October 29, 2020 — Cleaning beaches, saving birds, recycling resources – all in a day’s work for a special partnership of conservationists, supply chain entities and a resource reclamation firm.

This innovative effort to remove plastic waste from the environment and reclaim it as a fuel source is demonstrating the power and versatility of the supply chain.

Beach Environmental Awareness Campaign Hawaii in Honolulu is working to protect albatrosses and other marine birds by collecting discarded plastic bottle caps.

Thanks to Matson Shipping, the Port of Long Beach, SSA Terminals, Union Pacific railroad and Loup Logistics, a 40-foot-long container full of 1 million caps was recently shipped for free from Honolulu to Tyler, Texas. There, the caps were recycled by New Hope Energy into fuel, helping to further conserve resources. Read the press release.

  1. B.E.A.C.H. in Honolulu gathers discarded plastic caps, fills a shipping container, and the box is loaded onto a Matson vessel.
  2. At the Port of Long Beach in California, the Matson container is off-loaded at Pier C SSA.
  3. The container with the caps is trucked to the Intermodal Container Transfer Facility to be loaded onto a Union Pacific train.
  4. The container is hauled cross-country by UP to the Dallas area.
  5. Final stop is Tyler, Texas, and the New Hope Energy Co.