Joseph Klatt - Marble Plastics and the Art of Recycled Goods

[00:00:00] Adam: Hello and welcome to another episode of Green Champions.

[00:00:12] Dominique: Thanks for joining us in a conversation with real people, making real environmental change in the work they do. I'm here with Adam, the social enterprise extraordinaire.

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

[00:00:29] Dominique: From entrepreneurs to activists, scientists and artists, this podcast is a platform for green champions to share their stories and plant some new ideas.

[00:00:38] Adam: So whether you're tuning in during a visit to the gym or you're joining us during your daily commute, today, Dominique and I are joined by Joseph Klatt. 

[00:00:45] Adam: Joseph is the founder of Marble Plastics, a company that creates a hundred percent recycled plastic sheets to craft circular products and spaces. Last episode, we talked about his journey to get there, kind of walking through his experience in the EPA and going to Precious Plastics in the Netherlands. And today we're really gonna dive into what it means to actually create durable products in the plastic space.

[00:01:07] Adam: So, Joseph, welcome on the podcast.

[00:01:09] Joseph: Glad to be back.

[00:01:10] Adam: Can you start off by telling us a little bit about what Marble Plastics does?

[00:01:13] Joseph: Yeah, so at Marble Plastics we take recycled plastic input. So either we buy shredded plastic from recyclers around the region or we source plastic waste ourselves and we shred it ourselves. We take that shredded material, we input it into our, one of our molds. Then we use heat and pressure to compress that down into a sheet form. So it's basically an eight by four foot sheet of plastic, recycled plastic at that point. And then once you have that, that's kinda a semi raw material, and that can be cut like you would with wood into products that you can think of that you might build out out of wood, but you could build out of recycled plastic.

[00:01:53] Joseph: And what our main application is furniture. So chairs, tabletops, that sort of thing. Second one is countertop. So, any sort of horizontal structure, you know, could be in a residential context, but also, especially in a commercial context, like a bar top or in a retail store like the shelves that product would be sitting on. And then the last application is wall coverings. So having sort of a visual, having one of our panels on a wall as a visual detail.

[00:02:22] Dominique: So we talked last time about like durability. That's definitely part of furniture. But why furniture? Like what was exciting for you about that space?

[00:02:29] Joseph: Yeah, I think furniture is something that we got into partly because we share a building with a furniture maker. And they're really, really cool. They're called T.Y. Fine Furniture. They make their furniture, yeah, in the same building as us on the south side of Columbus. And then they have a retail store in Clintonville. And the owner, Tarik, is really, really a great guy. Really excellent furniture maker. And he loves what we are doing. So we've collaborated with them a lot. Especially taking their designs, but replacing the wood and replacing the wood with recycled plastic. So if you think, for example, like a wooden chair that has a metal frame, but has the wood as the seat in the back, we replace the wood with our recycled plastic material. And that's been a really, really fun journey in getting into furniture. It's something that, yeah, I just didn't know a lot about before getting into it. And it'a s really satisfying product because you can really interact and use it yourself. So it's cool to just be able to sit on a chair that, uh, you made like from scratch.

[00:03:29] Dominique: And something that you're not even mentioning that I think is notable they look great. Like that's, it's called Marble Plastics and it looks like marble, which is, I mean, just having heard all of this, it would be great if it's just existed and like wasn't cute and it still like looks amazing. 

[00:03:44] Joseph: And we chose the name Marble Plastics because marble, it's another material that yet takes thousands of years to form. It's also formed through like compression in the earth. And it's also yeah, kind of earthy. It is earthy, it comes from the earth. But it's also a very beautiful, valuable material. And that's what we're trying to change people's perspective about with plastic is trying to have them view plastic as more valuable. Uh, so that's why we try to make the comparison with marble. It's not like we're trying to copy what marble looks like, but we're trying to take the elements from marble and use that as a sort of story point for our material and our products.

[00:04:24] Joseph: Is there a most fun item piece to create? I think furniture is the one I get most excited about now. I just really like the ability to interact with it and have it be like a big item. I think that's really just fun. Um, you know, we've done like a lot of small products, but having something that's more like human sized is very satisfying. Right now we're fabricating some kind of benches for a activation in New York and they're like white and pink. And those are also really, really fun to make.

[00:04:55] Dominique: What's the smallest and largest item you've created?

[00:04:58] Joseph: So our very first project was for a guy that wanted to make a game. I think it's like a Chilean beach game. And it's like these discs, these like pretty small discs that you toss as part of the game, so that was pretty small. I think that was our first project and maybe our smallest project.

[00:05:15] Dominique: Like tiny frisbees?

