This Company Wants to Recycle Your Plastic Bags. There’s a Lot Riding on Whether It Succeeds

On any given day, J.P. Mascaro & Sons’ recycling plant outside Reading, Pa., receives anywhere from 500 to 600 tons of recyclable material.

There are heaps of cardboard boxes, mountains of glass jars and aluminum cans, and towers of plastic water and soda bottles, all of which J.P. Mascaro’s Total Recycle plant has processed for years.

But there’s also a lot of material it technically cannot process: frying pans, car transmissions, and a swath of plastic bags and other material made of thin, flexible plastic — shrink wrap, Snickers wrappers, potato chip bags, the plastic lining of your cereal box, the bags that pre-washed spinach and salad greens are sold in, Go-Gurt pouches.

That last category, known as flexible plastic packaging, is one the recycling industry has been grappling with in recent years.

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