The Winchester Star — Towering bales of plastic create numerous pathways leading through an area of the cavernous plant at 181 Battaile Drive, where Trex Company Inc. expanded its wood composite manufacturing operations earlier this year.

On a recent morning, Pat Burns, vice president of planning and business development, pulled a penny out from between the compressed layers of shopping bags, packaging film, and other types of reclaimed plastic, collected from more than 5,000 grocery stores and warehouses.

Dave Heglas, director of material resources, points to pieces of wire, palette strapping, and other common objects found in the bales as he explains the reasons why Trex recently added a new $10 million sorting operation to its production process.

The expansion has given Trex the ability to sort, prep, and process reclaimed plastic into production material for its main plant, just around the corner on Shawnee Drive.

Trex used to outsource the task before establishing a new department in the nearly 200,000 square-foot building, formerly home to Lear Corp, an automotive interior systems supplier that closed operations there in 2005.

Heglas said the new in-house department has streamlined the sorting process and cut expenses by about 20 percent.

"We had a lot of transportation logistics taking the plastic to the outsourcing companies," he said.

The expansion investment, Burns said was " primarily in two buckets."

About $1 million went into setting up the plastic sorting lines and the remaining $9 million into the processing of "unsortable" mixed plastic into pellets, which is then used for wood composite lumber production at the main plant.

Trex, headquartered in Winchester since 1996, has been producing the wood composite by melding plastic with recycled wood waste. The resulting lumber is used by building contractors for decking, fencing, and railing products.

Trex also created 60 new positions to staff the department, which operates 24-hours a day, five days a week.

In the sorting division of the department, employees stand on a platform as a conveyor belt moves the plastic from below. Employees work swiftly, pulling apart and sifting through the mounds of plastic. They are trained to identify "usable" from "unusable’ plastic, in addition to spotting fragments of cardboard, wire, bottle caps, palette straps, and milk cartons pieces, among other objects.

The usable plastic is polyethylene and the unusable plastic is polypropylene. "I can tell usually by looking at it," said Darren Garrison, polyprocessing supervisor for the department.

On that particular morning, employees were sorting plastic for an end-product that was to be clear in color. The unsorted plastic below them was laced with colorful parcel bags that employees were charged with plucking out of the gnarled mounds that moved by on the conveyor belt.

"We’ll either use them here when making a dark colored products or send them to someone who is making something like a flower pot or irrigation tubing," Heglas said.

Other materials found among the plastic bring in a nice chunk of change for the company.

Cardboard pieces, for instance, are bound into large bales and sold to paper mills or other recyclers. The company usually makes about $100,000 a month on the cardboard alone, Heglas said.

Wire and other types of unusable plastics are sold to other recyclers. "We try to set this operation up as 0 percent waste," he said. "So, we try not to send anything to the landfill."

Large quantities of polyethylene and polypropylene that are too intertwined to be identified or pulled apart are melted down and processed in another part of the facility.

"It’s grinded into a ‘fluff’ and melted into a pellet," Garrison said. "Once blended together, the polypropylene acts more like the polyethylene."

The pellets are then used to produce wood composite lumber at the main plant. It takes 15 minutes from the time the sorting and pellet processing is complete to the time the plastic is melded with ground wood waste and rolled off of the production line in the form of lumber.

The lumber is then taken to a separate warehousing facility to cool overnight. The next day, lab work and other quality checks are made before being packaged.

"The whole process is a 36-hour cycle," Helgas said.

Including plants in Fernley, Nev., and Olive Branch, Miss., Burns said. Trex, which projects net sales of more than $330 million for 2007, has invested a total of $30 million companywide.

"We’ve invested to increase productivity, lower costs, and improve the quality of our products," Burns said.

In addition to the $10 million sorting operation, an additional $8 million has gone into the Winchester plant, which employs about 600 of the company’s 900 employees.

Some of the $30 million investment was also diverted into the development of a new privacy fencing product called Trex Seclusions.

"Privacy fencing is a $1.3 billion market," Burns said, adding that the market has mostly been fueled by the large number of new subdivisions, were homes are built close together on small lots.

"We test marketed it last year in the West and put it on the market in the spring," Burns said.