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MBA tackles recycling obstacles

By Steve Toloken
Plastics News Staff

Richmond, Calif - Researchers say they have made dramatic improvements in recycling plastics from computers and cars and are set to test the first line that can do that at commercially viable speeds.

"A lot of technical hurdles we think we've tackled," said MBA President Michael Biddle. "I don't want to say we've tackled every hurdle, but that's what we've been about for the last four years."

The 10,000 pound commercial line is likely to need several years of tweaking to work out bugs and answer questions, such as how pure the stream of product going in has to be and how much paint it can contain," said Red Cavaney, APC's president and CEO.

Nevertheless, APC is happy with the lab and has been shifting more of its research spending to MBA he said.

Cavaney would not comment on how much money APC has spent at MBA. Market and infrastructure hurdles remain, however.

For example, it is getting harder to make a case for recycling the high-priced polycarbonate/ABS blends used in computer housings because they are being replaced by much cheaper virgin ABS, particularly from the Far East, said J. Ray Kirby, manager of IBM's Engineering Center of Environmentally Conscious Products.

"Our target just moved for recycling, " he said. "We were trying to beat the PC/ABS price. Now we have to beat the ABS price."

IBM's Kirby said recycling for computers will increase because the first computers that were made with recyclability in the design were produced in the early 1990's. Those computers are just now entering the waste stream.

A Washington unit of the non-profit National Safety Council is planning a study to develop baseline data on recycling in electronic goods.

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