Plexiglass popped up all over Boise during the pandemic. Now what will happen to it?

Two years ago, plexiglass was not disposable. Unlike plastic water bottles, it was used mostly for permanent fixtures. Or, at least, that’s how the producers and municipal recyclers treated it.

Now, though their effectiveness has been questioned, plexiglass partitions have popped up to combat spread of the coronavirus — in restaurants, stores, schools and offices. Recycling plexiglass is difficult, and not possible in the Treasure Valley, so what’s going to happen when it all comes down?

Without recycling options, it might end up in landfills.

“We’d encourage businesses to look at ways to reuse it or save it for future use, rather than look for a recycling option,” Colin Hickman, spokesperson for Boise’s Public Works, wrote in an email to the Idaho Statesman.

Plexiglass is a plastic used as a substitute for glass because it’s rigid, clear, unlikely to shatter and half the weight, as described on the Acme Plastics and A&C Plastics websites. It’s also less expensive.

A 2-by-2-foot plexiglass partition, which weighs about 3 pounds at a thickness of one-eighth inch, requires around 6 pounds of oil for production. It’s also responsible for the emission of about 16.5 pounds of carbon dioxide, according to numbers from Renewable Matter.

Joey McCabe, vice president of Faulkner Plastics of Miami, told the Statesman over the phone that “we sell performance plastics, which (were) never really intended to be a temporary solution.”

Then, the pandemic hit.

“All of a sudden, 18 months ago, we became hypocrites,” McCabe said. “Because, our argument was, nobody buys a $200 sheet of plexiglass with the intention of throwing it away. Well, I don’t think anybody bought a COVID barrier hoping that they would have it for the rest of their lives. So, by definition, they were buying plexiglass for a temporary solution.”

Faulkner Plastics provided barriers for Costco stores throughout the country and was also involved in installation.

“A lot of them are just sitting there, or velcroed to your desk, or — the ones that are in our office — we have a clamp on them,” McCabe said. “That’s the thing — nothing’s permanent about them.”

PLEXIGLASS SALES SOAR DURING PANDEMIC

Interstate Plastics in Boise was selling about 10 times as much plexiglass material as usual at the beginning of the pandemic, salesperson Paul Barehl said in a phone interview. Nationally, sales of plexiglass tripled, Bloomberg reported.

Over a year ago, Goodwood Barbeque Company ordered plexiglass screens made. Like at many restaurants, dividers were placed between booths. Goodwood’s two restaurants in Utah required partitions that were different heights than the ones in Idaho.

“We literally took our vehicles, transported it to each individual store and hired people to do the installation in each of the four stores, per the guidance of each health department,” Steve Cooper, Goodwood’s owner, said in a phone interview.

The plexiglass partitions cost about $8,000 per restaurant. “Eventually we’ll take them down,” Cooper said. They’ll remain in place “through the end of the year and into 2022. … You can’t plan much farther than that,” he said.

McCabe, of Faulkner Plastics, also thinks the barriers will come down at some point.

“I’m a plastics guy. I’m looking at one (barrier) right now on my desk, and it’s annoying me,” he said. “When it’s six months from now or 12 months from now, and people are tired of hitting their elbows against (the plexiglass) … they’re going to send an intern down to the dumpster.”

Companies that already removed their barriers, McCabe said, told him things like, “We took down our mask mandate in the office, so why the hell do we still have these clumsy things?” Or: “We got a bad design: They kept breaking. We’re definitely not going to pay to keep replacing them.”

How effective are plexiglass barriers anyway?

Early in the pandemic, scientists knew that the coronavirus could spread on tiny particles, called aerosols, suspended in the air. In July 2020, many scientists published a letter saying so. This means that particles can flow around partitions, rendering many plexiglass barriers ineffective.

