Trash Talk: Green product from dirty glass
July 23, 2010
Ellen Moorhouse
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
It’s all very well to set up systems to collect material for recycling, but what if there are no markets for the post-consumer waste?
Glass is one of those challenging commodities. Yes, some of it, the clean colour-separated stuff, can be turned into new bottles and jars. Other manufacturers can use clean material for other products. But what do you do with all the dregs, the broken multi-coloured contaminated bits that come from municipal blue box programs, besides landfilling it?
Some of Ontario’s mixed glass gets shipped to an insulation manufacturing company south of the border. But there’s a company in Innisfil, just south of Barrie, with a state-of-the-art plant that can also take this raw contaminated cullet and turn it into an innovative, green product.
Poraver North America screens it, grinds it to a powder, mixes it with binding and expansion agents to create a slurry, stirs it to create tiny pellets and sends the mixture to be cooked in big rotary kilns.
The whole process, says marketing analyst Taylor Armstrong, is a bit like creating corn kernels that pop when heated. In this case, what comes out are light, tiny grey-white spheres of expanded glass in a range of sizes, used as light-weight aggregate or fillers by Poraver’s customers for a wide range of products.
“There are thousands of applications,” says Poraver CEO Peter Plows. He was heading off to Calgary on Monday to discuss making highway sound-barrier systems with Poraver. The panels would be light enough to move by hand.
Other uses include ceramic tile adhesives, stucco, self-levelling underlayments for flooring, dry mortars, coatings, acoustic and insulation panels, roof tiles, architectural mouldings, cladding and other manufactured concrete products. Poraver offers sundry performance benefits: light weight, good thermal and acoustic insulation, workability because of its spherical structure, and fire resistance.
The technology, in use for 25 years, comes from Germany. The Innisfil company, an independent entity, has the North American rights to manufacture and distribute the product.
One Ontario customer is Atlas Block (atlasblock.com), which opened a brand new plant in Midland last year. The family-owned company manufactures concrete blocks, pavers, retaining walls and brick veneers.
Company president Don Gordon had been looking for a lightweight, environmentally friendly aggregate for his products.
“He pushed very hard for us to get ready as fast as we could,” says Plows. Gordon’s company substitutes Poraver for up to 30 per cent of the aggregate in its products, including block that went into construction of the G-8 media centre in Huntsville.
Poraver’s plant opened in 2007, the start-up representing a huge investment of $70 million to $80 million, Plows says. Partners include Richardson Capital.
Early on, the company received a $70,000 to $80,000 grant for cullet from Stewardship Ontario, the agency funding provincial recycling and waste diversion programs, and Plows says, “We hope to continue the dialogue.”
The plant, which currently employs 33, is a huge, high box of a factory that’s completely computerized. Wherever possible, the plant is designed to use gravity to move materials through the various steps.
Hills of broken glass and the yard, back-filled with cullet, glint in the sun. The material is left outside for months, where rain and decomposition of organic contaminants help clean it.
“The longer we leave it, the better it becomes,” says Plows. A close look at the piles reveals debris, like bits of plastic and pop can tabs, that comes with the blue box and is removed by screening.
Poraver, because it’s made exclusively from post-consumer waste, qualifies for high points under the LEED green construction rating system, although product content under the system is currently rewarded by weight rather than volume, a disadvantage for a material as light as Poraver.
Unfortunately, the Innisfil enterprise was launched just when the U.S. construction market imploded and that’s where many Poraver customers are. Plows says the company is operating at about 30 per cent to 40 per cent of current capacity, which is about 26,000 metric tonnes annually. (It takes 40 million wine bottles – three for every inhabitant in Ontario – to produce that amount the product.)
And this is a capital-intensive business with a premium product competing for some markets against dirt cheap materials like sand and gravel, which carry the heavy environmental cost of extraction.
Surely supporting companies like this should be a provincial priority: Poraver represents substantial private sector investment, turns a low-value waste commodity into an innovative green product, has introduced new technology and created jobs.
“A lot of people in North America talk a lot about environment, until it comes to money, which is the single biggest challenge,” says Plows.
Send questions or comments to e_moorhouse@sympatico.ca
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