AmeriCorps Volunteers Assist With Shrink-Wrap Recycling Efforts
Earlier this week, AmeriCorps volunteers were at the Bourne Integrated Solid Waste Management facility, assisting the Woods Hole Sea Grant/Barnstable County efforts to collect and recycle boat shrink-wrap from five towns on Cape Cod.
About a dozen volunteers worked at the ISWM facility for three straight days, sifting through the dumpsters’ worth of shrink-wrap that had been collected between April 1 and June 30. The program has been running since 2018 and just one year after its inception, volunteers were able to recycle 3.6 tons of plastic shrink-wrap. This year’s numbers will not be calculated until all of the shrink-wrap has been sorted and processed.
“This is our third day in Bourne,” AmeriCorps project lead Michael Andranovich said. “We’ll be in Chatham and Dennis on Thursday and then Eastham and Wellfleet on Friday.”
Although this is the first year that AmeriCorps has assisted with the efforts, AmeriCorps previously partnered with the Cape Cod Cooperative Extension of Barnstable County on a strand light collection. AmeriCorps volunteers were tasked with picking up the donations of broken or otherwise discarded strand lights during December and January and worked to get them processed for recycling off-Cape to keep them out of the waste stream.
Through this partnership with the Woods Hole Sea Grant and Barnstable County, AmeriCorps volunteers are tasked with removing anything that is not shrink-wrap from the donated swaths. Shrink-wrap, commonly made of some type of low-density polyethylene, is both reusable and recyclable under the right conditions. Pieces that usually need to be removed are strapping, plastic vents and zippered doors.
“Right now we’re taking the shrink-wrap out, we unfold it, and we look for things like marine vents that get put in by the owners during the winter to prevent mold and moisture,” Mr. Andranovich said. “Those are the kinds of things that can’t get processed through the recycler, so we come through, we cut out as much of those swaths as we can, just so that everything can be sent to them.”
The massive 40-yard dumpster to his right, Mr. Andranovich explained, is full of clean shrink-wrap that has been sorted through and is ready to be processed. The smaller 10-yard dumpster on his left is where all of the nonrecyclable parts go, including strapping, marine vents and zippered doors.
“Seeing it now, I mean you can see, this is just from today,” he said, referring to the 10-yard dumpster. “We’ve probably filled one of these up every time we do one of these days. In a perfect world, we don’t have to do any of this because the boat owners do it before it gets dropped off. So I think, this is all good education for next year to kind of start even earlier than just the collection part—you go to the boat yard, you go to the people who do the shrink-wrapping and you have them explain to [boaters] that when the season’s over and you’re done with it, take out your own strapping, take out your own vents, and then bring it.”
Recycling the shrink-wrap is an effective solution for getting it out of the waste stream and keep it from sitting in a landfill, which Mr. Andranovich says is the goal.
“What we’re learning from these days is that the education needs to be upped now,” he said. “We’ll get the general public more hands-on involved as opposed to them just thinking ‘bring it over here and someone else will take care of it,’ because if you take care of it before we do, we can do a lot more.”