The plastic grocery bag and dry-cleaning bag are conundrums for recyclers. They’re made of plastic, and plastic should be recycled, but most curbside programs don’t accept these products.

Now add the scale of a major retailer that receives pallets of goods wrapped with this same flexible polyethylene film. The material cannot be processed by traditional materials recovery facilities, which receive co-mingled recycled goods and sort them into their various categories such as plastic bottles, steel cans and cardboard boxes. Plastic film can get tangled in the sorting equipment and halt the entire process.

That’s a challenge Houston-based Avangard Innovative is seeking to solve with a facility primarily focused on recycling plastic film. The 35-year-old company opened the facility in 2017 to shred the film, melt it into pellets and then sell those pellets to companies here and abroad to make new plastic film products. It plans to expand next year with plants in Cypress, Mexico and Nevada.

These plants address a segment of recycling that’s lagged other products. The recycling rate of plastic film was 16 percent in 2015, compared to about 30 percent for commonly recycled plastic bottles, said Keith Christman, managing director of plastic markets for the American Chemistry Council, the chemical industry trade group, citing data from the Environmental Protection Agency.

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It’s a segment the American Chemistry Council is working to address as the industry comes under intensifying pressure to reduce plastic waste that’s choking the oceans and littering the landscape. Christman said there has been progress. A report prepared for the trade group found that 1 billion pounds of plastic film was recovered for recycling in 2017, up 54 percent from 2005.

“It is increasing,” he said. “Our goal is to double it.”

He said consumers can take their grocery bags, dry cleaning bags and other plastic film (a more detailed list can be found at PlasticFilmRecycling.org) to grocery stores that have receptacles for recycling this material. Avangard is focused on how businesses recycle plastic wrap. CEO Rick Perez started the company in 1984 by collecting and baling plastic bottles, sending it to other companies that would turn the bottles into pellets used to make carpet.

In 1995, Avangard built a plant that processed the plastic bottles into pellets, which were then sold back to the bottle makers. Avangard has also operated a materials recovery facility.

The company’s main focus, however, has been helping Fortune 1000 companies across 11 countries to reduce their waste costs by finding items to recycle rather than trash. Selling those recycled items also provides a new source of revenue.

To do this, Avangard retrofits dumpsters, balers and compacters with technology. Scales and sensors monitor how full the receptacle is, and a camera uses artificial intelligence to identify what is being thrown away. This helps determine how often the dumpster needs to be emptied, so companies pay to empty it only when needed, not according to an arbitrary pick-up schedule.

The technology also tracks how much recyclable material ends up in the trash. Avangard then sends a team to the company’s workplace to redesign how employees work in a way that boosts recycling.

“What we look at is finding hidden green assets,” Perez said. “Green, obviously for environmental, but green from dollars. You’re throwing away money. And it’s also socially responsible.”

This process of monitoring companies’ waste and recycling is what brought plastic film to Perez’s attention. With advances in sorting equipment and in removing odors, which can linger on plastic film used in food and other packaging, Perez decided it was time to tackle the challenge.

The recycling process starts with employees manually removing large visible contaminants, such as the remnants of cardboard boxes or the rigid plastic straps used to secure items to pallets. The plastic film is then shredded to a size at which sorting equipment can use puffs of air to remove smaller contaminants, such as plastic film covered in ink.

One challenge comes from plastic film sticking together, allowing contaminants to hide between the shredded pieces. The facility filters out these contaminants through washing, shaking and continuous vibrations.

What’s left is higher-quality plastic shreds that are ground into smaller pieces and then melted. The melted plastic is put through a machine that removes any remaining ink and then divides it into pellets. Water cools and hardens the pellets.

The process ends by mixing the pellets into batches specific to customer requests for creating carrier rings for six-packs of beer or soda, plastic bags, pipe and other flexible consumer products.

“The fact that they’ve been able to take this out of the trash can and recycle it, I say kudos to them,” said Brandon Wright, spokesman for the National Waste and Recycling Association trade group. “That’s great that they have a found a business model for this.”

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Avangard’s first plastic film recycling facility, located next door to its headquarters at 11906 Brittmoore Park Dr., is producing 50 million pounds of pellets a year. That’s about four truckloads of pellets leaving the facility every day.

Growing demand for the company’s recovered plastic is driving its expansion. A plant in Cypress is expected to begin operations in the first quarter of next year. That will be followed by one near Mexico City, scheduled to open in the second quarter, and a facility in Nevada expected to open in the third quarter of 2020.

Perez said demand is driven partly by consumers calling on companies to be better environmental stewards.

“It’s what consumers are looking for,” he said. “Solutions that will not contaminate their communities, their oceans and their landfills.”