Upcycling Plastic to Level Up Our Economy ft. Jonathan Mailhot (Les Plastiques DC)

Plastic. This one word has taken on monumental weight in today's economic and environmental conversations. And yet, I am sure all of us have come in contact with dozens or more plastic products over the past 24 hours alone.

Could the solution possibly lie in recycling plastic at an industrial level?

I honestly loved chatting with our next guest on The Resilience Report.

While I knew of Jonathan Mailhot back in our undergrad days, I had always associated him with doing great things in sports marketing. Fast forward to about a couple of years ago, and all of a sudden, I saw someone posting about recycled plastic in a way that was… shockingly… super interesting!

For the first time, even as someone who has been in the sustainability space for over a decade and an avid recycler, I found myself wanting to learn more about how this process is done at scale. And, more importantly, which companies are innovating their ways to better business?

Well, enter Jonathan.

Jonathan leads sales and procurement at Les Plastiques DC inc and EnergiPlast. With over 4.5 million pounds of recycled materials being processed between the two plants on a MONTHLY basis, he enjoys playing a significant part in the circular economy within the plastics industry and continuing to learn from an experienced team surrounding him.
 
Prior to this move into recycling, he was (as I mentioned) in the sports industry, notably as Senior Manager of Media Planning & Innovation for the Montreal Canadiens. Before joining the Habs, Jonathan was Director of Interactive Media with a growing software and online media company, PublicationSports.com / Spordle.

In this episode, you get to hear us nerd out on all things recycling and upcycling, from how plastic is even recycled, the ways in which it can be integrated into products, the role that marketers plan in advancing the industry, the circular economy, making important career moves into sustainability, and much more.

I promise you: you will never think of plastic the same way after this episode!

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Lauren Scott [host]: Welcome to the Resilience Report, Jonathan. Thank you so much for joining us.

Jonathan B. Mailhot [guest]: Thank you very much for having me on.

To start things off and to get everybody on the same page, would you mind sharing a little bit about who you are and your professional journey to where you are today?

I guess I've got a pretty varied background to bring you back into sustainability. I've been here with Les Plastiques DC and EnergiPlast for the last two years. We are a plastic recycler and compounder. So, we take care of the full variety: all the way from the plastic arriving from municipal recycling facilities over to EnergiPlast, grinded, washed and put into regrind brought in here to Plastiques DC to be turned into a custom compound for our clients. I've been doing that for the last two years.

I guess a bit like a lot of people, the story started during the pandemic. I got a bit of a time to change and come and visit my hometown here in the Eastern Townships and notice this business that's kind of related to the family on my wife's side of the family and discovered what was hidden in this building. So started off there.

Prior to that it was six years with the Montreal Canadiens. So, when you say complete paradigm shift, I think that's a that's a big one. So professional sports, which was my, I guess my concentration back when we were together at the John Molson (School of Business). I always wanted to be in sports and discovered that. So, a lot of sales, marketing roles and to bring it to the Montreal Canadiens for six years. And yeah, something kind of brought me back to the Townships. And there's always been a kind of attachment to the sustainability side and this one's this one's a big one. 

Big shift from that sports world over to plastics! Because not everyone is deep in that industry, could you help us level set a little bit to understand the scope of the plastics industry and then very specifically recycled plastics?

So, the recycling industry is, I mean, the plastic industry as a whole is humongous. When we talk in terms of numbers, we're looking at 367,000,000 metric tons in 2020 that were produced. The recycled part of the industry is about 47 million tons just to give you a perspective on that. However, those numbers are pretty varied. When it comes to virgin plastics, it’s pretty easy to follow. The recycled (plastics) industry; it's not as easy. There's a lot of recyclers. Where are they getting the data from all the recyclers? Are they getting the data from all the MRFs (material recovery facilities)? So, there's a lot of organizations in each country so these numbers are kind of put in together, but there's a lot of little stars on the side to say that, hey, it might be it might be bigger than this and a lot of organizations are pushing to really find out how much is actually being recycled out there.

And the process of recycling plastic itself, I definitely know the end user format of putting it in the bin and it kind of goes away, but is the process itself very energy intensive and are there any technologies that are coming out that are making this an easier process to do?

