Joseph Klatt - Closing the Loop on Plastic Waste

[00:00:00] Dominique: Hello. Welcome to another episode of Green Champions.

[00:00:13] Adam: Thank you for joining us in a conversation with real people, making real environmental change in the work that they do. I'm here with Dominique, the sustainability expert.

[00:00:21] Dominique: And I'm so glad to be here alongside Adam, the social enterprise extraordinaire. We bring you guests who saw the potential for impact in their job or community and had done something about it.

[00:00:30] Adam: From entrepreneurs to artists, scientists, to activists, this podcast is a platform for green champions to share their stories and plant new ideas.

[00:00:37] Dominique: So, while you're tuning in during a visit to the gym, you're joining us during your daily commute, today, Adam and I are joined by Joseph Klatt. Joseph is the founder of Marble Plastics, a company that creates a hundred percent recycled plastic sheets to craft circular products and spaces.

[00:00:53] Dominique: So what does that mean? Well, you can picture beautiful marble slabs and furniture made out of upcycled plastic that would've gone to waste. That's like plastic cutlery, solo cups, and bottle caps.

[00:01:03] Dominique: Before founding Marble Plastics, Joseph spent time in Maryland supporting the global initiative that is Precious Plastics and worked in Portugal with MAD Plastics. Joseph is really a green champion taking would-be plastic waste and building beautiful, durable products. Today we're talking about sustainability from the lens of recycled plastics and circularity. Thanks for joining us. 

[00:01:24] Dominique: Okay, tell us first, what's the scale of the plastic problem. 

[00:01:26] Joseph: So the scale of the plastic problem today is really the worst that it's ever been. It's a problem that has only grown since plastics were invented and we've really only made slight headways into trying to reduce the amount of plastic waste going to landfill or being burned in incinerators. And the reason for that is plastic, in some ways it's easily recycled and in other ways it's not. From a technical standpoint, it can be easily recycled, depending on the type of polymer. However, from a logistical and a sorting and a transportation standpoint, it's just a difficult thing to integrate into our recycling system.

[00:02:02] Joseph: So unfortunately, the plastic problem is only really getting worse. We've made some headways in different parts of bioplastics, reducing plastic at the source, but overall, the production is still going up and we still have a long way to go to solving the plastic problem.

[00:02:18] Dominique: Why do you care about it?

[00:02:19] Joseph: So, I care about the plastic problem because I think plastic is kind of indicative of the part of our society that is deeply unsustainable. Because most plastic is single use plastic. It's a item that comes from oil or natural gas that took thousands of years to form, and we use it for 30 seconds or a few minutes and then dispose of that item. That's about as unsustainable as you can get. When I think about plastic, when I think about single use plastic in particular, that is really just the sort of quintessential example of what I would like to change about the way that we live and in our society.

[00:02:57] Adam: Sounds like you haven't always been into plastics, like what got you into it?

[00:03:01] Joseph: So, I've always kind of been into waste, in recycling. But I wouldn't say plastics was always at the forefront of my mind even since I've been into waste.

[00:03:09] Adam: What got you into waste?

[00:03:11] Joseph: So I got into waste when I was in college. My first job when I was in college was I started working for a recycling company that did recycling services using a bicycle and a bike trailer. So I would get in my bike early in the morning and go ride my bike around to different businesses and pick up their recycling, put 'em on a trailer, and then take them to a regional collection hub where they would then go off to be recycled eventually. And I really just loved that job. I loved, you know, seeing the materials, riding my bike, doing a physical job, and I just started to, yeah, fall in love with waste and I've never gone back.

[00:03:46] Dominique: While you were having that experience, what were you studying?

[00:03:49] Joseph: I studied environmental management in my undergraduate studies. And then in my graduate studies, which I did right after my undergrad, was in public affairs with a focus on sustainable development and social entrepreneurship.

[00:04:03] Dominique: Okay, so I know you obviously had that recycling, biking experience and there was a gap between going off to the Netherlands to join Precious Plastics. How'd that happen?

