Last Monday was recycling day here at Astral Buoyancy and it was a busy one for the home office in Asheville. The goal of that afternoon involved loading a 16 wheel semi trailer full of leftover foam scraps. The foam scraps occur when we use a die cutter to trim out panels of foam for use as buoyant material in PFD’s…its kind of like a cookie cutter in that we end up with a good bit of excess material once the desired shapes are cut out. We are happy to tell you that this semi was filled with 100% Polyethylene Foam (PE). PE foam is far superior to PVC in that it can easily be recycled by the same processes that recycle your everyday plastic drinking bottles. We’re also proud to mention that 1/2 the amount of PE yeilds that same buoyancy as 1 unit of PVC so it makes good business sense too. For most PFD manufacturers this semi could easily have been loaded full of PVC foam, on its way to the landfill or burn pile (depending on their local regulations of course), but here at Astral it is ALL taken to the recycling center to be melted down and reused. For information on finding about how recycling can help your home or business visit http://earth911.org/

The foam scraps were piled up to the ceiling at Astral!

Notice the cookie cutter pattern of the PE scraps as Jared hauls them to the semi…

We ended up filling that truck so full of foam that it was hard to get the door shut.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at 9:20 pm and is filed under Environmental, Inside Astral. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.