Soon, the bench you sit on or your neighbor’s fence will be made of plastic waste. Now, a Canadian company is recycling the bulk of Halifax municipal plastic waste and turning it into synthetic lumber.

Up to 80% of municipal plastic recyclables are being recycled by Goodwood Plastic Products Ltd, who then turns the waste into building blocks. The lumber can be nailed, drilled, glued, and handled the same way as lumber made of wood. The only difference between the plastic lumber and wood lumber is the synthetic one will last much longer before deteriorating.

The manager at Halifax’s solid waste division, Andrew Philopoulos said:

We are very, very fortunate here in Nova Scotia to have that local company taking the material. Without them, I think we would find it challenging to find a market for a lot of the plastic packaging that we are collecting.

According to Philopoulos, the remaining 20% of municipal recyclables collected are sent to other Canadian recycling markets, where they’re turned into new plastic products.

In December 2019, Goodwood partnered with a Sobeys grocery store to construct one of the country’s first parking lots made entirely out of plastic waste collected from local landfills.

Philopoulos explained:

We can take this business—the knowledge and our skills—and we can export it and take it to other places. Post-consumer plastic is not going away, so we need to continue to find ways to give it a new life, so it becomes a resource instead of a waste.

Most of the recycled plastic that Goodwood collects comes from processed food jars, single-use bags, and other consumer packaging. So far, the synthetic lumber has been used to make park benches, picnic tables, guardrail posts, and agriculture posts. In the summer of 2018, the municipality bought 50 picnic tables to put in parks and community beaches.

The vice president of Goodwood, Mike Chassie, hopes their business model will motivate other countries to launch similar ventures. Many jurisdictions around the world are facing similar challenges, Chassie foresees his company as part of the solution.