Novolex™ Bag-2-Bag® program featured in Forbes

From Forbes​​

Buying something online means that it often comes packed in plastic to keep everything from meal kits to electronics safe from damage during shipping. These polybags aren’t as fun (for popping) as bubble wrap, but they are 100% recyclable. A company called Novolex wants more people to know about an infrastructure that takes in used polybags, plastic film and plastic bags for recycling.

The program is called Bag-2-Bag, and Novolex has installed more than 30,000 drop-off centers across the United States, creating its own plastic film recycling stream and recycling million of pounds of plastic each year.​

Bag-2-Bag is said to be the nation’s first closed-loop recycling program, allowing people to bring plastic bags, wraps and films to their local store to be recycled and made into new bags. Earth911 says it’s one of the biggest take-back programs in the country.

Novolex runs the nation’s largest closed-loop plastic bag recycling plant in North Vernon, Indiana, which turns old bags into new bags that can be recycled over and over.

It’s estimated that around 165 billion packages are shipped by Amazon each year in the U.S.

More than 380 billion plastic bags and wraps are used annually in America, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

MIT Technology Review notes (in an article about shipping magazines in polybags) that most curbside programs won’t accept the bags.

But like the headline to this article says, these polybags can be dropped off at thousands of grocery stores and retail chains across the nation.

There’s a directory at plasticfilmrecycling.org where you can search by ZIP code. The site returned 31 results for stores in and around the small Michigan town where this author lives, so the program looks to be pretty wide spread.​

​​​Original article: Forbes