[00:04:13] Joseph: So, I started to like waste, started to be interested in that, I did a internship with a company called Recology. They're based in San Francisco and they help San Francisco achieve what I believe is the highest recycling rate of any city in the world. It's about an 80% recovery rate. So they're very focused on sustainability, composting, recycling, et cetera. So I learned a lot when I was out there. And then my first real job outside of college was working at Ohio EPA in their sustainability unit, where I was specifically focused on waste and recycling.

[00:04:45] Joseph: And when I was at the EPA, my main project was to develop a business to business recycling and reuse platform that would enable one business's waste to become another business's production input. We were really trying to create a industrial symbiosis within Ohio companies so that we could keep waste outta the landfill, help create jobs and economic activity and really just try to incorporate those circular economy principles into Ohio business and industry.

[00:05:16] Adam: Does that still exist today? 

[00:05:17] Joseph: It does, yeah.

[00:05:18] Adam: Oh, cool. What's It called? 

[00:05:19] Joseph: It's called the Ohio Materials Marketplace. I forget how many millions of pounds that it has kept out of the landfill, but I like to see the numbers go up and up and feel like I helped bring that to life.

[00:05:29] Adam: So that's a way for businesses instead of paying to throw things into the landfill that other companies can take that material and reuse it in whatever products they're doing.

[00:05:37] Joseph: That's exactly right. So it's kind of like a dating service for, it's Tinder for waste.

[00:05:42] Joseph: You can swipe right if you like something, but it's basically like a craigslist type posting where you say what material you have and then other people are browsing that and then can connect and purchase or sometimes it's for free. So that's, yeah, that was my first step outside of graduate school. And I loved that project. I loved that job. It brought me all over Ohio, talking to, you know, different companies that we had on the platform, trying to help them with their waste. Try to help make those transactions happen between the companies.

[00:06:12] Adam: Well, like, while you're doing this, are there certain things that you saw in the companies as like, "Hey, here are easy wins for them", easy things that they just weren't thinking of that worked really well in terms of upcycling or recycling.

[00:06:24] Joseph: Yeah, I'd say there were some easy wins. There were a lot of not easy problems. And I think that is actually what drove me to my next step because people would call me or, you know, email me and ask me, you know, "I have this particular waste stream, can you help me find somebody who I can match with and would like this material?" And it's difficult to find somebody who wants a waste material. And it's not even really waste, it's just another material that can be reused in another way.

[00:06:52] Joseph: But, the reason for that is there's a kind of a myriad of reasons why that it's difficult. Number one, it could be a volume issue. There's just not enough volume to make it worth it for somebody to pick it up and bring it to another company to reuse. That's a very big one. You know, oftentimes waste comes in variable quantities or in small quantities that just doesn't make the transportation worth it. And when you're dealing with physical goods, materials, and waste, transportation is the number one factor. It's a huge cost. So in order to make the economics work, you need to know that you could make the transportation work.

[00:07:27] Joseph: So that's one reason. Also from a like a chemical or physical structure standpoint, you know, it's not exactly the right mix of what another company needs. There's also risk management, problems where, you know, if I put this in a production process, what's gonna be the risk on my system? What's the legal liability if something goes wrong? Who's at fault? So there's a lot of challenges.

[00:07:46] Adam: That is a lot of hairy issues. Yeah, that's interesting.

[00:07:48] Joseph: So when I was trying to help people sort through these issues, you know, I would always get a little bit frustrated, like, I could see the potential of what this material had, but I just couldn't get another company to take it. And I could even, you know, research and find ways that this really could be technically reused or recycled. But in order to actually make that happen was difficult. That frustrated me and I always wanted to just do it myself. Like I, you know, I was in that sort of governmental position when you're trying to facilitate and, you know, help the business community do that. But, 

[00:08:20] Adam: but your hands are tied a little bit. 