[00:05:16] Joseph: Yeah. Kind of. Yeah. I mean, not like tiny, but like something like, I don't know, a couple inches. 

[00:05:20] Adam: Like a donut?

[00:05:21] Joseph: Yeah. And then biggest project, I think it's the one that we're doing now, where it's a bench that's like a little bit larger than a half circle, like I think, 8 or 9 feet in length. And where it's, because it's circular, we have to bend our material around like the face of the bench. And so that's going to be a fun challenge. 

[00:05:43] Dominique: Is the plastic hot to bend it?

[00:05:46] Joseph: Yeah. You need to reheat it to be able to bend it. So we put it back in our process, get it hot again after we've already made it. Or I should say warm. It's not like really, really hot, but it's hot enough to be able to mold it and then we lay that over a form. And then once it cools, it keeps the form of the shape.

[00:06:04] Adam: So where do you get your plastics from?

[00:06:06] Joseph: So it's a variety of sources. So I get it from a couple of sources. One is a local recycler. And they supply us mostly with shredded material. And from like things like license plate hangers, that's a big one that we get from them. It's kind of a random product, but.

[00:06:23] Dominique: I'm surprised they get that single stream.

[00:06:25] Joseph: Yeah. They find a way Then we also get another recycler helps us out in Indianapolis. They're a big recycler in the type of polymer that we use primarily, which is high impact polystyrene. then we get a lot of material donated to us, or yeah, we go out and find it.

[00:06:43] Joseph: And we primarily work with recyclers who already collect larger amounts for like the base of our patterns, because that's the majority of the weight and it's easier to work with them when you're talking bigger volumes. And then for the accent, like the colors that pop on our material, that's the ones that we really hone in and mostly control ourselves in terms of collection and in shredding, because they're the most kind of important part of the product.

[00:07:08] Joseph: So, for the colors that you see in our material, we source from a woman in Indianapolis who she collects bread tags from all over the country. People send them to her actually, because she started a nonprofit around collecting bread tags and then selling them to recyclers that then she takes that money and helps pay for wheelchairs for folks who cannot pay for them themselves. 

[00:07:31] Joseph: I found her on the internet, somehow called her up and I was like, "I want your bread tags. This is extremely valuable for me. And other recyclers probably don't care that much about it." So yeah, we have that relationship with her and that's been a great one.

[00:07:44] Joseph: We also have gotten a lot of 3D printer waste from companies that 3D print objects. Because of the 3D printing industry, there's a lot of waste because of misprints, like different things than design that just didn't work out correctly when they printed it. And they use polymers that are not very easily to recycle.

[00:08:02] Joseph: So, other recycling companies generally do not want those plastics, and they also come in intermittent volumes and sometimes just too small a volume to make it worth it again, for the recycler to do the transportation to go pick it up. So that's been another really interesting waste stream for us, 3D printer waste.

[00:08:20] Adam: Well, and we talked about in the last episode how there's these different stages of recycling where first you have to collect it and sort the materials so that you can process the polymers together. And then you actually have to shred it before you can actually move it in. It sounds like you do some of that shredding in-house and some outside. How did you figure out how to put that process together and actually build a business around that?

[00:08:41] Joseph: So I kind of used the process that I learned when I was at Precious Plastic 'cause we were doing really similar work. And we were also, we kind of actually pioneered this technique that I'm using at Marble Plastics. We really kind of pushed that technique at Precious Plastic. And the technique is, it's part of the family of compression molding. So you're using heat and pressure to compress the plastic into a shape. In this case, it's the sheets. And what's kind of unique about what we're doing is that, yeah, it's recycled feedstock, but because we control the accent material, it really looks recycled. It has that very recycled look because the accents are a different color and they pop.

[00:09:24] Joseph: Whereas in the, you know, plastic sheets, they're very common in terms of the industry. But even if they were recycled using recycled feedstock, you would never know because they use a different production technique called extrusion molding, where it mixes the material in a homogenous way.

[00:09:41] Joseph: So it doesn't, you can't see the accents, it doesn't look recycled, and we do it, we use compression molding because yeah, then it looks recycled. And our customers are buying this product because number one, they want a product that's made from recycled material. But number two, this helps them communicate to their end users, whether it's like in a restaurant, at a hotel and a retail store they are yeah, trying to champion sustainability. And they do that by buying a product that really looks recycled and helps them visually tell that story.

[00:10:12] Dominique: And something else you mentioned, like just kind of briefly was, you know, you work with local recyclers and you build products that get delivered locally to obviously people that are in your network that are hopefully nearby, even though your products elsewhere as well. I know you do. Um, buying that like hyper-local focus, I've heard you share that before. Can you share just like why that matters so much? And like we also talked last time about transportation costs being a huge part of the problem.

