DuPont, Waste Management Launch Tyvek Recycling Program

April 17, 2009

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In a continued effort to increase the company’s recyclables, DuPont Nonwovens has partnered with Waste Management Inc. to deliver a national mail-in recycling program that enables users to recycle their banners, signs, posters, envelopes and other items printed on DuPont Tyvek products. A recycling kit is available through Waste Management.

The program allows DuPont’s customers to track on-line what they have ordered, the weight of each package that was returned and an aggregate total for each year. The recycled Tyvek items will be repurposed for other products such as decking, playground equipment and corrugated pipes. Tyvek is made of 100-percent, recyclable polyethylene.

DuPont has had a program in place for more than 20 years to recycle Tyvek envelopes at its plant in Richmond, Va., and recycles approximately 50,000 pounds annually at the site. The company’s existing program has recycled more than 1 million pounds to date.

The Waste Management alliance will allow DuPont to expand the program in the United States and make it easier for customers to recycle wide-format printed materials. DuPont has an established recycling program in Asia with plans to expand it as well.

Last year, DuPont together with Bosch and Xerox joined the Eco-Patent Commons, a business effort to help the environment by pledging environmentally-beneficial patents to the public domain. DuPont has contributed four patents, one of which involves waste reduction technology that uses selected enzymes to accelerate the conversion of certain non-recyclable plastics to beneficial fertilizers. The other three patents involve the company’s Lux technology for pollution detection.

Waste Management, based in Houston, Texas, has a corporate goal of nearly tripling the amount of recyclables it processes from 8 million to 20 million tons by 2020.

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