Elgin Plastix Inc. Helping Elgin to Recycle

Attention, owners of agricultural businesses in Elgin County! If you have any plastic waste products, such as old trays or containers, there’s a company in Aylmer that would like to buy them for recycling.

The County’s newest green business is called Elgin Plastix Inc., and it is looking for sources of plastic products that can be ground into little pellets and resold. Within a year, the company expects to be recycling cardboard and plastic film as well.

Eric Bartlett is president of Elgin Plastix and also manager of the Elgin Innovation Centre in Aylmer. That’s where the recycling company opened its doors in October 2011. It is one of 10 businesses that have been attracted to locate in the Innovation Centre since March 2010.

Bartlett, who recently moved to Aylmer from London, is one of four owners of the company. The others are Jack Baribeau of Dorchester, John Burkes of Springfield and Richard Phillips of London. Elgin Plastix is part of Elgin County’s growing industrial sector of energy and environmental companies, which are setting examples for combating reliance on oil and reducing the effects of climate change.

The machinery used by Elgin Plastix can grind up to 5,000 pounds of hard plastic per hour, like lawn chairs, plastic skids and starter trays from greenhouses– that would otherwise go to landfill sites. The plastic is reduced to small pellets and trucked to commodity depots, which resell them to manufacturers.

Bartlett says Elgin Plastix is looking to expand by finding more kinds of materials, and combinations of materials, to recycle.

"We are trying to find innovative ways of recycling different streams of plastics," he says. "We have taken in truckloads of mixed materials and found that we can process 80 per cent of them in a way that is useful."

Elgin County is an advantageous location for a green business like Elgin Plastix, Bartlett says, partly because operating costs are relatively low and partly because the large agriculture industry is a good source of recyclable products.

"If agriculture businesses have clean jugs and large containers made of polyethylene or polypropylene, we can take them.

Any businesses interested to work with Elgin Plastix to find green solutions for waste management can contact Eric Bartlett at 226-448-9101 or

Bartletteric@ymail.com.