OUTAGAMIE COUNTY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) – You know that bag you stuffed with all that Styrofoam collected during the holidays? Well, there’s now a place for you to take it.
Outagamie County is able to put Styrofoam – the brand name for polystyrene foam – that usually ends up in the trash to good use.
“’Foam dome’ is what we’re calling our polystyrene foam densifying unit. Basically, it looks like a big fax machine,” said Marissa Michalkiewicz, Outagamie County Recycling and Solid Waste program coordinator. “You put the polystyrene foam in the top of the machine, it grinds it up, takes all the air out of it, then it heats it to about 100 degrees Fahrenheit, densifies it and it comes out looking kind of like hard soft-serve ice cream.”
The polystyrene foam densifier is at the Resource Recovery Park. It’s brand new and is free for residents to use, but the county just asks for residents to take a little bit of time and do their part to make sure that the materials get recycled correctly.
That means, if you have a box that’s packaged with polystyrene foam, you’ll first want to remove the foam from the cardboard box, throw the box in the recycle bin, and then drive the clean foam, itself, up to the “foam dome.”
The county’s polystyrene foam recycling program is drop-off only. If you put it in your recycling carts, it will not get recycled.
“We don’t accept polystyrene foam in the recycling stream, so you can’t put it in the recycling carts,” Michalkiewicz said. “Now, we’re able to recover it and recycle it, whereas before, it’d go in the landfill, so it’ll sit forever and ever.”
At the “foam dome,” only expandable polystyrene foam is accepted, which includes food packaging items that a lot of restaurants use, like take out containers, cups and egg cartons.
But for some restaurants, like Ione’s inside Fox Valley Technical College, even though foam may cost less, they don’t have to worry about that.
After the foam is densified, the county then sells the solid polystyrene to a company that makes picture frames out of it.
The densifier does not accept packaging peanuts or flexible polystyrene.
Outagamie County’s foam densifier is one of just a handful in the state. Fond du Lac County has one as well, which is where Outagamie County residents were directed to go, before the machine was purchased.
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