Success Stories
Through the Tennessee Materials Marketplace, businesses and organizations find beneficial end uses for hard to recycle waste and by-products. There have been and continue to be success stories of materials being kept out of the landfill. Check out the stories below!
Tennessee Materials Marketplace and Florim USA featured on the State of Sustainability Podcast
The J.M. Smucker Company and Dynamic Lifecycle Innovations Reuse & Recycle Shrink Wrap
The JM Smuckers Company plant in Lexington had been working to find alternatives for the discarded film rolls from their shrink wrap machines. The mostly-spent rolls still have valuable material on them but because the film is still on a cardboard core, it is too costly to be processed by their current recycler.
Read more about how they used TMM to find an end use for their spent rolls HERE!
Recycled Materials Complete the Circle in Tennessee
Americans dispose of some 10 million metric tons of reusable materials, like glass, annually. Most of it ends up in the landfill, and only about one-third gets recycled. That’s not because of some intrinsic materials or chemical property that makes materials like plastic and glass difficult to recycle, but rather a reflection of a very challenging interplay between collection processes, market supply and demand, and rising freight costs to move material in the US.
Read about how Florim USA and Dynamic Lifecycle Innovations connected through the Tennessee Materials Marketplace to close the loop on end-of-life materials HERE.
Manufacturers, Startups and Nonprofits Driving Progress on Reuse and Recycling in Tennessee
Bob Zak and Daniel Kietzer with the Tennessee Materials Marketplace team zig-zagged from Memphis to Nashville to Morrison in early March ‘19 to meet with a handful of businesses and organizations working with the Materials Marketplace to hear firsthand about what’s working well and needs scale, and learn about challenges companies have today in leveraging materials reuse and recycling in their business. Check out a few highlights from their trip HERE.