We can recycle plastic Mike Biddle

I’m a garbage man and you might find it

interesting that I became a garbage man

because I absolutely hate waste

I hope within the next 10 minutes to

change the way you think about a lot of

the stuff in your life and I’d like to

start at the very beginning think back

when you were just a kid how did you

look at the stuff in your life perhaps

it was like these toddler rules it’s my

stuff

if I saw it first the entire pile is my

stuff if I’m building something the more

stuff that’s mine the better and of

course it’s your stuff if it’s broken

well after spending about 20 years in

the recycling industry it’s become

pretty clear to me that we don’t

necessarily leave these toddler rules

behind as we develop into adults and let

me tell you why I have that perspective

because each and every day that our

recycling plants around the world we

handle about 1 million pounds of

people’s discarded stuff now a million

pounds a day sounds like a lot of stuff

but it’s a tiny drop of the durable

goods that are disposed each and every

year around the world well less than 1%

in fact the United Nations estimates

that there’s about 85 billion pounds a

year of electronics waste that gets

discarded around the world each and

every year and that’s one of the most

rapidly growing parts of our waste

stream and if you throw in other durable

goods like automobiles and so forth that

number well more than doubles and of

course the more developed the country

it’s a bigger these mountains now when

you see these mountains most people

think of garbage we see above-ground

mines and the reason we see mines is

because there’s a lot of valuable raw

materials that went into making all this

stuff in the first place and it’s

becoming increasingly important that we

figure out how to extract these raw

materials from these extremely

complicated waste streams because as

we’ve heard all week at Ted the world’s

getting to be a smaller place with more

people in it who want more and more

stuff and of course they want the toys

and the tools that many of us take for

granted and what goes into making those

toys and tools that we use every single

day it’s mostly many types of plastics

and many types of metals and the metals

we typically get from or that we mine in

ever-widening mines and ever deep mines

around the world and the plastics we get

from oil which we go to more remote

locations and drill ever deeper wells to

extract and these practices have

significant economic and environmental

implications that we’re already starting

to see today the good news is we are

starting to recover materials from our

end-of-life stuff and starting to

recycle our end-of-life stuff

particularly in regions of the world

like here it in Europe that have

recycling policies in place that require

that this stuff be recycled in a

responsible manner most of what’s

extracted from our end-of-life stuff if

it makes it to a recycler are the metals

to put that in perspective and I’m using

steel as a proxy here for metals because

it’s the most common metal if your stuff

makes it to a recycler probably over 90

percent of the metals are going to be

recovered and reused for another purpose

the plastics are a whole nother story

well less than ten percenter are

recovered in fact it’s more like five

percent most of its incinerated or

landfill

now most people think that’s because

plastics are a throwaway material have

very little value but actually plastics

are several times more valuable than

steel and there’s more plastics produced

and consumed around the world on a

volume basis every year than steel so

why is such a plentiful and valuable

material not recovered it anywhere near

the rate of a less valuable material

well it’s predominantly because metals

are very easy to recycle from other

materials and from one another they have

very different densities they have

different electrical and magnetic

properties and they even have different

colours so it’s very easy for either

humans or machines to separate these

metals from one another and from other

materials plastics have overlapping

densities over a very narrow range they

have either identical or very similar

electrical and magnetic properties and

any plastic can be any colors you

probably well known so the traditional

ways of separating materials just simply

don’t work for plastics another

consequence of metals being so easy to

recycle by humans is that a lot of our

stuff from the developed world and sadly

to say particularly from the United

States where we don’t have any recycling

policies in place like your in your

finds its way to developing countries

for low-cost recycling people for as

little as a dollar a day pick through

our stuff they extract what they can

which is mostly the metals circuit

boards and so forth and they leave

behind mostly what they can’t recover

which is again mostly the plastics or

they burn the plastics to get to the

metals in burn houses like you see here

and they extract the metals by hand now

why this might be the low economic cost

solution this is certainly not the low

environmental or human health and safety

solution I call this environmental

arbitrage and it’s not fair it’s not

safe and it’s not sustainable now

because the plastics are so plentiful

and by the way those other methods don’t

lead to the recovery of plastics

obviously but people do try to recover

the plastics this is just one example

