ASHLEY — Ashley, Indiana’s global waste solutions provider, Brightmark, has announced it has achieved a milestone.

Brightmark has hit a goal of recycling 4 million pounds of plastic waste. This waste, which includes all forms of plastics types 1-7, has been successfully recycled at the company’s flagship plastics renewal facility in Ashley and converted into valuable products, creating a closed-loop, circular economy.

Brightmark’s breakthrough closed-loop solution has the unique ability to recycle all types of plastic waste that has reached the end of its useful life.

The waste recycled includes single-use plastics such as beverage bottles, food packaging, plastic bags, straws, and coffee stirrers — as well as the difficult to recycle plastic types 3-7, such as plastic film, flexible packaging, styrofoam, coffee K-Cups, car seats and children’s toys, which are not currently recycled at scale.

In achieving this milestone, Brightmark has recycled 4,000 children’s car seats, 60,000 pounds of boat wrap, 6,000 pounds of plastics recovered from the ocean, 200,000 yogurt cups and a variety of other non-single use plastics that are likely to otherwise end up incinerated in landfills or as litter in the natural environment, where it will sit for thousands of years.