The citizens of Somerset County, Pennsylvania can currently recycle multiple types of materials, including polystyrene, and this recycling project is called FFFF.

The founder of this project, Virginia Malcolm, secured permission from the Giant Eagle on North Center Avenue to use its parking lot once a month, which can facilitate the district-wide collection of discarded materials. Hence, she coined the term FFFF to describe this recycling project, which is held on the first Friday each month from 4 to 5 p.m. The FFFF recycling program began as a cardboard recycling operation in 2004 but now has expanded to include polystyrene foam and other recyclable materials.

Polystyrene recycling is extremely easily to achieve, but unfortunately, most people only use polystyrene as a disposable material and miss out on its huge recycling value. At present, humans produce about 430 million tons of plastic every year, two-thirds of which will soon become waste. In the application market of foam plastics, the packaging market occupies a large part. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, plastic packaging waste accounts for more than a quarter of all municipal solid waste in the United States and consumes significant resources, including fossil fuels. People's reliance on short-lived plastics has caused environmental degradation. Waste polystyrene is actually a reusable resource, and the GREENMAX polystyrene recycling machine, belonging to INTCO Recycling, can easily convert foam waste into recycled products.

Waste foam can be made into polystyrene particles, which are the raw materials for various recycled products, such as food-grade packaging, toys, building materials, etc. Foam plastics undergo processes such as crushing, heating, compression, shredding, extrusion, cooling, and cutting, and are finally made into granular recycled plastic raw materials. The machine adopts an advanced automated control system, which improves production efficiency and safety, and helps companies save labor costs. At the same time, it is equipped with advanced heating and extrusion technology, which can quickly heat waste foam plastics to the melting point, extrude them into long strips, and then automatically cut them, with high production efficiency and low energy consumption. These polystyrene particles have good physical properties and chemical stability and can be used to produce various plastic products. INTCO Recycling not only developed the GREENMAX foam pelletizer, but also provides purchasing services for polystyrene particles to customers around the world to manufacture various environmentally friendly frames. If you don’t want to spend time and energy looking for downstream buyers, you can sell the particles to us, and we will purchase the particles at a preferential price to achieve win-win cooperation between our team and customers.

Malcolm said that in August, Somerset County’s new recycling coordinator, Cathie Beal, talked to her about the FFFF program. It is conceivable that the recycling of foam plastics in Somerset County can go further in the future. INTCO hopes that more companies and regions can join the foam recycling business.