That's one thing that I find impressive about now being on this side of the recycling industry. I think that when we're consumers or businesses, you kind of look at your blue recycling bin (or whatever the color is in the area that your listeners are at), you throw it in and you just think, hey, it's going to go out there, it's going to get recycled. It's when you discover the industry that's behind it depending on location. So we're here in Quebec, so we know that our municipal recycling facilities, the companies that are involved, we know exactly where that's going. So, a lot of your blue bin is directly going to your municipal recycling facilities. Some of the big ones that are very vocal on social media and out to get consumers to recycle well. They're the first line of attack on your bin, so they kind of have to sort all the recyclable materials that are coming in and they also have to kind of correct the mistakes that some of us might be making in our recycling bin. It's not, I think that's one big shift and we can talk about that later, but of what needs to go in the bin and what can go in the bin, it's constantly evolving. It's very different than in certain areas. 

So, it goes from those facilities where it's that first sort and where we deal in is really the plastic side. Paper or paper cardboard is one of the larger ones in terms of percentage and plastics are then brought out of that, so plastics are identified by the numbers that you have under some of the cups. In our case here, the number two plastic, which is HDPE #5 plastic which is polypropylene, are the two main ingredients that we take. And out of these big bails (and I'd love to be able to show you a picture at the same time), but at these municipal recycling facilities, they will bail the material, put it on a truck and we'll essentially order trucks. There is a cost to buying recycled materials that are sorted.

We will bring them in - so one of our plants in Cowansville is in EnergiPlast and one thing about the recycling industry is it's often very hidden. There are buildings now that I that I go to and I go back to Montreal and I see somewhere of our customers and suppliers, and I'll realize that well, this whole building on the corner of Saint Patrick is actually a huge recycling facility and millions of pounds of plastic are going through. 

So, the bails will come into EnergiPlast. They will be shredded first, grinded, washed and then put into the format and re-separated. So, there's another sorting portion that's done there to make sure that the chemists that we have here on our side, so the compounding side, is to remake a plastic as close as possible to virgin plastic. The ultimate goal would be to be able to remake the exact same plastic that manufacturers are using as a recycled form, but as we know with, you know, contaminants and reuse of plastic, that's not quite possible. But the team here, that's where the I guess the chemistry nerds are really good on our side so I rely on them a lot. So, in terms of when we're talking about the energy, we're a mechanical recycling facility, there's a lot of talks now about chemical recycling.

Mechanical, to really put it simple, we have the first shredder. It is big knives that are coming in and breaking up the ball into smaller parts. We'll do a sort after to separate the plastic and then we'll grind that down into a part before washing it. So, everything's mechanical. There's no additives, there's no extra heat that's put within it. That's it. It comes out, it's fully mechanical. 

The chemical side is where they want to bring down plastics all the way down to the initial monomer. So that's much more energy intensive. There's a lot of research that's being done; it's kind of a trend that's coming up. They, from what I'm understanding now in a lot of the conferences we're going to, they haven't found the way to make it profitable. The costs are so high, the energy costs are so high on that, whereas on the mechanical recycling side, we kind of have found that balance. But there is a lot of work to be done on that side too. 

In terms of energy wise, technology is always changing. I'm looking at just the machinery here. It seems like there's always something new that we’ll discover that betters the plastic that's coming out because that's the ultimate goal. If we can make our plastic look like virgin resin and we can replace it in more and more products, that's where the growth of recycling will come from. But in our case already just getting the specifications down to recreate that is really where we differentiate ourselves in terms of compounding. 

It’s an interesting world to discover. And I think that what's fun with social media now is a lot of these municipal recycling facilities are going out there to showcase here's what happens to your blue bin when it arrives at our facilities. A good example now is people throwing a battery in their recycling bin. Well, that's been causing fires in Montreal, so little things that at least when you see the video pop out and you see an actual fire, then you're thinking a bit more about what's going into the bin. There's a lot of awareness on that side that needs to be. So that's the consumer side.

A lot of businesses - and I know that some don't know this - some businesses can also have the typical blue bin on the curbside, but when it comes to bigger volumes, that's where there's a whole other industry that's kind of developed. We will go and approach, take an example, a bottle manufacturer. And they have very, very specific marketing goals in terms of their packaging: the packaging needs to be perfect red. If I go back to my Montreal Canadiens days, it has to be that perfect Pantone, that's the one we want. And if it's not, the producer will need to discard that plastic. So, it's postindustrial plastics; they haven't made it to there yet, but they're not accepted.

