Political campaign-sign recycling project grows from Volusia to Seminole, Orange counties

Here's a thought as Tuesday's midterm election reaches its frenzied conclusion: The next time you drive past a patch of political yard signs, in a matter of weeks, many of them will be reduced to a recyclable resin.

A sign reuse project that started in Volusia County in 2018 has now expanded to Seminole and Orange counties, and this year will involve an Orlando-based company that claims to clean and transform signs into material that can then be used to make new signs — or food containers, carpet, auto parts, anything made of polypropylene (plastic No. 5).

Suze Peace, a DeLand resident and member of the League of Women Voters of Volusia County, said after the 2016 election, there was a "blizzard" of campaign signs and she started thinking about how they should be recycled. She contacted the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to inquire about whether this was being done somewhere else in the state, and the answer came back that it wasn't.

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So in 2018, and again in 2020, Peace and other volunteers started a project working with Republican and Democratic party clubs to collect signs and recycle them at Southard's Recycling in New Smyrna Beach. But the volume of signs was more than the "mom-and-pop" recycling shop could handle.

"So," Peace said, "I started looking around."

She found League of Women Voters partners in Orange and Seminole counties to help organize the collection of some 15,000 political signs.

She also found PureCycle Technologies Inc., a publicly traded company on the NASDAQ index based in Orlando that's willing to recycle the signs. PureCycle officials estimate they will be able to divert nearly 10,000 pounds of polypropylene from landfills.

The problem with plastics

Giant patches of plastic debris, much of it broken into small pieces, swirl around in the oceans' gyres.

A report by the Pew Charitable Trusts states 13 million metric tons of plastic enter the Earth's oceans every year, threatening marine life and polluting shorelines.

The Center for Biological Diversity calls plastic accumulation in the oceans "a global crisis," and if the reliance upon plastics continues to grow at the current rate, it's estimated that the plastic will outweigh all of the world's fish.

"The tragedy is no one knows how long they take to biodegrade," Peace said. "It depends on sunshine and water. What I've heard is it takes at least 125 years to biodegrade. If we can reuse it, it makes sense."

Clubs from both the Republican and Democratic parties are participating in the project, which has also gotten support from Volusia County, Supervisor of Elections Lisa Lewis and the University of Florida's Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.

"We do not take signs off the roadways at all," said Nancy Vaughn, natural resources team chair for the League of Women Voters of Volusia County. "We understand those are private property and will not take them. We only pick them up from the election offices, Democrat and Republican."

Other candidates and volunteers can bring signs to the Volusia County Fairgrounds on Nov. 19 and 20, where the League of Women Voters will have volunteers ready to take them in a truck first to GEL Corporation in Orange City, where the signs will be baled before being delivered to PureCycle.

Vaughn said she appreciates that this is an effort that bridges the political chasm seen in American elections in recent years.

"This is the beauty of this: It's a nonpartisan effort," she said. "Everybody is engaged and it's a perfect combination of recycling and keeping election signs out of the landfill, and working in nonpartisan outreach, which is what the league is known for."

PureCycle's process

Dustin Olson, CEO of PureCycle, said his company is scaling up and "canvassing the nation" looking for sources of plastic to recycle, so he welcomed Peace's entreaty.

The signs and other materials PureCycle collects go to a plant in Ironton, Ohio, where the material is cleaned and grounded into UPR — or ultra-pure resin.

PureCycle's customers are the converters and compounders who manufacture plastic goods using UPR.

"They make the car bumper or they'll make the carpet made of polypropylene. Or they make the toy at Ikea and they make the cup at McDonald's," Olson said. "They will buy our product and put it into those goods."

Olson said there are three types of recycling for plastics: mechanical, chemical and advanced.

"Mechanical recycling is taking all of the plastic and blending it together. You end up with bad odor performance and bad color performance. So the color is gray; the odor is not perfect," he said. "With chemical recycling you take the plastic and you basically break the molecule using a lot of energy and turn it into, let's just call it crude oil equivalent."

PureCycle is engaged in "advanced recycling," Olson said.

"It's literally like a washing machine for the molecule," We put it in a facility that washes it at the molecular level. And when you do that, it just washes away all of the contaminants in the plastic."

Olson said he hopes the program will expand statewide or nationwide in coming elections.

So does Peace.

"There are 67 counties in Florida and we had only three (recycling plastic political signs)," Peace said. "It's just sad."

Florida law requires signs to be removed within 30 days of an election. Peace wants to tweak that. She said she has attempted to contact one of her lawmakers to see if that law can be amended to require the signs be recycled.

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This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Nonpartisan effort will reduce election yard signs to recyclable resin