“I’ve seen plexiglass barriers in restaurants in New York — they’re requiring them between tables. But, you know, those tables are well over 3 to 6 feet apart, anyway. … So they really serve no purpose — other than they have the inadvertent effect of possibly blocking proper ventilation in the space,” said Linsey Marr, a professor at Virginia Tech and aerosol expert, in a video interview.

Natasha Ferney of Boise-based Central District Health wrote in an email, “Plexiglass barriers should be used in combination with other measures that help reduce the spread of COVID-19 virus.” They are, she wrote, “a common measure used in establishments with booth-type seating.”

When reopening, Central District Health advised restaurants to follow recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which were consistent with barrier usage, Ferney added.

However, some scientists question the effectiveness of barriers.

“Thinking about cigarette smoke and how it behaves and moves around in the air is a good proxy or substitute for thinking about how the virus could be moving around,” Marr said. “If you’re talking with someone at really close distance, like less than 3 feet, then (barriers) can help. But, for longer distance interactions, it really doesn’t help.

“If it’s a full, complete wall, sealed on all sides, then, yes, it will prevent transfer of aerosols between. But if it’s just a larger barrier, and it’s still open around the sides, aerosols are easily going to flow around those. The larger the barrier, the more likely it is to mess up the ventilation in the room.”

Though the CDC now recommends ventilation improvements along with other strategies, according to its website, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) still suggests barriers between unvaccinated workers, or between workers and the public, closer than 6 feet apart.

Recycling Plexiglass will be difficult

Since the beginning of 2021, sales of materials for plastic barriers have returned to pre-pandemic levels at Interstate Plastics and Faulkner Plastics, they reported.

Now that most businesses have stopped buying them, what’s going to happen with all the existing plexiglass?

Faulkner Plastics, which is in Florida, already gave its plastic scrap waste to a recycler before the pandemic. Now it has started accepting and recycling returned barriers.

The recycler grinds down the scraps and the returned plexiglass to make little pellets. These pellets are then sold to plastic producers, who melt it down to make new plexiglass sheets.

“That’s a unicorn — I guess it’s called true circular recycling — when something can actually be made back into itself,” McCabe said.

If a company uses recycled pellets to make plastic sheets, it can claim some percent is recycled.

To make the plastic, producers melt down the pellets until it’s “ready to be squeezed out, like a Play-Doh spaghetti machine, onto a conveyor belt,” McCabe said. Then the plastic cools into sheets, which can be cut to make barriers or partitions.

But just because plexiglass is recyclable doesn’t mean any recycler will take it. What recyclers accept depends on what’s readily available and can be resold. For example, municipal recyclers have the infrastructure to recycle certain household plastics, since they’re commonly discarded.

But prior to the pandemic, when plexiglass was viewed as permanent, few people discarded it often enough for recyclers to invest in the equipment necessary to process the special type of plastic.

Republic Services, the company in charge of recycling for Boise, Meridian, Nampa, Star, Caldwell and Middleton, has invested in machines that can process and resell particular common plastics, but they don’t accept plexiglass.

“People in my industry,” McCabe said, “are the few people that throw (plexiglass) away in the form of scrap. So we might be the few people that have access to a supply chain.”

That’s why McCabe was able to set up the recycling program, though he’s only had about 10 companies turn in barriers since the program started around the end of May. “It would be great if I could organize a little bit of a network, and I can help with logistics and stuff,” he said.

In Boise, the Statesman was unable to find anywhere to recycle used barriers.

Interstate Plastics, Specialty Plastics & Fabrication Inc., B’s Ace Hardware, The Home Depot, Republic Services, and the cities of Boise and Eagle all said that they couldn’t recycle or accept used plexiglass barriers.

“I’m sad about all the plexiglass that has been used because of the resources that had to go into producing that, and now it’s going to end up in the landfill,” Marr said.

Sophia Charan writes for the Idaho Statesman on a fellowship through the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She has a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the California Institute of Technology, where she focused on atmospheric chemistry, and a bachelor’s degree from Yale University.