Putting old plastic to good use

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This article was published 25/01/2019 (2631 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As the drive to reduce plastic waste increases, one local manufacturing company is ramping up its effort to give trash a second life.

On Jan. 22, General Byng School was one of 14 schools across the province to receive a brand-new bench from ReGen Composites. The hefty piece of outdoor furniture is made of a proprietary material called polymass, developed and manufactured by ReGen Composites at its plant on McGillivray Boulevard from 100 per cent recycled materials.  

“These benches are gorgeous and the biggest thing is that they’re made here in Winnipeg,” Take Pride Winnipeg executive director Tom Ethans told students at General Byng. “It’s fantastic that you all participated in this.”

The new fixtures are a result of a partnership between local schools, Take Pride Winnipeg, Multi-Material Stewardship Manitoba, and ReGen. Over the course of the year, students in Manitoba collected over 886,000 plastic bags through the MMSM Bag Up Manitoba program. General Byng collected over 4,600 plastic bags to contribute to the effort.

“The benches were a collaborative idea where we sat down and thought, what can we give the students that would last long and be forever in their minds,” Michelle Gowdar, chief operating officer of ReGen, said.
Gowdar said the patent-pending polymass composite is a mix of plastics that would normally end up in the landfill, waste wood, and agricultural fibres.

“It’s a really interesting brand-new product to the world,” she said.

Based on client needs, the composite can be moulded into a variety of shapes and sizes, and the end product has a consistency somewhere between concrete and wood, with a tensile strength higher than concrete, in addition to it being water, fire, and mould resistant.

Since the composite is made from plastics that are less desirable — such as plastic bags, straws, coffee cups, pool plastics, and plastic furniture — Gowdar said ReGen also has less competition for the material.

The young company is preparing to scale up its production after just two years in operation, Gowdar said, and is in the process of opening two more plants in the United States.

“What we’ve found is a specific niche market, where we take our products and we make stuff that is in industries that have never been changed: where they predominantly use wood or cement,” Gowdar said. “Because we can make it for less than what they’re buying those current products for, we’re disrupting the markets.”

Unpredictable prices for hardwood has made ReGen’s polymass more attractive to industry, Gowdar added, as they’re able to maintain a consistent pricing scheme, generally 10 per cent below market value.

A recent purchase order valued around $5 million has allowed the company to undergo substantial technology upgrades and significantly improve their manufacturing and processing capacity, Gowdar said.

In the next year, she estimates ReGen will process 60,000 tons of waste otherwise destined for the landfill, about half of which will be plastics, with much of that material coming from industrial applications.

“It’s a lofty goal but we think we can do it,” she said. “In truth we have demand. The products that they are asking us to make would take that amount.”