Ever wonder where that plethora of packaging plastic ends up after the those large, blue recycling bins are emptied?

Well, some of it ends up in the hands of Allen Jongsma.

Vice president of Agri-Plas, Jongsma leads the recycling facility located in Brooks. Agri-Plas takes every piece of plastic they receive and then turns it into something else - some of it even becomes crude oil again.

“We take nursery pots, lumber wrapping, buckets, banding, plastic sheeting and even Astroturf and shred it all into little pieces," Jongsma said. "Then we heat it up to around 1100 degrees Fahrenheit in our burner vat, then the vapor goes through a sort of distilling process, after that we have crude oil. All with zero emissions. Right now we use propane to heat the plastic, but we already have plans to use some of the gas from the plastic to heat itself.“

Agri-Plas is the first and only recycling company in the nation, and as far as Allen knows, the world, to do this.

“All of the plastic gets hand separated. There are seven different types of plastic and separate it all in order to have a pure plastic product. If we get too much debris mixed in it weakens the durability and then it‘s just waste,” Jongsma said.

Not every part of the plastic can be turned back into oil. There is a leftover carbon deposit after the process that will go to landfill, but out of 1,000 pounds of plastic recycling there is only about 80 lbs. of waste after the process.

Agri-plas doesn’t take every kind of plastic that can be pitched into household recycling, however the plant plans to expand and will be helping local lumber mills to recycle and reprocess their plastic.

“We have safety features in place such as automated shut downs and cool down if something were to go wrong with the heating process. When we store the oil we keep it in a sort of jellified state so that it is close to non-flammable as possible. When we go to ship it out to the refinery, we slowly heat it up a bit, in order to bring it back to its liquid state,” Jongsma said.

From there, the newly reborn oil ends up becoming anything from fertilizer to cosmetics, gasoline to home heating oil. Some companies will even turn it back into another plastic product.

Every year America ends up disposing millions of pounds of plastic into landfills or shipping it over seas to process or store it.

According to Alan Pennington from Marion County Environmental Services, all of Salem’s curbside recycling is shipped to Hillsboro where it is sorted at Far West Fibers.

“The plastics that can be recycled are then sent off to different recycling facilities depending on the markets. All of the material that can’t be recycled is shipped back to Brooks to be incinerated at the privately owned Covanta Energy plant where it is then transformed into enough electricity to power around 10,000 homes,” Pennington said.

Agri-Plas is trying to put a dent the amount of plastic shipped out of Marion County at all.

“America is buying oil from foreign countries, lets not pay them to take it back when we can create energy and jobs with it right here,” Jongsma said.