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Recycling is a green growth industry in South Carolina, home to over 500 recycling companies including collectors, processors, recycled product manufacturers and equipment makers. The economic impact of recycling, South Carolina's sustainable industry, has doubled in size over the last decade and now exceeds $13 billion, annually.
According to the SC Recycling Market Development Advisory Committee's 2015 Annual Report, Commerce helped facilitate the recycling industry recruitment of:
Recycling is more than a way to manage waste; it plays a large role in community and corporate sustainability goals by:
South Carolina has more than 170 companies involved in metal recycling from “mom and pop” scrap metal collectors that haul material and sell it to scrap yards, to the scrap metal processing facilities that prepare the material for end use as well as the mills that manufacture new products from recycled steel and aluminum.
The state’s recycling industry is strong. SC has 4 times more jobs per capita related to recycling than Massachusetts or California, both of which are recycling leaders. The state has over 520 recycling businesses that haul, process or manufacture recycled content materials. The state has robust plastics, metal, paper, textile, carpet, biomass, petroleum and rubber recycling industries. South Carolina is growing in its competitiveness by developing businesses in the following recycling sectors: glass, electronics, construction and demolition, organics and carbon fiber. Having additional processor and end-user capacity in these areas would ensure that new value-added products would be returned to the marketplace instead of landfilled.
As markets mature and develop, they can help to increase the state’s 2015 MSW recycling rate of 26.5%.
An estimated 300 million pounds of plastic bottles are landfilled annually in the Carolinas; these are potential feedstocks that could be turned into new recycled content products by businesses that employ our citizens as well as generate taxes.
The Carolinas Plastics Recycling Council (CPRC) is a public/private joint initiative to increase plastic container recovery and recycling in North and South Carolina. CPRC's key state agency stakeholders are:
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates 175,000 tons of glass is generated in South Carolina. The Glass Recycling Group is a public/private stakeholder effort between the South Carolina Department of Commerce, South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control, local governments and industry.The glass stakeholder group is trying to find ways to overcome the lack of markets for glass and find more high-end uses. While glass currently has limited markets due to its low value, transportation and processing costs, the state has some public and private material recovery facilities with glass technology to handle glass collected via single stream.Although no bottle to bottle glass recycling is available in South Carolina, a number of applications for glass exist.
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