[00:10:36] Joseph: Yeah, so I think, the kind of the coolest example that we've done in regards to this hyper locality is working with Ohio State's Wexner Medical Center to make a bench for a new park that they installed and they gave us some material that they collected that we could incorporate into the bench and they're, you know, just a few miles away from our facility.

[00:10:56] Joseph: So yeah, be able to collect material just a few miles away, take it back to our facility, shred it, and then compress it into a sheet, and then make it into a bench that can go right back to where material came from, I think is just, yeah, really interesting concept. And also demonstrates that we can have like hyper local recycling and it's kind of in the same way that single use plastic is like the quintessential example of unsustainable part of our society. I think that is kind of a example of something that is sustainable. You know, how do we reuse materials and then also do it in a physical, super local way. Because ultimately, moving things around the world is energy intensive and it produces carbon, um, yeah, it takes energy. So the more that we can keep it local as possible, the more sustainable and the more circular it really is.

[00:11:44] Dominique: So, part of what you do is you talk to a lot of people and through your work over the years, like you build communities around this. Like, what do you think are some of the most important things people can learn in order to shift their mindset of like, "Hey, here's something I can do to be more climate effective"?

[00:11:59] Joseph: So the way I guess that we think about education and behavior change is that we educate through our product. And we do that by making a beautiful product from recycled materials that helps people think, "This material is valuable," and ultimately that should be around changing their behavior in terms of consumption. 

[00:12:22] Joseph: So not consuming single use plastic as much and being able to look to all alternatives and also just reuse materials as much as possible. So we don't do a lot of like direct educating in really, you know, talking to people directly in that way, but that's how we think about our product strategy and kind of our brand strategy, and our mission, what we're trying to do, which is really change perspective through product.

[00:12:44] Dominique: What's the biggest change you think the plastic problem needs right now?

[00:12:47] Joseph: Ultimately, I think we need to stop producing plastic and we should save the amount of plastic that we do produce for those durable goods that where it makes sense because plastic is like an amazing material. It's really useful, it's just in the wrong places. But it does have its use case. I'm not like anti plastic. It just needs to be kept to the place where it should be. And in the single use space, we need to leverage bioplastics. It's an emerging field. We need a lot more investments in infrastructure and research and development to increase the mass market adoption.

[00:13:22] Joseph: And we also need to think about where those bioplastics go as well, uh, when they end up in the residential stream. That's really about the composting infrastructure and how they deal with bioplastics coming in. So there's a lot of that I think ultimately we need to develop that because this is a convenience capitalistic society, we need to have convenient materials. And plastic is not a good one in that case because of its environmental impact. But bioplastics can be.

[00:13:51] Joseph: So primarily the bioplastic that is used predominantly now is PLA which is based from corn. But it has some problems in the composting stream because of how it breaks down. And it looks, it can look very similar to regular plastic, so that creates a problem for composters. 

[00:14:08] Joseph: There's another type of bioplastic, I believe it's PHB, that's becoming more and more popular. It's more biodegradable so that's another thing in terms of thinking about where this bioplastic can go. Ultimately you wanna make it biodegradable so that it doesn't require an intensive process to break it down. And, this new bioplastic is a, I think, really promising in terms of creating single use bioplastic items.

[00:14:33] Dominique: What do you think it would take for those changes to happen? Like when you think about Joseph's dream scenario around our manufacturing of plastic changing in our view of single use, I'm just curious. Like as crazy as it might be, what do you picture like being the big changes that make it happen?

[00:14:48] Joseph: I think it has to be a mix of government intervention. So you need some to reel on the economics of materials and energy. So right now plastic is used so widely because it's cheap, and that's because oil is still relatively cheap. So, the more expensive oil is, the more plastic gets recycled. Because it makes virgin plastic more expensive as compared to recycled plastic. Also, the more expensive oil is, the more expensive virgin plastic is compared to other materials. That makes other materials more of a viable option. And because if we want people to shift to biomaterials, it has to be close in relative price point. And right now it's more expensive. So. 

[00:15:32] Adam: Do you have an idea of like how much more expensive it typically?

[00:15:34] Joseph: I would say probably double at this point, maybe. Maybe 50% or double.

[00:15:38] Dominique: Yeah. for a restaurant I was working with recently, they were paying like 1 cent per straw for plastic straws and to switch to compostable straws, it was 2 cents. I think even when it's tiny, it's still double.

