New King County project gives more options for recycling soft plastics

Have you ever found yourself wondering what to do with plastic packaging film, bubble wrap, plastic shopping bags, and other soft plastics that can’t be recycled in the blue bins at home?

A new pilot project gives King County residents a few more options for where to take those harder-to-recycle plastics.

Some large grocery chains will already take soft plastics, but a new pilot project run by King County, the City of Seattle, and other partners is allowing people to drop off these plastics at local independent grocery stores.

“What is new about this is, we’re working with independent grocers,” said Shari Jackson, director of Plastics Sustainability for the American Chemistry Council, at a press conference announcing the project. “These are the smaller grocers that provide that more convenient access for consumers to recycle the film, but they don’t have these programs.”

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Town and Country Market, PCC Community Markets, Marketime Foods, and the Madrona Grocery Outlet will all take the soft plastics through the end of May.

Jackson described qualifying plastics as “the stretchy, pliable film that you find in carryout bags, produce bags, bread bags, dry-cleaning bags, newspaper bags, food storage bags, plastic mailers, bubble wrap, e-commerce packaging, the overwrap around beverage cases, bathroom tissue, paper towels.” What will not be accepted is the tougher, less stretchy plastic that’s found in potato chip bags.

Once it is collected, the materials will be taken north to Canada, where they will be turned into, in some cases, plastic packaging once again.

“The end user for this material will be Merlin Plastics in British Columbia. They turn this material into pellets that can be used for a variety of other end uses, and that includes film packaging,” Jackson said. “So it’s a really unique opportunity to kind of close the loop.”

Adrian Tan, policy and market development manager for King County Solid Waste, said that it is important to give people more convenient opportunities to drop off soft plastics for recycling. Since people cannot put them in the blue bins at home, the items all-too-often end up getting thrown away with garbage.

“3,500 tons of plastic bags that were potentially recyclable were sent to our landfill in 2019,” he said. “That is quite a lot when you think of how light each plastic bag is.”

For more information, visit King County Solid Waste’s recycling pages.

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