Mike Biddle: Why plastic is still
'the last frontier' of recycling
The former CEO
discusses his frustration with the recycling movement, his hatred of waste and
how the US can grow jobs
Mike Biddle has stepped
down as MBA Polymers CEO. Photograph: MBA Polymers
This month, Mike Biddle, the founder and longtime CEO of a
pioneering plastics-recycling company called MBA Polymers, stepped down as an executive
at the firm, ending more than two decades of unrelenting effort to reduce
plastic waste.
Biddle's story is one of great success, as well as ongoing
frustration. He sat down with me last week at the 2014 GreenBiz
Forum in Phoenix to talk about MBA Polymers, the potential of
the so-called circular economy, and why,
despite all we know, the vast majority of plastics discarded in the US still
wind up in incinerators, landfills or, worse, the ocean.
Plastics, he says, remains "the last frontier of
recycling."
Biddle, who is 58 and has a PhD in chemical engineering from Case Western and an MBA from Stanford, left a good job at Dow Chemical in 1992 in the hope of solving the difficult puzzle of plastics recycling. During the next seven years, he attracted about $7m in grants and loans from the state of California, the Environmental Protection Agency and a plastics industry trade group.
Biddle, who is 58 and has a PhD in chemical engineering from Case Western and an MBA from Stanford, left a good job at Dow Chemical in 1992 in the hope of solving the difficult puzzle of plastics recycling. During the next seven years, he attracted about $7m in grants and loans from the state of California, the Environmental Protection Agency and a plastics industry trade group.
The money enabled him to develop a set of technologies needed to
make high-quality plastic pellets – which can be used to make new products –
from big, messy and mixed post-consumer waste streams, particularly electronic
waste and junked automobiles. He calls it "above-ground mining." (MBA
Polymers doesn't bother with PET plastics,
the type used to make soda bottles, leaving that particular waste stream to the
beverage industry.)
MBA Polymers turns hard-to-recycle post-consumer plastics - such as those found in electronic waste and junked automobiles - into high-quality pellets like these, which are, in turn, used to make new products. Photograph: MBA Polymers
Since raising its first round of venture capital in 1999, MBA
Polymers has attracted more than $150m from investors. Its latest round was a
Series H. Now, the company, headquartered in Richmond, California, operates
recycling plants in China, Austria and in the former coal-mining town of
Worksop in the UK, which together process more than 300m pounds of plastic
waste per year. It also won a 2013 Katerva
Award for the materials and resources category, announced
today.
The company has proven that the economics of plastics recycling can work, so long as there is an adequate supply of waste to be reprocessed. And closing the loop on plastics also delivers big environmental benefits. Recycling plastics not only keeps waste out of landfills and oceans, but also reduces the need for petroleum-based feedstocks, requires 80% less energy than making plastic from oil and dramatically reduces carbon emissions.
The company has proven that the economics of plastics recycling can work, so long as there is an adequate supply of waste to be reprocessed. And closing the loop on plastics also delivers big environmental benefits. Recycling plastics not only keeps waste out of landfills and oceans, but also reduces the need for petroleum-based feedstocks, requires 80% less energy than making plastic from oil and dramatically reduces carbon emissions.
Of all
this, Biddle is justly proud. He considers himself an environmentalist, as well
as an entrepreneur. "I absolutely hate waste," he says.
But
Biddle is disappointed that he has been unable to take the company further. He
estimates that as much as 500bn pounds of plastics are thrown away every year,
only a tiny fraction of which is captured by MBA Polymers.
He's
especially frustrated that the company isn't operating in the US, the country
that educated him and provided the seed money for his research. MBA Polymers
employs about 300 people, and all but a handful of engineers work overseas.
"I'd like to create jobs here," he says. Biddle himself had been
commuting to the UK.
Why
can't the company gain traction in the US? Building plants to reprocess
plastics is expensive, and MBA Polymers cannot be sure it will get a large
enough – and secure enough – supply of US plastic waste to justify the capital
cost.
One way
to secure a more predictable supply of e-waste would be to place some of the
burden of collecting it on manufacturers. That's what the EU has done. Its
"extended producer responsibility" laws, which require electronics to
be collected and recycled, have created a robust collection system for used
cell phones, tablets, computers and other e-waste. "They primed the pump
with policy," Biddle says.
Besides
that, Biddle would like to see the US follow other countries and require that
e-waste exports to poor countries be handled responsibly. MBA Polymers cannot
compete, he says, with cheap and irresponsible recyclers in places like China,
Vietnam and West Africa.
"People,
for as little as a dollar a day, dig through our stuff and extract what they
can and leave behind what they can't, which is mostly the plastics," he
says. "A lot of that winds up in rivers and oceans. … We need care about
how we unmake our stuff as much as we do about it's made."
US
recyclers, he says, could be required to audit the processing of the waste that
they export. Today, "there's no downstream accountability," he says.
Biddle
has testified in favor the regulation of e-waste exports before Congress. The
stance didn't come easily to him because, he told me, he's believes in limited
government and free markets. "But I can't compete if the rules aren't
fair," he says.
MBA Polymers may get a big assist from China, which last year
announced a crackdown on hazardous waste imports called Operation Green
Fence. "They're trying clamp down as they should," Biddle
says, "but enforcement is not what it should be."
Biddle
isn't giving up. Even though he has left MBA Polymers, he expects to keep
working on recycling policy – despite his libertarian instincts. He plans to
encourage businesses with access to waste streams, such as auto shredders, to
recognize their value. And he has taken on a new job as president of Waste Free
Oceans America, a new subsidiary of a global non-profit called Waste Free Oceans.