[00:08:21] Joseph: Yeah, your hands are tied. You know, you can only do so much. So, part of that job, we would also give out recycling grants to Ohio businesses that were doing recycling efforts. And we would, so we'd give out money for infrastructure, like machines and basically machines. And then we would go out and visit those sites where those machines would be working just to make sure everything was going correctly. And we went out to one of those recyclers and I saw the production line. I saw everything that was happening and was just thinking, you know, number one, they're really, really doing it. I can see the whole process. It's happening. Like recycling is real. This is great. 

[00:08:54] Joseph: And then I also saw at the end of that production line was plastic pellets. And the input was essentially large industrial plastic bags. So it was kind of like industrial plastic bag recycling company. But at the end of the line, when I saw those pellets, I was just thinking to myself, you know, why can't you just put a production machine at the end of that line and make a new product like right away? So it's like a total like circular loop all within one building. So I went back to my desk and I was researching and I was like, does this exist? Like, who's thinking about this? And that's when I found Precious Plastic on YouTube. That put me all on a whole different path.

[00:09:28] Adam: Wow. So a simple search led you to a company in the Netherlands. 

[00:09:33] Joseph: Yes. 

[00:09:33] Adam: Wait, so how did you make it over there?

[00:09:35] Joseph: So, yeah, then I started researching about Precious Plastic, which is basically an open source plastic recycling community of people around the world that are interested in recycling plastic on a small scale into new products. And it was started by a Dutch designer named Dave Hakkens. And he actually started the project as part of his undergraduate studies in design school. He also saw the plastic waste problem around the world, and he wanted to design something that would help alleviate it. So he designed a set of small scale plastic recycling machines that would give people the tools to actually recycle plastic into new products. 

[00:10:12] Joseph: Because previously it's difficult to do plastic recycling on a small scale. Traditionally it's really a mass production technique, you need enough volume to make the economic work, economics works, and then you need big machinery to be able to turn that into new products. So it just wasn't done so much on a small scale.

[00:10:28] Joseph: So his solution was, "Okay, what if we give people small machines that they can put in like a small workshop or in their garage or something like that to actually enable them to take action themselves instead of having to rely on like big companies or governments to do that for you?" It's kind of comes out of the DIY ethos of 'let's just do it ourselves.'

[00:10:49] Joseph: So anyway, he designed those machines. He started this community called Precious Plastic around those machines and around the products that you can use those machines to make. I found them on the internet and mostly the project has spread on YouTube. So Dave, the founder, he made a lot of videos about how to build the machines yourself, and then how to make the products, how to work with the material, different techniques. And there's like, I dunno, 50 or a hundred YouTube videos. So I was back at my desk just binging those videos and really getting excited about, "Okay, this is possible. You can have kind of the whole circular loop in-house." And I was also then ready to kind of leave my job at Ohio EPA and do something a little bit more hands on.

[00:11:34] Joseph: So, at that time, Precious Plastic had just received a grant to develop a new set of small scale machines and digital platforms to facilitate the community. And so, I contacted the founder and ended up going to the Netherlands to be part of that team to develop the next version of the project. And my job was specifically around how to increase the number of small businesses using the plastic recycling technology that they were developing, helping them be financially successful.

[00:12:03] Adam: So it sounds like just a huge challenge, especially with something that is very kind of grassroots oriented. What did you learn from that experience?

[00:12:11] Joseph: I learned a lot. I learned a lot about community, how you develop a brand, how you develop a community, because Precious Plastic has like an incredibly strong community and brand. It's a project that is really mission driven, socially driven. It's also altruistic in a way that, you know, it's not a private company.

[00:12:29] Joseph: It's all about designing machines, designing products, getting as many people to recycle as possible. And everything that we did at Precious Plastic is published open source online for free to enable access. And I really saw how that can make a project incredibly impactful when you have just, you're basically just trying to get as many people under your umbrella as possible. And that really worked, I saw that work because today there are thousands of organizations around the world that use the technology that we developed to either recycle plastic again, like a community program or in a small business or in a university. There's just tons of utilization of the tech that was developed there.

[00:13:08] Adam: There also seems to be a lot of effort around building connections within a community. So if somebody's breaking down the plastic, they can connect with somebody who's actually developing the products and that sort of ecosystem.

