“Peek into any basement or garage and you’ll find them: old cans of paint left from a domestic makeover. Every year, do-it-yourselfers stash away some 66 million gallons of surplus latex. That’s not counting the tons of waste from commercial sources, including low-quality paints rejected by manufacturers, dinged cans tossed by retailers, and big barrels abandoned by contractors.
A startup hopes to shift the flow of this colorful river away from the nation’s landfills and into new plastics. Licensing technology from Rutgers University, Re-Manufacturing Technologies (RMT) has developed a process that combines waste paint with recycled plastic to produce resin pellets that companies melt and mold into various forms, from kitchen tools to electronics cases.
The RMT approach avoids landfill costs and helps meet the plastics industry’s growing demand for recycled supplies, for which prices have climbed recently. Some day, paint recyclers might even pay you a fee to return those unwanted cans in your basement”.
-By Adam Aston
