MBA Polymers - Your Source for Recycled Plastics

Drastic Plastic
The Hard Stuff is Finally Getting Attention from Recycling Industry

By Rob Waters
Special to the Times

From his perch atop a 10-foot metal platform, a worker reaches into a cardboard box and grabs a handful of snow skis. He tosses hem into a large steel tank and latches the lid. Then with flicks of three switches, this small recycling factory fills with the clatter of grinding.

For the next few minutes, the skis are ground, blown and sucked through an elaborate series of pipes, magnets and filters, until, reduced to shards and dust, they are shot into separate bins of metal, pulp, plastic and wood. Mike Biddle, president and founder of MBA Polymers, which opened this state-of-the-art recycling plant in April of 1996, reaches his hands into the barrel of plastic and examines it closely.

"Not bad for the first five minutes," he pronounces. The next task, he says, will be to tinker with the equipment and reprocess the skis until the plastic is pure, uncontaminated by wood.

Biddle, a chemical engineer who has worked in plastics for years, is a man with a dream: to keep the billions of pounds of plastic in computers, automobiles, telephones and other products out of landfills, and to show that it is economically viable to recycle this plastic into new products.

He is a pioneer in a new industry: hard-plastics recycling. Soft plastics, like those used in bottles and bags, have been recyclable for years. But durable plastics, such as computer housings and automobile dashboards, have been much harder to recycle, largely because they are mixed with so much nonplastic material, including metal and foam, and with so many different types of plastic.

Biddle regularly consults with computer companies on how best to "design in" recyclability, and he stresses two main points. One is for plastics used in equipment to be easily removable from other materials. The second is for different kinds of plastics to have densities that are sufficiently different from each other that they can be easily separated during recycling.

Computer scavengers and recyclers are ready to ship a large quantity of plastics to him as soon he can handle it. A market -driven approach to recycling concerns some environmentalists. "It's clear to me that market forces are not working," says Ted Smith of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition in San Jose. He argues that few companies have established take-back programs and that landfills are drowning in plastics and computers.

MBA Polymers, Inc.
500 West Ohio Avenue, Richmond, CA 94804
(510) 231-9031 • FAX: (510) 231-0302 • info@mbapolymers.com