At Food City recycle bins, you can deposit nearly every type of plastic that serve valuable purposes in daily life. There’s only one plastic we can’t accept: PVC. That is a type of plastic commonly used for pipes and as a coating for wires and cable.

More on recycling items

The items will go to Eastman’s mixed plastics processing facility, part of the new molecular recycling plant the company recently opened in Kingsport.

The items are sorted by plastic type. They will then be converted into new materials to make various durable items.

With Kingsport being home to Eastman’s new recycling facility, Kingsport has global importance when it comes to plastic recycling. In Kingsport, Eastman now operates one of the world’s largest material-to-material molecular recycling facilities.

Eastman’s molecular recycling processes hard-to-recycle plastic waste that otherwise usually goes to landfill or incineration. Through these recycling innovations, Eastman takes in many kinds of hard-to-recycle plastic, such as the items you deposit in the Food City bins.

Through molecular recycling, Eastman reduces waste, preserves natural resources and gives plastic new life in new products. And molecular recycling can do this over and over again.

Let’s look closer at the Resin Identification Code (RIC). That code identifies the type of plastic used to create that item and is important in identifying the type of recycling that can be used to process it. RICs are commonly found on the bottom of plastic items and are numbered 1–7 in a triangle made of arrows.