We recognize the plastics industry has been plagued with poor quality recycled products, and they are so often the substitute or lower cost alternative than new products. SSD was created with the idea that we can change that concept with positive performance based results that make using recycled materials the preference not the substitute. Even better is when we make such little waste that no one needs to use any recycled content! Wouldn't that be the day?! 

Lets talk down and dirty for a minute- we get it. You may think recycled plastics are bad, or just plain plastics are bad. But this could not be further from the truth. Plastics are super cool. Plastics have a much broader life cycle than most people realize. In fact, the average plastic resin can be manufactured and then reused 7 times before its properties begin to become unpredictable and difficult to perform as expected. Even when that level of degradation has occurred, we can still find ways to reuse these plastics. Gosh, did that sound like it was simple?? Absolutely not, It does take some creativity, and lots of hard work
 
Most of us know how important it is to create a sustainable environment for us to live, work and create in for many generations to come. It can be difficult and overwhelming to know how to do that when the world around us has all these new innovations happening so quickly. We have so many bright minds making new things, its easy to forget we need to follow through with the old ones that we have made. Truly, plastics fits into that group. Amazing innovation, but needs help making it to the next generation of its life cycle. This simple idea is where so many of us drop the ball. 

It is for that reason that we at SSD Designs took a good hard look at ourselves and said, maybe we can help and do a small part to be involved in some solutions because sitting on the sidelines was just not good enough for us. 

Having more than a hundred years of combined plastic manufacturing, compounding and recycling experience- we put our knowledge to the test and set out to design a way to make going green easier for our industry.

Manufacturers have it tough, they are under constant pressure to make a perfect product for their consumers all the time. Now consumers have added another hurdle to overcome, using recycled content. Sounds simple, just use more recycled content- right? Not so simple, and we completely understand.

Meeting quality and financial expectations is a "no-win" situation when what is received, prohibits one of the two of those goals.

Recycled content has long been held as a substitute to new plastic and nearly always considered a lower cost alternative. Why? So many reasons... That's story is for another page. We set out to change that, and help make using recycled content goals for manufacturers and helping improve the quality of our environment achievable for everyone.

It seemed to us that recyclers, compounders and new resin companies felt they could only stay in "their playground" and not cross lines and make something from one of the other areas.  We thought, why cant we do it all? Why cant we compound a product that hybrids both new and old products? These questions led us to the ResAlt brand. Making a product that was "green engineered" and whenever we can, we use as much recycled content as possible without hurting the performance of the graded product. 

Over the years we have gotten better and better at using recycled content in our compounds. We can now boast that all of our graded product lines contain a minimum of 40%  recycled materials in their composition. We did not want to stop at the recycled content minimum numbers, we also try very hard to focus on what the environmental impacts of our choices are in all components of the compounds.

Less than 5% of the ResAlt brand product lines have color added to them. Whenever possible we hand separate out different colors of raw recycled materials when we receive them. We have found that with a little sweat equity on the front half of our raw materials, we are able to make a good recycled product where we can eliminate contamination, and sort out colors that already exist and are beautiful without having to use color concentrate. This helps us reduce our carbon output and gives our customers fabulous colors to pick from that we can repeat over and over again in high volumes. 

It seemed to us lots of people focused on post consumer products, it sure does need some help but having been in the industry for so many years we knew that it was not just post consumer that had a hard time getting recycled properly. Many large manufacturers couldn't find easy homes for their products and the higher the level of technology they created the harder it was for them to recycle it. More importantly one of the reasons that companies produce so much waste is because they often don't know where or why the problem with waste exists. We decided if we could focus on designing our products around helping these manufacturers we could make a big dent in avoiding landfills for products that were at risk because they were poorly understood or needed to be modified in some way before they could be reused.  

One of ResAlts more important recycled content features is in its selection of what kind of recycled content it uses. "Green engineering", meant a focus needed to be on using recycled content that was not easy to recycle. 

It was important that we helped our manufactures to reduce the amount of waste they produced, particularly larger manufacturers. The more waste they produced the more important we felt it was for us to get involved in helping them gain better visualization of their waste. We set out to serve a dual purpose, recycle the products in our compounds, provide transparency to the manufacturer and by doing so we designed a reporting system that gives visualization to their systems that is completely unbiased. Its goal is simple, report the truth and let the manufacturer decide how to handle the information.

Of course it is all free to our manufacturers and it gives them a slew of data points, information, photos and is completely customizable to the individual manufacturer.

92% of our clients say that it helps them to improve their internal communication and break down barriers to understanding their own waste, which in-turn produces less waste and creates a more efficient and productive manufacturing plant.

We celebrate in the reward when we work ourselves out of a raw material because if the manufacturer can make no waste, well that is the ultimate goal. Its on to the next. There are so many companies that need help and we know we can keep creating performance based resin that is designed with green engineering in mind.

Recycling should be the last option, but we will be here to make something cool out of it needs to be recycled. 

Many of our clientele prefer our product lines so much that they have replaced new resins and color concentrate all together.  Our goal is always to use the most amount of recycled content we can, without comprising the quality your company needs to make your product perform for the job it was set out to do. 


ResAlt® Brand name product lines where "We believe going green should be about the ResAlts!"