South Suburban College in partner- ship with Cook County Government, received a $50,000 grant from the Food- service Packaging Institute’s Foam Recy- cling Coalition (FRC) that enables the Illi- nois county residents to recycle materials, such as foam polystyrene cups, plates, bowls, clamshells, egg cartons and meat trays, as well as block packaging foam, at its local drop-off center.
The FRC grant assisted with funding the purchase and installation of a foam densifier at the newly opened Center for Hard to Recycle Materials (CHaRM) Center in South Holland on the South Suburban College campus. Densifiers are used to compact foam products into foam blocks or ingots. Cook County sells the foam ingots to end markets to be manufactured into architectural moldings and picture frames, as well as thermal insulation panels for foundations, walls and roofs.
The CHaRM Center is centrally located near 53 communities with over 268,000 households in Cook County that have the lowest recycling and diversion rates, including 37 municipalities below the median income and 33 municipalities that are designated Environmental Justice areas.
The County will inform residents about the addition of foam polystyrene recycling via communications including mailers, flyers, community events, social media and on its website.
The grant is made possible through contributions to FRC, which focuses exclusively on increased recycling of post-consumer foam polystyrene. Its members include Americas Styrenics; Chick-fil-A; CKF Inc.; Dart Container Corp.; Dyne-A-Pak; Genpak; INEOS Styrolution America LLC; Lifoam Industries, LLC; Pactiv Evergreen; and Republic Plastics.