[00:13:19] Joseph: Absolutely. And what we did was when I went over there, we were developing kits that were like basically everything you need to know to start a business for one part of the supply chain in your community. So if you imagine like a small town, you need somebody who's focused on collection, like a business focused on collection, then you need to bring that to another company that can shred that material into small granulate, which then you can bring to another company that is gonna be able to turn that into a new product. 

[00:13:49] Joseph: Then you could even have another one that's retailing the product. So there's a long supply chain and we created kits for each step of that supply chain for people to get the information, get the machines, get all the know-how to start a business on each part of that supply chain. 

[00:14:05] Adam: Well that's also interesting for somebody listening who's like, "Hey, listen, I don't know a product I wanna make," but hey, there's different opportunities to be part of that supply chain on a small scale where you can fit in.

[00:14:15] Joseph: Absolutely. And you have different, you know, just skill sets that people have that you make it more better served for more of a collection versus like an end retailer. There's totally different business model and totally different skill sets needed. So it's nice to have an option based on your sort of interest area.

[00:14:30] Adam: Well, I know that then you went to Portugal. So I'm curious what brought you there? How was that a next step in you maybe jumping into the small business side?

[00:14:38] Joseph: I eventually, ended up in Portugal. So I was in the Netherlands to start when I was with Precious Plastic and we, as an organization we were kind of going through different iterations. And the one that I was heavily involved with was taking precious plastic from a sort of internet community, grassroots community into a more established nonprofit. So we started to provide services that we would get paid for to help fund the project. And the services that we provided were we would build machines and then provide them to another organization and then install them and train people on how to use them. So that brought me like to different, uh, all over the world to Bangladesh, Nigeria, Algeria, Hawaii, many places around Europe where we partnered with another company. They paid us, and then we trained the local people on how to use them. And that became kind of our business model.

[00:15:32] Dominique: Sounds very hands on. 

[00:15:33] Dominique: Yeah. That's, that's really cool. 

[00:15:34] Joseph: Yes. Mostly it was my colleagues that were doing the technical part. Although I focus a lot on like the polymer types and helping people to understand plastics. Not so much on like the product making side, but on the plastic part, which is very important for the product side is understanding the difference in polymers.

[00:15:52] Joseph: But yeah, we ended up moving our operations, our home base operations from the Netherlands to Portugal, and that's what brought me there. And yeah, that's kind of where I ended up before deciding to come back to the US.

[00:16:03] Adam: So, can you give me a quick 101 of like polymers?

[00:16:06] Joseph: Sure. So yeah, polymers, huge world, very interesting, sometimes difficult world, but it all comes down to the chemical makeup of the plastic. And the thing that's really difficult about plastic recycling is that plastics, depending on the type are radically different. I mean, when you think about your recycling bin, you're like, "Okay, I understand that paper and metal is different." But then you think about, it's like paper, metal, plastic, like oh, plastic, that it's all, you know, kind of together, at least in my mind as all plastic.

[00:16:37] Joseph: When it's like two polymers are as different as paper to metal as they are to each other. They're that different in terms of how you need to work with them. And that's what makes plastic recycling really, really difficult because you have thousands of different polymers and they have to be treated the same. The polymer that is the same type, it has to be kind of collected and utilized in its own stream. And that makes for an incredibly difficult logistical and operational challenge because, you know, there's not that much volume in the specific plastic type, so it doesn't make sense to collect it. But then it's contaminating the stream 'cause it gets in there anyway. 

[00:17:13] Joseph: That's kind of the starting point is the plastics are very, very different and they need to be treated as such in the recycling stream. There is a numeric code for most residential plastics one through seven. And that determines, that's how it's talked about in your residential curbside stream- which plastics they will accept. Normally it's 1s and 2s, sometimes it's number 5. Primarily the other ones are not collected in your residential bin because they're difficult to identify in the sorting process. And they're also come at a less volume, so it doesn't, it's not as economical for the recycling companies to take that material.

[00:17:52] Dominique: We've also hinted at like the word circular. Whether it was like the EPA work or Precious Plastics. What does circularity mean to you? And I'm asking the behalf of people who maybe are like, "What does it really mean to work in circularity?"

