Recycling Styrofoam? Forget About It
(CBS) -- Low oil prices have driven down the cost of petroleum-based styrofoam, prompting the few places that recycle it around here to stop.
Residents of Algonquin, Barrington Hills, Lakewood and others in McHenry County can no longer drop off styrofoam for recycling.
Ken Santowski, an environmentalist and owner of a storage and transportation company, has been picking up the packing material for free at 10 locations.
Podcast
He's been doing it for years and processing it for recycling, always at a loss, he says.
Now the market for used styrofoam is totally gone.
Santowski says he used to get between 3 and 12 cents a pound for it but the recycler he takes it to in northern Wisconsin rejected the last truckload six weeks ago.
That means he's stuck with three semis full of styrofoam.
He hates the idea of it going in the trash, so he's working on a crowd-funding plan for a machine to better prepare styrofoam for recycling.
