What if we could manufacture new products out of recycled plastic? Mike Biddle, the CEO of MBA Polymers, is trying to do just that. “We get so concerned with how our products are made, but we don’t seem to care how we are unmaking our stuff,” he says.
Mike not only recycles plastic, he strips it down to its essence and reprocesses it into the basic building blocks–or nurdles if you’ve read Plastic, Ahoy! Investigating the Great Pacific Garbage Patch–which he sells back to manufacturers of electronics, coffee machines, and vacuum cleaners, to name a few.
Profiled in the March 2014 of Popular Science, Biddle’s vision is to create a worldwide market for high-grade recycled plastic. Most recycled plastic becomes a lower-grade plastic. i.e. a recycled water bottle never becomes a water bottle again, but might show up in a polar fleece blanket or your carpet.
With Biddle’s model, plastic from a laptop is reduced to its purest form and sold back to an electronics company to make another laptop.
MBA Polymers recycles more than 125,000 tons of trash a day. His plant shreds, cleans, and grinds the waste plastic into confetti-sized bits. These bits then travel through a secret closed-loop recycling process that removes ferrous and non-ferrous metals; sorts the material by weight; sorts plastics by chemistry; and sorts plastics by color.
In 2007, Biddle was named an Earthkeeper Hero, an honor previously awarded to Jacques Cousteau, Rachel Carson and Jane Goodall. He is also the founder of thePlasticity Forum, an influential dialogue on our world of plastic.
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