[00:18:03] Joseph: Mm-Hmm. Yeah. To me it just means a closed loop system. So it's system where it doesn't require, uh, it doesn't end, you know it keeps going again and again and doesn't require a lot of additional energy to make it happen. It's a system that's almost self-sufficient in that sense. And I, when I think about circularity and I think about plastics, like, some people say, "Plastics is like the perfect example of what can be done in the circular economy."

[00:18:28] Joseph: I think there are different sides to that argument. I think, single use plastics, I don't think is a good example. In general, yeah. I just don't really agree with it. I think plastics, and that's coming from a plastic recycler, like that's literally like my job. But when you thinking about plastic products, there's single use items and then there's like get durable goods that last a long time. And plastic does make sense in those durable goods cases because plastic is a material that will last thousands of years potentially.

[00:18:56] Dominique: Yeah. That's his problem. 

[00:18:57] Joseph: That's his problem, that's problem. So, I think about recycling, I don't want to just help facilitate the recycling of single use plastic items into more single use plastic, because I don't think it should be. We shouldn't have single use plastic items in the first place. We should use bio-based materials for the, you know, convenience cases where we need a single use item. I think we should think about used plastic recycling in the case of durable goods. And that's also why we only produce durable goods, is that we don't want to continue down the single use train. We want to keep it on the durable goods side. Keep plastic on the durable goods 'cause it's gonna last for a very, very long time.

[00:19:37] Adam: That makes sense. I mean, I've heard that, you know, it's what, like 7% of plastics get recycled. So if you're recycling things into single use plastics, those in turn aren't gonna get recycled, and you can only recycle things so many times before they're, can't be used anymore. So if you can create a durable good, you take it out of that stream of just going very quickly from a product to the landfill.

[00:19:59] Joseph: Absolutely.

[00:20:00] Dominique: Well, I know next time we're gonna dive into Marble Plastics and what you're doing now. So we'll leave that for our next episode. But this was fantastic to hear how you frankly got into plastic through riding a bike around town and then just found yourself going to one of the bike capitals of the world.

[00:20:18] Adam: Can you leave us with a little teaser about what Marble plastics is? 

[00:20:21] Joseph: Yeah. So at Marble Plastics, we produce, recycled plastic sheets that can be made into furniture, countertops and wall coverings, all those awesome durable goods that we were just talking about. 

[00:20:34] Dominique: this has been fantastic. I really enjoyed just seeing this journey from like, "Okay, what does it take to get into a place where you're starting a company to, you know, take plastic out of the waste stream?", And really just tangible stories around like what it means to actually look at circularity and actually tackle our waste problem. It's very cool. So, thanks for chatting with me.How can people support the work that you're doing? Whether a website, an Instagram handle what's best?

[00:20:57] Joseph: Yeah, if you wanna learn more about Precious Plastic, you can go to preciousplastic.com. There's a bunch of learning and information there about plastics and material, different machines, production techniques. That's a great place to start if you're just kind of getting into the small scale plastic recycling world. And if you want to see more about what we're doing at Marble Plastics, you can visit marbleplastics.com and see the sort of cool products that we're making out of plastic waste.

[00:21:21] Dominique: Can attest. I just showed some friends yesterday your website. Your stuff is really cool. So yeah. We'll also sure have some images on our Instagram too of the products.

[00:21:31] Adam: So I'm excited to talk about that in the next episode. 

[00:21:33] Adam: So thank you for joining us today.

[00:21:35] Joseph: Thanks for having me. 

[00:21:36] Adam: As always, our guests have found a unique way to champion sustainability. We are here to put real names and stories behind the idea that no matter your background, career, or interests, you really can contribute in the fight against climate change.

[00:21:48] Adam: If you know a green champion that should be our next guest, email us at thegreenchampions@gmail.com. You can find our show notes at thegreenchampions.com. Our music is by Zayn Dweik. Thanks for listening to Green Champions. We're gonna dig into Joseph's story for the next time. 

​