September/October 1998
Trex Co. L.L.C. makes a wood-polymer decking material that’s no mere plastic lumber. The firm combines scrap plastic film and wood to create a composite product that captures the best of both the plastic and wood worlds.
By Kent Kiser
Kent Kiser is editor of Scrap.
The next time you bring your plastic grocery bags to your neighborhood store for recycling, think about this: In their next life, they could come back as your backyard deck.
At least that’s the mission of Trex Co. L.L.C. (Winchester, Va.), which recycles PE film—mostly grocery sacks and stretch film—and scrap wood into its trademarked composite product: Trex Easy Care Decking. Whatever you do, don’t call Trex plastic lumber around Mike Vatuna, director of materials sourcing. The proper term, he insists, is “wood-polymer lumber.”
To him, plastic lumber refers to products made of 100-percent plastic, while Trex is a 50/50 composite of plastic film and wood. “By putting fiber in Trex, we get the best of both worlds,” he asserts. “We get the best of the plastic, and we get the best of the wood.” The plastic component, for instance, is durable, insect-proof, moisture-resistant, splinterless, crack-proof, slip-resistant, and contains no chemical preservatives. The wood, meanwhile, gives Trex workability, enabling it to be sawed, routered, drilled, nailed, glued, painted, stained, and so on, much in the same way as wood. Plastic lumber can’t make such claims, Vatuna notes.
And just as plastic- and wood-polymer lumber differ in their physical traits, they differ just as much in how they’re made. This walk-through of Trex Co.’s Winchester production plant shows how plastic film and scrap wood are reincarnated as Trex.
Making the Corian of the Decking Industry
You’ll find Trex Co.’s well-landscaped facility in the scenic Shenandoah Valley, nestled between rural Route 11 and bustling Interstate 81. As you approach the plant, on the right is its 100,000-square-foot production building, whose gleaming silver silos and visible network of tubes somehow suggest a petrochemical plant. On the left are stacks of neatly wrapped bundles of Trex, which make the area look for all the world like a lumber yard.
No matter when you visit, the plant is humming—24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, it’s producing Trex, which, in simple terms, is a product made of a mixture of scrap plastic film and recycled wood that is extruded into standard lumber dimensions.
But the process is hardly as simple as that. High technology and a high degree of quality control go into the production of each Trex “board.”
The process begins with the plastic film. Trex Co. buys HDPE (2) and LDPE/LLDPE (4) plastic film—mostly grocery bags and stretch film—from more than 400 suppliers around the country, primarily grocery stores, distribution centers, and retailers. Plastic usually arrives baled in truckload quantities, with 40 to 50 bales—or 37,000 to 42,000 pounds—per truck, and each bale weighing 750 to 1,200 pounds.
After being unloaded by forklift, bales are broken and fed manually onto one of several infeed conveyors. “This is probably the most important part of the plant,” says Dave Heglas, production supervisor. Why so important? Because this is a crucial quality-control stage.
“The quality of our raw material is paramount to us,” Vatuna says. “Our goal is to manufacture the best decking material we can. We want to make Trex the Corian of the decking industry.”
As employees feed material onto the conveyors, it passes under a detector that stops the belt whenever it senses an item with a density greater than film—a piece of wood pallet, bottle, can, or OCC, for instance. Large quantities of blue bags can also pose problems because the color doesn’t fade in the same manner as that of other bags. Small quantities of cash register receipts and paper labels aren’t a problem, however.
The employee must remove the contaminant before the line will restart. Clean material is conveyed into shredders, which chop the film into small bits called plastic fluff, which is then stored in hoppers before entering the production process.
Just as the Trex process depends on scrap plastic, it couldn’t work without recycled wood. Step through a door from the plastic sorting room and you’re in the wood processing area, which is rich with the smell of wood dust. Trex decking incorporates mostly hardwoods such as oak, maple, and walnut, which comes from about 23 suppliers—mostly furniture, cabinet, and flooring makers as well as pallet recyclers—within a 400-mile radius. The material arrives in various forms, from sawdust to chips to larger pieces.
The unloading of wood is an invisible process. Trailers back up to the dock and automatically unload the wood directly into augur lines. Trex Co. mixes the various batches of ground wood that emerge to achieve a homogeneous feedstock that will make its final products look and weather the same.
A Continuous, Quality-Conscious Process
Now, with plastic fluff and wood powder in hand (or rather, in hopper), you’re ready to make Trex.
Aside from the manual plastic sorting stage, the Trex production process is completely automated, with one employee running the computerized controls for each of the firm’s six production lines.
To start the process, the operator selects the desired batch weight and proportion of plastic fluff and wood powder. The material is fed from two large storage hoppers into two smaller hoppers, then into a single container. These batches follow one another closely, making the production one continuous process, which is more efficient than straight batch feeding but more difficult to control, Heglas points out.
From there, the material enters the mixing unit. At this point, the plastic begins to melt and combine with the wood, forming clumps of hot, gooey Trex of a “granola, brown sugar-like consistency,” Heglas says. These clumps drop into the extruder section, in which they’re pressed into a slug and pushed through dies into the desired dimensional lumber profile—2” x 4”, 2” x 6”, and so on. The extruded Trex emerges from the die into a shallow trough of liquid that cools and sets the material. At this stage, the Trex is one continuous, flexible board—and the longest you’ve ever seen.
