Dale M. King/Staff Photo Sun Valley President Dan Schrager offers a basic depiction of his firm's process. Plastic bags are recycled into resins, which are sold off to make new products.

Ten years ago, Dan Schrager of Delray Beach had $100 -- and an idea.
“My wife had worked in the retail business – and she told me about all the plastic bags, hangers and other materials that they were throwing away.”

What’s more, they were paying companies to haul away the trash.
Schrager figured there was a better way. He invested the $100 plus lots of sweat equity to create Sun Valley Worldwide Inc. “Today, we serve more than 600 customers throughout North America, Asia, India, South and Central America and the Caribbean, recycling more than 185 million pounds per year of plastic waste.”

The firm, headquartered at 1801 S. Federal Highway in Delray Beach, just started a recycling program in Haiti – coincidentally, during the Aristide uprising.
“Every company that manufactures a product creates waste,” said Schrager. And during the past 10 years, his company has been able to capitalize on this – and turn it into a success.

“We make money – and help the environment,” he noted.

Sun Valley is the only firm in the nation that provides “one stop” service, its founder said. “We provide recycling services for plastic, paper, metal, textile and electronic waste.” But it doesn’t stop there. Sun Valley also provides packaging material, equipment and consultant services “to assist companies in managing their waste and disposal costs. There is no single organization that provides all of these services under one roof.”

The company’s offices are in Delray, but its recycling plant is in Morristown, Tenn. It accepts all types of waste, from plastic bottles to corrugated cardboard, all at the same location.

Sun Valley has a lengthy list of clients, including Coca Cola, PepsiCo, Zephyrhills water, Mattress Giant, Mohawk, Nestle, Heinz, Dannon, Kids R Us, Del Monte and Alcoa, to name a few. Schrager also notes his firm handles waste management for the United States Post Office, Publix Supermarkets and the United States military.

One of the firm’s secrets of success is adding value to the scrap it collects and sends to its processing plant in Tennessee. “We melt and clean the plastics and convert them into recycled resins used as raw materials to make new products.”
Basically, Sun Valley is the conduit between the waste stream and the needs of the housing and construction market, agriculture, automotive parts, packaging and consumer goods.

That Zephyrhills water bottle you’ve got in your hand may someday become part of a dashboard on a Chevrolet. The Coke can could end up in a house in Miami. And that ketchup bottle you throw into the recycling bin could come back as… well, another ketchup bottle.

“We recycle 40,000 soda bottles a year,” Schrager noted. “We sell a lot of the resin to companies that make carpeting.”

The resin produced by Sun Valley is called Omega LLD, and is packaged in two forms: densified, a gray material, and pelletized, a white substance that’s slightly more refined. Companies that use raw plastic in their manufacturing process can get a deal on either one. The densified, he said, costs about 40 percent less than raw resins; the pelletized, about 20 percent less.
Schrager is founder and head of the company, but he said his team has helped the firm grow. “Steve Grossomanides, a senior VP at Sun Valley, has been with the company since 1996 and heads up our plastic recycling and sourcing operations,” the boss said.

Jason Schrager, Dan’s brother, created the recycling program in Haiti.
He works with a bottler in that island nation. Consumers bring bottles back for a redemption fee. “Once 35,000 pounds of bottles have been collected, full container loads are shipped to Sun Valley for recycling,” said Dan Schrager.
The recycling chief has learned a lot over the years – and is sharing it in the community. “We have education programs in the schools,” he said. “I took a fourth grade from Pine Crest School on an environmental field trip, to a landfill, an incinerator and a material recovery operation. They said it was the Number 1 field trip this year.”

Schrager said he is working with Pine Crest this year on a program to reduce the school’s waste stream to zero.

On the growth side, he said he hopes to partner with some Fortune 1000 firms nationwide “because these companies have factories and distribution centers, and generate multiple streams of waste at facilities across the country.”
He also wants to have a total of three mills. He has one in Tennessee and wants another is the Midwest and a third on the West Coast. Schrager is working to get a plant in Tijuana.

Sun Valley employs 32 people in Florida and 35 at the Tennessee plant.