Where it Goes: Brightmark
Do you ever wonder what happens to the items you drop off at Cincinnati Recycling & Reuse Hub? This series of mini blogs will help shine some light on our various pathways for recycling and reuse for different materials. In this post, we’ll talk about our processing partner for flexible film and many rigid plastics—Brightmark!
Single-use water bottles, milk jugs and sour cream tubs are easily captured by Rumpke’s curbside recycling program here in Cincinnati. But, what about plastic plant pots, chip bags, bucket lids, or laundry baskets? Plastics that can’t be recycled curbside are often landfilled or incinerated for lack of better options. Thanks to the innovative technologies of Brightmark in Ashley, Indiana we are able to help fill that recycling gap in our community.
The Hub partners with Brightmark to process:
Soft Plastics from our Flexible Film bin
Rigid plastics #2, #4, #5, #6, #7, and No #*
Our Flexible Film bin collects plastic pouches, crinkly plastics, chip bags, salad bags, plastic pet food bags, and much more!
Brightmark was founded in 2016 with the mission to “Reimagine Waste®” and currently operates over 30 Circularity Centers across the country. They take a multi-pronged approach to sustainable waste management with some of the centers focusing on Plastics Renewal®, and others producing renewable natural gas from dairy farms and organic waste. To date, they have reduced over 1,317,000 tons of CO₂eq emissions and recycled over 10,000,000 pounds of plastic waste.
In 2024 alone, the Ashley Circularity Center helped the Hub divert 45.6 tons of material from the landfill. So, how do they do it?
Brightmark utilizes a method called pyrolysis. When the Hub has a full semi-truck load of baled plastics ready to go for Brightmark, it is shipped out to the Ashley Circularity Center. Once there, the plastics are prepared for processing. They are shredded and pelletized, then fed into an oxygen-starved environment where they are exposed to extremely high temperatures and vaporized. Then, the vapor is collected and cooled. From there, the resulting liquid can be turned into diesel fuel, new plastics, or industrial wax.
Last summer, some of the staff from the Hub visited Brightmark for a tour.
Cincinnati Recycling & Reuse Hub continually advocates for the thoughtful consumption of resources, reuse, and strives to prioritize mechanical recycling opportunities when possible. However, some plastics are very difficult or impossible to recycle with traditional mechanical methods and they can only be mechanically recycled so many times before the material’s quality degrades. Brightmark’s state-of-the-art pyrolysis facility is a safety net for hard to recycle plastics that would otherwise fall through the cracks and occupy landfill space where they are no longer a retrievable resource and/or degrade in an uncontrolled environment.
Reclaiming raw materials from waste plastics saves landfill space and reduces the need to rely on virgin petroleum sources. In 2021, Brightmark commissioned a peer-reviewed life cycle analysis that found that their plastics renewal process results in “82% energy use savings, 46% water use savings, and a 39%-139% reduction in carbon footprint” compared to sourcing virgin materials.
Brightmark is just one of the Hub’s many partners helping to keep items out of the landfill. If you missed our previous mini blog in the series, Where it Goes: Foam be sure to check it out! Our next post will explore our outlet for the soft plastics in our Store Drop Off collection—stay tuned!
*While many plastics can be pyrolyzed, certain plastics, like #1 PET and #3 PVC, are not suited for this method because they may contaminate the end product or release corrosive compounds that can damage the equipment. The Hub partners with other processors for these plastics.
