Issue link: http://www.insightdigital.biz/i/577447
30 | I NSIGH T • O c t o b e r 2 0 15 w w w . i n s i g h t o n b u s i n e s s . c o m invested more than $5.5 million to develop and construct its film wash and resin production line. Another $2.5 million was spent on new extruders and a building expansion to house the new line. To date, nearly $9 million has been spent on the recycling center and the extrusion lines — all without disrupting the company's core production lines. Rapid results T he return on investment has been quick and resoundingly positive on a multitude of levels. On the business side, ECO Blend products account for more than 25 percent of the company's sales, a figure that continues to climb as the product opens doors and allows Wisconsin Film & Bag to compete both on price and environmental terms. "It's really opened a lot of doors for us," says Greg Greene, vice president for major accounts. "Because there are a lot of competitors in the market, price is probably the number one deciding factor. We are able to discount the pricing for the recycled material yet still meet the specs buyers are looking for." A growing demand to meet recycled content targets also gives the sales team leverage to compete with major players in the market. Additionally, Wisconsin Film & Bag has become one of its own largest suppliers of raw materials, allowing it to further drive costs down. "We never thought it would be this significant," Feeney says. "It has been a wonderful business development tool." Overall, the company has grown 10 to 12 percent a year since ECO Blend came online, Feeney says. e growing sales have had other financial benefits for the company. An economic development loan through the Department of Energy that helped finance the equipment and building expansion will be paid off in four years rather than the anticipated seven. "We've just been blown away by the growth and job creation. Everything has happened faster than we anticipated," says Al Johnson, the company's CFO. "ere are a lot of ways to measure payback, and we have good results from many of them." Environmentally, Wisconsin Film & Bag now has the capacity to recycle 7,000 tons of post-consumer film scrap, keeping it out of landfills around the region. Recycling that material reduces energy consumption by 395,500 mBtu compared to producing virgin resins from oil or natural gas, according to data from the National Resources Defense Council. e recycling process also reduces CO2 emissions by 2,422 tons. SEAN P. JOHNSON Trash to Treasure c o n t i n u e d On the production line, an extruder heats up the resin until it becomes molten. The molten resin is pushed through an air ring which blows cool air onto the plastic creating the "bubble," cooling it enough so it can be shaped. Each step forward seemed to present a new set of overwhelming obstacles. It's one thing to successfully clean the film in the sink. It's quite another to scale up the process to handle the tons of material that would make the process cost effective. It did, however, lead to a unique story that Feeney loves to tell about the process. Wondering if technology similar to commercial laundry equipment might be the ticket to processing large volumes of scrap, the team cut more than 8,000 pounds of film into strips and took it to area laundromats to test the theory. "In Wisconsin, most people get kicked out of bars," Feeney says. "We got kicked out of laundromats." ey made sure to clean the machines before they le, he says. But it worked. Now they just had to take what they had learned and scale it up further. Since no one had ever done it before, there was no existing equipment to install or even use as a model. e team at Wisconsin Film & Bag eventually found a manufacturer in Germany that designed equipment for recyclers of other types of plastics. "ey thought we were the crazy Americans," Feeney says. "ey had not built a line this size for anyone." Aer all the trials, errors and false starts, Feeney and his team were not stopping now. Wisconsin Film & Bag