VIDEO: RightCycle PPE Recycling Program Behind The Scenes

So you're in the middle of a production floor for the Jackson County Developmental Center, also known as JCDC. We are located in Millwood, West Virginia, and what you see behind me is when we take materials from Kimberly-Clark's consumers. People actually use their product and they send it to us and we recycle it. We sort it out by the different kinds of plastics and other materials that are inherent in the clean room suits. We started working with RightCycle and Kimberly-Clark probably about seven years ago and then they just said "well gee, you guys are doing it better than anybody else has done it! Keep doing it."

JCDC is a not-for-profit organization. We are mission-based which means that our mission, which is to provide quality of life support and employment opportunities for people with disabilities, means if we want to employ people we need work and so what we learned a long time ago is that we have to do a very good quality job. This is not a gift to us. They're getting something that they need back from us and in turn what we get is not only the income generated from doing business, but we get jobs for people with disabilities and that's a very important part. We are very much in rural West Virginia. Our little county has 29,000 people in it. So when we're able to bring in a major corporation like Kimberly-Clark, we now have jobs for people with disabilities and we have them every day.

The RightCycle program is a stable, dependable way for us to employ individuals with disabilities and help them learn new skills that help them become more independent people. Being able to say we're going to recycle these garments, we're going to recycle these PPE items so they can be turned into chairs or flower pots, that's a very concrete item that we can say you made a difference, you did this. RightCycle is a part of that process and helps us do our job better. We are thankful for the Kimberly-Clark RightCycle program because it gives us the opportunity to work with so many different programs and make a great impact on the environment.

My name is Bryan Adams and we're here at Somerset Recycling Services. We are a plastics processing facility located in Somerset, Kentucky. We're excited to be partnered with Kimberly-Clark and the RightCycle program. Somerset Recycling and Kimberly-Clark have partnered for nearly a decade together. We come up with solutions to create product that then can have a second life. We process a number of materials. Quite a bit of Kimberly-Clark product comes through our facility for our extrusion process and our densification process. The material that comes in from a Kimberly-Clark location and it's raw form which can be gowns, footies, boots, nitrile gloves, diaper leg cut outs, safety eyewear, comes to our facility as well. We take it in its raw form. We then size, reduce it, and those materials then can be used in the next process which would be injection molding, compression molding, and roto molding to create products – a lot of houseware items, outdoor furniture, composite lumber, things of that nature. What really brings to life the program is that we're taking items like this and becoming an item like this.