In this episode our investment director, Neil Cameron, addresses the topic of circular economy with Charles Boettcher, Senior Vice President at Waste Management. With limited polymer recycling today, what role can companies like Waste Management play when it comes to enabling the circular economy. 

Transcript
Neil Cameron: What's Waste Management's biggest success today in enabling the circular economy, and what's your biggest challenge?
Charles: Yeah. So that's a good question. And I first want to say thank you for having me here. This conference is going to be fantastic. Really excited about it. But I would also say I agree with your point about the growth of plastics. Look. To level set, plastics is a great product for human kind, what it did for us. The uses of plastics are incredible. Now we're just in a caretaker period for Mother Earth where we need to get this right and make sure plastics don't become a big pollutant in the oceans and we're not taking care of it from a circular economy standpoint. And I agree with the numbers you said, I mean, it's only going to grow. And I was touring Shell’s cracker the other day up in the northeast in the United States, and Exxon's got another planned cracker. There's a superabundance of ethane, so cracking it to ethylene is very easy to do. And it's something that will be continued within the United States in particular.
So for Waste Management, we're a North American company, and our biggest impact we think has been educating people about what to do when it comes to recycling. So we're the largest recycler in North America, and we have about 15% of the market share of the tons that are collected that you spoke to. So we feel like if we better educate our customers that we pick up the recycling from, we'll reduce the contamination, we'll make it more efficient to recycle, and we'll get the products out that we want out of the stream. A little known fact is that PET, the HDPE, those are the most valuable plastics to recycle, and yet we get a lot of other plastics in the stream. And so getting people educated about which plastics are better to recycle and which are not is a big part of our mission. Reduce the contamination and increase the output.
Neil: Would it be fair to say that the big challenge is what to do with the rest?
Charles: Yeah, I think that's fair. I think... Well, first, let's start. We're the largest recycler in North America. We're also the largest landfill company. And I know that sometimes is a swear word, but we view landfills as one of the most environmentally positive things you can do with waste at the end of its life. A lot of places around the world that don't have good landfill infrastructure, (that’s when) it ends up in the oceans. And that includes all the trash along with the recycling that could have been brought out of the stream. So we start from “let's take care of the trash.” That's a big part of what our company does. From there, if we can mine, on a resource basis, materials out, like paper, which we're not talking about today, and is the largest part of what our recycling is, or the 5% of our recycling stream that is plastics; if we can mine that out and then further the 80% that's PET and HDPE; and then if we can make sure we're good stewards of it after we collect it and mine it, and we don't send it off overseas where it all ends up being in a river, one of the 10 big rivers that contribute to the ocean's plastics, we feel like we're doing the right thing. That's we're geared. Today, I'm proud to say, for our residential recycling, we do not send any of it outside of the United States and Canada. So we keep it all internally and we make sure we know where it goes.
I think even before innovation, it starts with demand. Because we're the middle man. We're the one that sits in the middle between the consumer and where that recycled plastic, once collected and sorted and baled, is going go and be re-used in replacement of virgin material. So think of us like a broker, almost. Our whole business model is we'll educate folks about what to put in, but it's based off of the demand at the tailgate of our facilities. If, for instance, we collect, sort, bale a number three recycling product and there's no demand for that, we just wasted a tremendous amount of energy and efficiency. We've actually left a worse carbon footprint for a product that's not going to have a high demand and may not ever be recycled in the way you'd expect, or go and be used in a recycling stream that would make it less environmentally conscious in how it was used. So we preach a lot about the big thing we need to do with the packaging industry and the plastics manufacturing industry is to work on the demand for these recycled plastics products at the end of our facilities.

свернуть