this is a photo I took standing on the

rooftops of one of the largest slums in

the world in Mumbai India they store

their plastics on the roofs they bring

them below those roofs into small

workshops like these and people tried

very hard to separate the plastics by

color by shape by feel by any technique

they can and sometimes they’ll resort to

what’s known as the burn and sniff

technique where they’ll burn the plastic

and smell the fumes to try to determine

the type of plastic none of these

techniques result in any amount of

recycling in any significant way and by

the way please don’t try this technique

at home so what are we to do about this

space-age material at least what we used

to call a space-age material is plastics

well I certainly believe that it’s far

too valuable

and far too abundant to keep putting

back in the ground or certainly stand up

in smoke so about 20 years ago I

literally started in my garage tinkering

around trying to figure out how to

separate these very similar materials

from each other and eventually enlisted

a lot of my friends in the mining world

actually in the in the plastics world

and we started going around to mining

laboratories around the world because

after all we’re doing above-ground

mining and we eventually broke the code

this is the last frontier of recycling

it’s the last major material to be

recovered at any significant amount on

the earth and we finally figured out how

to do it and in the process we started

recreating how the plastics industry

makes plastics

the traditional way to make plastics is

with oil or petrochemicals you break

down the molecules you recombine them in

very specific ways to make all the

wonderful plastics that we enjoy each

and every day we said there’s got to be

a more sustainable way to make plastics

and not just sustainable from an

environmental standpoint sustainable

from an economic standpoint as well well

a good place to start is with waste it

certainly doesn’t cost as much as oil

and it’s plentiful as I hope that you’ve

been able to see from the photographs

and because we’re not breaking down the

plastic into molecules and recombining

them we’re using a mining approach to

extract the materials we have

significantly lower capital costs in our

plant equipment we have enormous energy

savings I don’t know how many other

projects on the planet right now can

save 80 to 90 percent of the energy

compared to making something the

traditional way and instead of plopping

down several hundred million dollars to

build a chemical plant that will only

make one type of plastic for its entire

life our plants can make any type of

plastic we feed them and we make a

drop-in replacement for that plastic

that’s made from petrochemicals our

customers get to enjoy huge co2 savings

they get to close the loop with their

products and they get to make more

sustainable products in the short time

period I have I want to show you a

little bit of a sense about how we do

this

it starts with metal recyclers who shred

our stuff into very small bits they

recover the metals and leave behind

what’s called shredder residue it’s

their waste very complex mixture of

materials but predominantly plastics we

take out the things that aren’t plastics

such as the metals they miss carpeting

foam rubber wood glass paper you name it

even an occasional dead animal

unfortunately and it goes in the first

part of our process here which is more

like traditional recycling we’re saving

the material we’re using magnets we’re

using air classification it looks like a

willy wonka factory at this point at the

end of this process we have a mixed

plastic composite many different types

of plastics and many different grades of

plastics this goes into the more

sophisticated part of our process and

the really hard work multi-step

separation process begins we grind the

plastic down to about the size of your

small fingernail we use a very highly

automated process to sort those plastics

not only by type but by grade and at the

end of that part of the process come

little flakes of plastic one type one

grade we then use optical sorting to

color sort this

we blended in 50,000 pound blending

silos we push that material to extruders

where we melt it push it through small

dye holes make spaghetti like plastic

strands and we chop those strands into

what are called pellets and this becomes

the currency of the plastics industry

this is the same material that you would

get from oil and today we’re producing

it from your old stuff and it’s going

right back in to your new stuff

so now instead of your stuff ending up

on a hillside in a developing country or

literally going up in smoke you can find

your old stuff back on top of your desk

in new products in your office or back

at work in your home and these are just

a few examples of companies that are

buying our plastic replacing virgin

plastic to make their new products so I

hope I’ve changed the way you look at

least some of the stuff in your life we

took our clues from other nature mother

nature wastes very little reuses

practically everything and I hope that

you stop looking at yourself as a

consumer that’s a label I’ve always

hated my entire life and think of

yourself as just using resources in one

form until they can be transformed to

another form for another use later in

time and finally I hope you agree with

me to change that last toddler rule just

a little bit to if it’s broken it’s my

stuff thank you for your time

you