycling program in Los Angeles.

California Integrated Waste Management Board's Lisa Barry was eager to bring Styrofoam recycling to the Sacramento region and worked with Roseville to start the Poly Pilot program.

"Our state agency and local governments haven't paid much attention to this material because the score card is about tons diverted," Barry said. "While it doesn't weigh much, it takes up a lot of space."

Styrofoam doesn't degrade in landfills. It also breaks into little pieces that can easily blow away, littering the environment and harming wildlife.

Not everyone agrees that creating recycling programs for the material is an environmentally sound step.

Californians Against Waste, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization, would rather ban Styrofoam altogether.

"Lots of things are technically recyclable, but it's an issue of cost and having the infrastructure to do it," said Bryan Early, who heads up the group's plastic waste reduction campaign.

"This is part of an effort to create the illusion that if you go to McDonald's and get a polystyrene cup of coffee, you can toss it into a blue bin and it will get recycled. But that doesn't happen."

Styrofoam costs $2,000 a ton to recycle, compared with less than $100 a ton for glass, Early said.

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• Call The Bee's Jennifer K. Morita, (916) 773-7388.