• Home
  • Books
    • A River’s Gifts: The Mighty Elwha River Reborn
    • Planet Ocean
    • Eavesdropping on Elephants
    • Neema’s Reason To Smile
    • Zoo Scientists to the Rescue
    • Sea Otter Heroes: The Predators That Saved an Ecosystem
    • Plastic, Ahoy! Investigating the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
    • Ebola: Fears and Facts
    • Jingle the Brass
    • Nugget on the Flight Deck
    • Surviving Animal Attacks
    • Elite Operations series
    • Energy Lab series
    • QuickReads Fluency Library
    • Books for English language-learners
    • Writers write all kinds of things
  • Author Visit Programs
    • FAQs
    • Calendar
  • Blog
  • Educator Resources
    • STEM + Literacy Activities
    • LitLinks
    • Teacher Guides
    • KidLit creators who make kids want to read
  • Writer Resources
    • Manuscript or Proposal Critiques
  • Who is Patricia Newman?
  • Contact
    • Stay In Touch
Patricia NewmanPatricia Newman
Sibert Honor Children's Book Author & Environmentalist
  • Home
  • Books
    • A River’s Gifts: The Mighty Elwha River Reborn
    • Planet Ocean
    • Eavesdropping on Elephants
    • Neema’s Reason To Smile
    • Zoo Scientists to the Rescue
    • Sea Otter Heroes: The Predators That Saved an Ecosystem
    • Plastic, Ahoy! Investigating the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
    • Ebola: Fears and Facts
    • Jingle the Brass
    • Nugget on the Flight Deck
    • Surviving Animal Attacks
    • Elite Operations series
    • Energy Lab series
    • QuickReads Fluency Library
    • Books for English language-learners
    • Writers write all kinds of things
  • Author Visit Programs
    • FAQs
    • Calendar
  • Blog
  • Educator Resources
    • STEM + Literacy Activities
    • LitLinks
    • Teacher Guides
    • KidLit creators who make kids want to read
  • Writer Resources
    • Manuscript or Proposal Critiques
  • Who is Patricia Newman?
  • Contact
    • Stay In Touch

One man might free the world from new plastic. Forever.

September 18, 2014 Ocean Plastic, Video No Comments

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.
Tags: actionoceanplasticrecyclevideo
No Comments
Share
0

You also might be interested in

Ocean apps for your explorations

Ocean apps for your explorations

Nov 2, 2016

The Marine Science and Technology Center at Highline College in[...]

The sole of the sneaker is made from sustainable materials, the upper from recycled ocean waste. --Adidas
The sole of the sneaker is made from sustainable materials, the upper from recycled ocean waste. --Adidas

Plastic Reduction Goes Global #marinedebris #plasticpollution #PlasticAhoy

Aug 18, 2015

by Molly Vincent, Guest Student Blogger As awareness spreads about[...]

Saving sea otters: Star in a kids’ book
Photo credit: Elise Montanino

Saving sea otters: Star in a kids’ book

Sep 25, 2017

Happy Sea Otter Awareness Week! Today Dr. Brent Hughes, a[...]

Leave a Reply

Your email is safe with me.
Cancel Reply

Click the logo to have LitLinks delivered to your inbox

LitLinks Logo-2022

Author Visits

https://youtu.be/ziN0UrqaDYI

Post Categories:

Blog Archive

Top Posts

LitLinks: How to share our ocean connections with kids and teens

LitLinks: Let’s learn to decode photos in STEM nonfiction

LitLinks: How Elephants Can Make Your Sound Unit ROAR!

LitLinks: Easy ways to build students’ science communication skills

Proof that science connects kids to the larger world

Recent Comments

  • Annie Lynn on LitLinks: Best practices for making connections between kidlit and science My pleasure! We are stronger together!✌🏽💖🎶🔬📚🌻
  • Patricia Newman on LitLinks: Best practices for making connections between kidlit and science Thank you for putting the A in STEM, Annie!
  • Annie Lynn on LitLinks: Best practices for making connections between kidlit and science As usual, this was a fantastic, helpful, detailed post that…

I also write for STEM Tuesday

STEM Tuesday
Empowering young readers to act

Latest Blog Posts

  • LitLinks: An easy lesson to help students write a desert rap
    LitLinks: An easy lesson to help students write a desert rap
  • LitLinks: 5 ways to use nonfiction kidlit in the classroom
    LitLinks: 5 ways to use nonfiction kidlit in the classroom

What's happening on Twitter

  • It's #internationdayofthegirl 🥳 Celebrate #girlpower w books abt ♀️ #scientists #WomenInSTEM #scicomm #STEM…  http://t.co/ALmXSCYDrs 
  • 5 months ago
  • RT  @mstewartscience : Love seeing all those smiling faces!
  • 5 months ago

Follow @PatriciaNewman

Action Shots

Check out the STEM Tuesday Blog

© 2023 — Patricia Newman

  • Home
  • Books
    • A River’s Gifts: The Mighty Elwha River Reborn
    • Planet Ocean
    • Eavesdropping on Elephants
    • Neema’s Reason To Smile
    • Zoo Scientists to the Rescue
    • Sea Otter Heroes: The Predators That Saved an Ecosystem
    • Plastic, Ahoy! Investigating the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
    • Ebola: Fears and Facts
    • Jingle the Brass
    • Nugget on the Flight Deck
    • Surviving Animal Attacks
    • Elite Operations series
    • Energy Lab series
    • QuickReads Fluency Library
    • Books for English language-learners
    • Writers write all kinds of things
  • Author Visit Programs
    • FAQs
    • Calendar
  • Blog
  • Educator Resources
    • STEM + Literacy Activities
    • LitLinks
    • Teacher Guides
    • KidLit creators who make kids want to read
  • Writer Resources
    • Manuscript or Proposal Critiques
  • Who is Patricia Newman?
  • Contact
    • Stay In Touch
Prev Next