MBA 

Recycler Reopens

Innovative Plastics Plant Returning to Action after Disastrous Fire

Henry Norr / SF Chronicle 11jun01

When MBA Polymers of Richmond suffered a fatal fire last October, it was more than a tragedy for the family of the victim, a setback for a promising startup and another blow to a community regularly forced to bear more than its share of industrial accidents and toxic emissions.

It was also a disappointment for environmentalists and waste managers around the world, who had been closely following MBA's pioneering efforts to develop new technologies for recycling plastics.

This week, under a rebuilt roof, MBA will officially restart its high-tech recycling lines, the fruit of $15 million spent on research and development since the firm's incorporation in 1994. Its 50 employees -- down from 102 before the fire -- are still mourning the death of their colleague, 26-year- old Jeremiah "JJ" Spritz. But they're also itching to resume an operation that was "just hitting its commercial stride" before the tragedy, according to chief executive Mike Biddle.

MBA's focus is on recycling plastics from durable goods, including computers and other electronics, automobiles, appliances, even sports equipment.

In principle, that gives MBA plenty to work with: North American consumption of plastics for such products adds up to 15 billion to 20 billion pounds a year, Biddle said. (Overall plastic production in North America now exceeds 100 billion pounds annually, according to the American Plastics Council, the industry's trade association.)

Today, very little plastic is recycled. In 1998, the last year for which data has been published, about 1.5 billion pounds of No. 1 (PET) and No. 2 (HDPE) plastic bottles were recycled. But most post-consumer plastic, whatever the category, ends up in landfill in this country. (In the rest of the world, it's usually burned, either for fuel or in waste incinerators, according to Biddle.)

The underlying problem is not technical but economic, according to Michael Fisher, director of technology for the Arlington, Va., plastics council. Collecting used plastic items, shredding them and reprocessing the material back to a form that can be used in new products costs money. For many grades of plastic, the result simply can't compete with virgin plastics.

But that's not the case, according to Biddle, with the types MBA is after, which are mostly advanced "engineering plastics." Such materials, once recovered, can easily be sold for reuse. In fact, he said, his main challenge is not finding willing buyers, but lining up sources -- despite the enormous consumption figures.

"Absolutely," he said, "our biggest problem is supply, not markets. It's not that it's not out there, but it's not being collected and aggregated."

And that, in turn, is largely a result of two issues. Computers, consumer electronics devices, appliances and cars tend to include many different kinds of plastics, and the plastic parts are often entangled with other materials, such as paint, paper, rubber, wood and bits of metal.

Even when a product is dismantled for recycling, and large nonplastic components are removed, separating the plastics by type and eliminating the remaining traces of other materials isn't easy.

The result is a mélange that no one wants. "Mixed plastics have zero value, " Biddle said, and the contaminants only make things worse.

Even Micro Metallics, the company that manages Hewlett-Packard's pioneering computer-recycling facility in Roseville (Placer County), hasn't been able to find a good use for the plastic fragments that emerge from its grinders.

The best it's been able to do, according to Micro Metallics President Steve Skurnac, has been to ship the material to a smelter in Quebec run by its parent company, Noranda -- an expensive solution, and one that wastes the intrinsic value of the plastics.

Skurnac is hoping MBA can help. He had shipped a sample load of plastics from his Roseville facility to the Richmond company before the fire. Now that it's coming back online, he said, he's looking forward to getting the results of MBA's testing -- and possibly to a long-term business relationship.

"Mike's going to have to present an economic model that makes sense for us, " Skurnac said, "but I believe he'll be able to. It should be a win-win for both of us."

Biddle, 45, started searching for better ways to reuse such materials more than a decade ago. At the time, he said, he was working for Dow Chemical, doing research on new high-tech plastics. But one day, he recalled, he said to his supervisor, "There's a little issue out there called recycling, and if we don't do something about it, we're going to be in a world of pain."

His boss's first response, he said: "We didn't hire a Ph.D. in polymer science to worry about garbage."

Eventually, though, Dow came around and assigned him to set up a recycling research group. Among the factors that convinced the company to do so, he said, were decisions by the city of Berkeley and by Suffolk County, N.Y., to ban the use of polystyrene cups within their boundaries, because the material couldn't be recycled.

In the early 1990s Biddle left Dow to start a consulting company, Mike Biddle and Associates. In 1994, with co-founder Trip Allen (now chief technical officer), he formed MBA Polymers.

For most of its seven years the company mainly did research, surviving on its founders' funds, research grants and contracts with major corporate consumers of plastics -- including, Biddle remembers, one with the ski-boot industry.

Many of the grants came from the American Plastics Council, which commissioned the company to help develop techniques and equipment it could make available to the whole industry. But Biddle also began to lay plans to move beyond research into large-scale recycling, supplementing the technologies his team had developed for the APC with proprietary innovations.

Most of these, according to Biddle, involve techniques for separating the different types of plastics, after the source materials have been shredded into fingernail-sized slivers. He wouldn't say much about how MBA's separation technologies work (except "air, water and electricity -- that's all we use"), because they are the keys to the business he hopes to build.

Once the types are separated, it's relatively simple to melt and extrude the recycled fragments back into tiny like-new pellets, which are then shipped -- in cardboard boxes or gigantic sacks, each holding as much as 2,000 pounds - - to companies that can reuse them. Luckily for MBA, its two $1 million extruding machines survived the fire with only smoke and water damage.

To fund its move from research to production, MBA in 1999 began soliciting equity investments. American Industrial Partners, a private San Francisco investment firm, put in $3 million. A similar amount came from "angel" investors -- mainly from the prestigious group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs that calls itself the Band of Angels.

Another round of funding is currently in the works. Last fall's disaster, however, forced MBA to put its ambitions on hold while it regrouped.

No one knows exactly what caused the explosion and fire, Biddle says, but at the time the plant was recycling whole toner cartridges from copiers and printers, and investigators from the California Occupational Safety and Health Administration concluded that an electrostatic charge could have ignited toner dust in the area.

In April the agency levied fines of $221,000 against MBA because of the incident. The company is appealing, and Biddle noted that the production line that exploded was specifically designed (by an outside company with long experience in such projects) to handle dust safely.

He added, though, that MBA no longer recycles whole cartridges, so it won't have to worry about the toner dust. (It still processes plastics from such cartridges, but now insists that the companies that send them shred them first,

and most of the toner left inside is dealt with during that stage of the process.)

In rebuilding the plant, MBA has worked with Bechtel, the San Francisco engineering giant, to redesign its production lines both to improve efficiency and ensure safety.

Once in full operation, the facility will have the capacity to reprocess 20 million to 30 million pounds of plastic a year, depending on the type of feedstock it can find. Within five years, Biddle said, he expects to have five more plants set up around the world.

"We have to go where the supply is," he said. In Japan new legislation compels manufacturers of appliances and electronics to build plants for recycling their products, and "those companies are dying to have this technology available," he said.

MBA is not the only company working on plastic-recycling technologies, but the plastics council's Fisher said, "You can count the number of companies on one hand."

Asked whether MBA is out in front of the field, he chose his words carefully: "Based on their emphasis on very strong R&D and their technical capabilities, I have no reason to believe they're not the technology leader."