As the material exits the trough, it is stamped with an NER construction material code, cut by an automated saw to the desired length, stamped on the heel with a lot number (one of several quality-control measures), and rolled onto cooling racks at a rate of several Trex boards every few minutes. Trex Co. is proud of its NER code because it’s the only manufacturer of polymer lumber to have such a code listing, Vatuna says. The code signifies that its products meet or exceed the standards of the National Evaluation Service Inc. for use as a decking material.
Once on the cooling rack, Trex boards—which are still hot to the touch, soft in the center, and flexible—are inspected for imperfections. Those that pass are stacked and set aside in bundles. Those that fail are recycled.
For each batch, about a 2-foot sample is cut for quality checks at the firm’s in-house lab, which examines each sample’s color, squareness, dimensions, and strength. Each batch must wait for the results of these quality checks before it can be wrapped in a protective plastic jacket and placed in inventory. According to Heglas, it takes about 36 hours to go from raw material to finished Trex that’s been tested and packaged for shipment. Trex Co. sells its decking material to wholesale distributors, who in turn sell it to specialty lumber yards and construction contractors.
Calling All Plastic Suppliers
Business has definitely been good for Trex Co. in its short two-year existence as a private company. (For more on the firm’s history, see “The Story Behind the Company” on page 114.) This year, in fact, the Virginia Chamber of Commerce named it one of the 50 fastest-growing companies in the state, as well as giving it the Virginia Vanguard award in the manufacturing category.
Demand for Trex is so strong, says Vatuna, that Trex Co. is planning to build a second production plant west of the Mississippi. That plant will enable the company to expand its annual production well beyond its current capacity, which in turn will help it claim a larger share of the alternative decking market—estimated between $60 million to $100 million annually.
The new plant will also allow Trex Co. to serve western customers faster and more efficiently. Currently, the firm ships a large percentage of its finished product by rail to distant customers, which isn’t as fast or efficient as shipping by truck. Its second plant will enable it to ship material by truck and, thus, expedite deliveries. As if adding a second plant weren’t enough, Trex Co. is also planning to expand its Winchester facility.
The challenge for Trex Co. isn’t selling its decking product, it’s sourcing enough raw material—primarily plastic—to make it. “You can’t do anything without the raw material,” Vatuna states. “That’s the whole key to the process. It’s the lifeblood of our business. We’ve got to have plastic to run.”
In 1997, Trex Co. bought well in excess of 50 million pounds of plastic film, reportedly making it one of the largest consumers of PE film in the country. And according to Vatuna, the company will increase its consumption more than 50 percent in the next 18 months. By 2000, he projects, the firm will be consuming well over 100 million pounds of PE film.
What this means is that Trex Co. is aggressively seeking new suppliers of stretch film and grocery bags, which could open up new opportunities for scrap recyclers who haven’t heretofore thought of recycling plastic film. “Most of the stretch film is recoverable from the exact same locations as corrugated,” notes Vatuna. And there’s an untapped motherlode of plastic film out there, given that the PE film market is about 8 billion pounds a year.
Trex Co. pays $60 to $100 a ton for plastic film, depending on freight and quality. On full truckloads, the company pays the freight. “We can guarantee prices quoted as a minimum floor price for all account locations—meaning we’ll never pay less—and we will match any competitive offers for the same materials,” Vatuna says. Also, since Trex Co. has 150,000 square feet of off-site warehouse space, it can buy material as suppliers have it available, which means they never have to store more than a full load.
By selling their plastic film, companies can minimize the material they discard, which reduces the number of pulls required for their waste; reduce their disposal costs; and make money on a previously discarded material. “Now, they’re basically throwing away money,” says Vatuna. Given the stable price and reliable demand that Trex Co. can offer for the material, he asks, “Why wouldn’t they want to do it?”
Why not, indeed.
The Story Behind the Company
Trex Co. L.L.C.’s roots go back to Philadelphia and a company named Riverhead Milling Inc. Roger Wittenberg, Riverhead’s president, developed a technology in the late 1980s to recycle plastic bread bags. He came up with a way to mix the plastic film with processed wood to make a wood-polymer lumber product called Rivenite. He subsequently renamed his company Rivenite Corp. after the product, which was produced at a plant in Philadelphia.
In the early 1990s, when public recycling mania was in full swing, Mobil Chemical Co.—a major producer of plastic grocery bags and stretch film—began seeking a technology that would allow it to collect grocery bags from the public and recycle them. This quest led to Rivenite Corp., which Mobil acquired in 1992 and turned into its composite products division, based in Norwalk, Conn. This new division opened its first plant in Tampa in 1992 and its second in Winchester, Va., in 1993. It also gave the Rivenite product a new name, calling it first Timbrex, then shortening that to Trex around 1994. The division subsequently closed the Tampa facility in 1994, consolidating its production in Winchester.
In late 1995, Mobil sold its plastic division to Tenneco Inc.—everything except its composite products division. That division was bought by four former Mobil employees—including Wittenberg, Robert Matheny, Andy Ferrari, and Tony Cavanna—in September 1996, who turned it into a private company under the name Trex Co. L.L.C., with headquarters in Winchester.
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Editor’s Note: For more information about Trex products or to inquire about selling plastic film to Trex Co., call 800/742-1035 or visit www.trex.com.
Trex Co. L.L.C. makes a wood-polymer decking material that’s no mere plastic lumber. The firm combines scrap plastic film and wood to create a composite product that captures the best of both the plastic and wood worlds.