Materials / Plastic film
Plastic film
Bags and bubble wrap are collected on their own and almost certainly end up as composite lumber. How much of it makes it into a board is unknown.
Where it goes
Solid border: confirmed. Dashed: likely. Dotted: open.
The numbers
- Tons, 2023
- No film line on the town's revenue sheet Town data
- Bench math
- NexTrex gives a community group a composite bench for 500 to 1,000 pounds of clean film. State data
- Share that becomes product
- Unknown Inference
What the records show
The center collects plastic bags and bubble wrap as a separate stream. The destination isn't published, but there is essentially one end market for post-consumer film: composite lumber. NHDES states that film collected in the state is sold to composite lumber makers, and Trex alone reclaims more than 300 million pounds of polyethylene film a year for decking.
The same market runs a community program, NexTrex Bags to Benches: a group that collects 500 to 1,000 pounds of clean film earns a Trex bench. It's active nearby. The Ten Towns group in Harrisville promotes it, and the Concord Hannaford received a bench in 2023. Lions Clubs run drives elsewhere. A past Peterborough bench drive is remembered locally, but nobody has confirmed who organized it.
Film is the reason curbside plastic gets contaminated: it jams sorting machines. Collecting it separately, as the center does, is exactly the right move.
The open question is yield. Nothing public says what share of the film collected here actually ends up in a board.
Still open
- What share of collected film makes it into product.
- Who ran the past Peterborough bags-to-benches drive.
Tracked on the open questions page.
Sources
- #1 Recycling center page. Town of Peterborough Town data
- #6 Plastic bags and film. NHDES blog State data
- #8 NexTrex recycling program. Trex State data
- #9 Plastic film recycling. Ten Towns (Harrisville area) State data