Chinese Company Has Plan to Recycle Plastic Used in Fields

The immense plastic sheets stretched across local strawberry fields usually end up in the same place as the garbage bags they so closely resemble--buried beneath heaps of rotting trash in the county’s landfills.

Benn Tsai hand David Goldstein, however, see the sheets, used when growers fumigate their fields, as a valuable resource waiting to be tapped. Or more precisely, hosed down, ground up and recycled.

Tsai, who represents a Chinese company that has an office in Thousand Oaks, said the firm may build a recycling plant in Ventura County that would reduce used sheets into small plastic bits. The bits would then be shipped to China and made into more plastic sheets.

Goldstein, an analyst with the county’s Solid Waste Department, has tried to interest several companies in recycling the sheets, often referred to as “ag film plastic.”

Goldstein said the plant that America Hualong Investment & Development Co. Ltd. hopes to build would reduce the amount of nonbiodegradable junk going into the county’s landfills, turn worthless waste into a profitable commodity and create jobs.

“We not only benefit by saving resources--a global benefit--but we also get the local economic benefit,” he said.

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Despite their ignoble end, the sheets are vitally important to the local strawberry industry. Growers fix them to the ground, usually by burying the edges several inches into the dirt, before injecting the soil with chemicals to kill off crop-munching pests.

The plastic acts to seal in the chemical fumigants, preventing them from wafting into the air before they can be absorbed by the soil.

Without the plastic, the fumigation system would not work, said Rex Laird, executive director of the Ventura County Farm Bureau. And without fumigation, the size of the county’s strawberry crop would drop, he said.

“There’s been instances where a portion of a field was missed, and I’ve been told that with an untrained eye, you could walk out there and see the difference in plant size,” Laird said.

As the strawberry plants grow, through holes in the film, the plastic also warms the roots by trapping heat in the ground, and keeping berries off the damp soil.

Disposal of the sheets, after berries are harvested, is neither easy nor cheap. The flat, flexible and slippery plastic is difficult for such landfill equipment as bulldozers and scrapers to handle, said Lori Norton with the Ventura Regional Sanitation District.

“It gets caught up and wound around the equipment itself,” she said.

As a result, the sanitation district charges growers or trash haulers $100 per ton to dump the film in landfills, nearly three times the amount the district charges for normal trash.

Add that to the cost of the plastic itself. Oxnard grower Mike Conroy said he spends about $64,000 each year to cover his 87 acres with 83,000 pounds of plastic.

“If there’s something that can lessen the cost of that, it would certainly be a godsend,” he said.

The system that Hualong proposes would cut those costs, Tsai said, although the company has not yet determined the exact prices it will charge.

Hualong would collect the plastic from local trash haulers. To ensure a profit, the company would charge haulers a fee to dump the film at the recycling plant. But that fee would be substantially less than the one landfills charge, Tsai said, possibly $20 to $30 per ton.

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Once at the plant, the plastic would be washed to remove dirt dragged in from the field, then ground into bits. Those bits would be shipped to an existing Hualong facility in China, to be made into more film sheets. Finally, the company would ship the sheets back to the U.S. and sell them to local farmers.

Although Hualong has not set a price for the recycled sheets, Tsai said the company should be able to undercut the price for new plastic sheets.

“I’m pretty sure farmers will take the offer,” he said.

Participating growers, especially those who dump their own ag film plastic, will also have the advantage of dealing with one company to supply and dispose of plastic sheets.

“We can put everything together, make everything easier,” Tsai said.

For Hualong, the project’s attraction lies in the sheer volume of ag film plastic used in Ventura County--about 8,000 tons each year, according to estimates. Building a plant here also will allow the company to collect ag film from Santa Barbara and Kern counties, each of which uses about the same amount of plastic as Ventura, Tsai said.

Others have toyed with the idea of recycling the immense sheets before. Starting in 1989, Gold Coast Recycling in Ventura tried collecting the plastic and shipping it to China for recycling.

But the price of new “virgin” plastic soon dropped, and the Chinese buyers balked at paying for shipments, said Gold Coast marketing director Chris Webb. Although virgin plastic’s price has since gone up, Gold Coast stopped collecting the ag film in 1993.

“We look for products we can recycle for the community, but we also want to get paid for it,” Webb said.

Goldstein has worked with two other companies that considered, briefly, recycling Ventura County’s ag film. One lacked the necessary financial backing, he said, while the other had not fully ironed out the technical process of recycling the messy plastic.

Hualong, however, already has experience recycling the sheets in China, Goldstein noted.

“Even more impressive to a lender, they have the markets already in China,” Goldstein said. “And they’ll have some here.”

The plant is still far from becoming a reality. Hualong has not yet picked a site for its facility, although it has considered several locations in the county, including Oxnard.

As part of his pitch to lure Hualong to the county, Goldstein has pointed company officials to possible building sites as well as shown them the kind of city and county permits the proposed plant will need.

He has also shown them how to get financial assistance from the state to build their proposed $4.5-million plant. Goldstein said the company is eligible for a low-interest, fixed-rate loan, for up to $1 million, from the California Integrated Waste Management Board. Currently, the board loans, funded by a surcharge on landfill dumping fees, are being offered at 5.8% interest.

“I want to see [Hualong] do it because otherwise it’s something that’s a drag on our economy,” Goldstein said. “If they don’t do ag film, then we have farmers and haulers paying a tremendous amount of money to get rid of something useless.”