[00:15:51] Joseph: Yes, I think there's two parts to the economic equation. One, you can make the version like oil-based materials more expensive. On the other one, you can make the bio-based materials cheaper. So by either subsidizing the actual production or subsidizing the research and development that helps make it more efficient.

[00:16:07] Adam: Or getting rid of oil subsidies. So you're not subsidizing the other side of the equation.

[00:16:12] Joseph: Yeah. So I think it's a mix of government trying to realign the economics. Of course consumer demand, that also affects the economic equation because it changes the demand side of the equation. I think that's important, but, you know, can we do it fast enough by just, you know, us, the environmental wing of society pushing that I think, probably not. I think we need to move faster. This is like a climate emergency. We gotta move fast.

[00:16:36] Dominique: Are you seeing that response from like, at least businesses working with Marble Plastics? You mentioned like hospitality and some of those like commercial sites that are a good match for your products. 

[00:16:47] Dominique: Like do you see excitement on their end of like, they do wanna showcase products that look recycled to champion sustainability?

[00:16:54] Joseph: Definitely. I see a lot of excitement and I think it's also a differentiating factor for them that, you know, they want to be part of the move towards circular and sustainable economy and society. So, yeah, I think this is kinda the perfect product for them because it helps them do that in a physical way, but also like show really, really beautifully and specifically that they are doing it. And that's by having our product that looks really recycled. So yeah, I do definitely see a lot of excitement.

[00:17:23] Dominique: What if somebody's listening and they're maybe not gonna become a collector. Maybe they don't feel like a design mind to wanna go make furniture. How could someone just get involved in support people like you in their communities? If they're seeing Precious Plastic hubs, if they've gone on the website and they've now seen the map, which is very cool, and you should see the map, and there's dots in their city, how do you explain to someone how to support the work of plastic recycling?

[00:17:47] Joseph: I think, um, something that's really interesting, I think to get into as somebody who's just learning about this, is understanding the polymers. Understanding what plastic really is, what are the different polymer types, why some can be recycled like more easily than others. And you can do that, yeah, by researching on your own, but also going to talk to those recyclers, those small scale recyclers. Understanding what their process is, seeing what the production techniques for making new products are because I think it's empowering to know about how things work, but also useful in pushing behavior change in yourself. 

[00:18:24] Joseph: The more that you understand a problem, the more you understand a solution, the more likely you are to really change your behavior and support those businesses by, you know, buying their products, but also changing your behavior in terms of reducing your consumption of the materials that are causing the problem in the first place.

[00:18:40] Dominique: What's next from Marble Plastics? 

[00:18:42] Joseph: So we are experimenting with some new patterns, but also, just kind of getting settled in our business model around, you know, are we focusing on just selling the semi raw material goods, so the sheet goods, or are we doing custom fabrication projects for other companies and organizations? 

[00:19:02] Joseph: Or are we like making a product line of furniture or whatever other product we think of ourselves and delivering that to customers? We're kind of like still exploring those three areas. So that's kind of a big thing for us this year 

[00:19:16] Dominique: I feel like we've covered a lot here just diving into Marble Plastics and what you're about and what that looks like creating durable plastic goods and why that's important,Yeah, and just talking about like the importance of understanding polymers, the amount that I've educated people on the fact that like the numbers mean something and they don't, and like understanding why that's the case and like how the numbers also differ from how some like re sending facilities actually process the material. The machine is not scanning for a number. So also understanding that just the number serves a single purpose and knowing what that means, and how like the whole system actually works. 

[00:19:49] Dominique: So I feel like I'm glad your tip for people was just to learn and to actually understand what's going on because it's a very not simple problem.

[00:19:57] Joseph: Absolutely.

[00:19:57] Adam: How can people connect with you in and help support the work that you're doing?

[00:20:01] Joseph: A great way would be to follow us on social media, especially our Instagram. I believe it's @marbleplastics. You can see like all the different products that we're making, the different materials that we are recycling.

[00:20:13] Joseph: So yeah, their Instagram and LinkedIn. And then also just staying connected through our website and getting in touch if you have some sort of project that you're thinking about doing, um, we love to connect with you on that. 

[00:20:25] Adam: And where is your website?

[00:20:26] Joseph: marbleplastics.com. 

[00:20:28] Dominique: Thanks for chatting us again. This was awesome. 

[00:20:30] Joseph: This is fun. Thanks guys.

[00:20:32] Dominique: as always, our guests have found a unique way to champion sustainability. We're 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.

[00:20:44] Adam: If you know a Green Champion, that could 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. And thanks for listening to Green Champions. We'll dig into another sustainability success story in our next episode. 

[00:20:59] Adam: ​