Business Opportunities Weblog

October 17, 2005 by Dane Carlson | 0 Comments

Forbes:

Cacophony reigns inside Michael Biddle’s 45,000-square-foot recycling plant in Richmond, Calif. Pieces of fax machines, telephones, keyboards and cell phones are fed into green hoppers atop 20-foot-tall chutes. Pipes and conveyor belts run everywhere. Amid the whirring fans and clanging grinders, you can pluck out the sounds of metal clinking as it gets sucked out by ejectors, plastic pinging as it is pulled away from foil and paper, air jets whooshing as they separate light-color plastic from dark. Out the end come gray pellets, sorted into six or more grades of reusable plastic.

To Biddle it’s a symphony, the result of nearly two decades of hard work. He claims to be the first to figure out how to take nearly any kind of plastic trash, which is usually a mongrel blend of up to 20 different plastics, and separate it by chemical type. Biddle’s factories make the three important plastics used in durable goods and electronics: polypropylene, acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (alias ABS) and polystyrene. “We’re changing the way plastic is made, just like minimills changed the way steel was made,” he says.

In Ideas | 0 Comments