Recycled Material

Many common items are made from resin, like your household trash can, kayaks, canoes, live bait wells for fishing boats and even some playground slides and carousel horses. TerraCast® makes all of our products from a Linear Low Density Polyethylene, or LLDPE.

Go green with black resin! Terracast Products has developed a 100% recycled black that is made entirely from 100% Post Consumer Recycled material that allows you to apply credit MRc4 and help contribute 2 points toward your LEED credits.

Our Resin

LLDPE is formulated, designed and manufactured to withstand years in the sun and harsh climates. When it does complete its purpose as a trash can or kayak we can melt it down, re-stabilize it, re-pulverize it and re-mold it into a planter, light pole or other TerraCast custom product like a faux-stone lion statue for a movie set.

Every plastic is different. The small letters, numbers and symbols on plastic items are a numbering system to differentiate different formulas so they find their way to the right recycling facility with similarly formulated items. PET means polyethylene, but there are also different types of polyethylene.

Other Resin

There are different formulas for different ways of creating products. There’s a polyethylene for injection molding, extrusion, vacuum molding, blow molding and injection blow molding. Each method of manufacturing has a specific type of resin for its particular process.

Things like computer towers and printers are made from a High Density polyethylene, and those would be recycled together, just like Low Density polyethylene products are recycled together to be re-ground back into the recycled Resin we use.

Other Materials

Other materials like steel and aluminum corrode, rust and rot. It’s possible to trim most metal to remove the rust and rot and then melt it down and recast or recycle. Once it’s corroded, however, it’s unusable and winds up in a landfill.

Our products come in a variety of colors and are always eco-friendly but our recycled black offers 100% post-consumer recycled material. As we like to say, “our black is green!”

Our Method

We obtain recycled resin from petroleum manufacturers, such as Exxon Mobil or Dow Chemicals. This resin comes to us in the form of little pellets, like rice or oat grains, by way of rail car or hopper truck. We put it into our pulverizing machine and turn it into a fine powder. That powder goes into the color blend machine, where it becomes a stunning shade of black.

Once the color and texture blend is perfect, the resin is weighed into a predetermined recipe amount and poured into a clamshell mold. The technician closes the mold, and the machine arm takes it into the oven to cook. In the oven, the machine arms rotate the mold on two axis. The powder melts and liquefies, baking into the mold from the outside in, to become a planter or light pole.

The ovens we use are powered by natural gas heat and the cooling chambers use reclaimed water. Not only is our black Resin made with 100% recycled materials, but our manufacturing processes are very green too. We use environmentally conscious and sustainable practices.

So when your trash can, kayak, or carousel horse (if you have one of those) wears out, put it in the recycling bin. It is taken away and grouped with other formulas and given new life as another Resin product, like a planter pot, a light pole, or a boulder on Broadway.