Some facilities do have their own grinding and they can bring it back in a closed loop system, and they'll trust that to be able to bring it back. But often, if ever it's fallen on the floor or there was a liquid that was added to it or a cap was put on from a different type of plastic, then they might not trust it as much so, they won't use it within the machinery. And they'll accumulate either in parts inside the bigger cardboard boxes that we call gaylords. They'll accumulate it, and when they've gone to a certain quantity, they'll give us a call and we'll go pick it up, bring it to our facilities, and then we'll do a sort out of there. So often I guess the fun part for us, and that is, because it's postindustrial, we know exactly what's in that plastic. Here's the specification of the product we just made; I can't use it anymore, so we can either grind it up, service it back and send it back to them to be used in their product, or if they can't, they'll come to us and we'll create a new resin out of it for other customers. So, that's the full postindustrial side, and that's another part that's in in big development: a lot of education to be done on certain businesses where it's still cost wise and labor intensive to put in a grinder to be able to save that space because if you think of your detergent bottle, put that in a couple of cardboard boxes, there's a lot of air; there's a lot of space. And if the square footage costs in certain areas, you might not want to keep that in your shop. That's where we come in and try to pick that up and have to do it. 

There's also the cost effective way, you know, can we transport it from where you are to our plant. Is it worth it with the cost of transportation bringing it here at the end of the day, we also have to kind of battle with wherever virgin plastic pricing is. We still have to do a recipe with it that makes economical sense for our customers to be able to integrate it in. So that's the postindustrial side and that's where even in terms of development, now that COVID has passed and we're allowed to go visit a lot of plants, we can come in and say “hey, that's actually great plastic for us”, or “we know how to recycle this”, or we'll go in for a certain type of plastic that we know that they're producing and I'll often get a question, “what do I do about this”? And it will be another type of plastic that we might not use, but the plastic industry is such a small, tight knit community that often we’ll reach out to another company and will say, “hey, there's some ABS here that we can't use, but if I'm going to bring it in, it's closer, why don't you come and pick it up here”. So, there’s that that's kind of being developed and there's even government organizations that I've had the pleasure to meet a couple of times that are called local synergies, the county usually runs them and they'll go into businesses, talk about their products, what they're doing and try to improve their first line of recycling, but then, you know, create synergies between businesses. So sometimes we'll have smaller customers come in where they only produce a box per month, which in terms of volume, we're talking truckloads, so a 53-foot truck versus 1 box, not quite the same game. But if I can help some of our customers out and take that plastic, reintegrate it and kind of give them the stamp that they want of saying I know it's being recycled, we gave it to Plastiques DC and it's going into a product - in our case, a lot of it's going into plastic pipe which lasts for 100 years. So that's another marketing side sometimes that that that some of these businesses like, but there's a lot of conversations to be had on that side.

I have so many questions, but I'll try and focus! The first one is actually, at the top, you were talking a little bit about virgin plastic versus recycled plastic. Is there a finite amount of lives (for lack of a better word) for plastic?

Yeah, there is. Again, more of the marketing background not the chemists at the back, but if you had this one piece of plastic and you had to reuse that exact piece of plastic multiple times, then you would hit that that recycling part where it's about and depending on the type of plastic, I’ll put it out there, but it's like 7 times where we know that the structures should be kept together. 

But when you look at what we're doing here, plastic is coming back, it's blended with others and reincorporated. So, which part of that plastic wasn't ready? What's going to be lost inside the compounding process? That's where, you know, I guess the chemists in the back would be the best person to answer that. But it's also sometimes in terms of time. We were talking earlier about putting some positive spin to it. In our case, a lot of our plastics are going into the plastic pipe industry. So right now, they've proven that plastic pipe can last up to 100 years, so if I take your detergent bottle, bring in here, recycle it once and put it in in the compound that I make goes into a plastic pipe that's installed somewhere in America and it's 100 years, and then it comes back and it's recycled the second time, well add those on, and if ever I made that plastic bottle last 700 years, that's still a great, great story to tell. And even that first 100 is the one that we're sure about. It's the one that we're kind of relying on and using in our own industry to kind of push also the recycling side of we're going from a single use to a durable product that's another big one that, in terms of number of times of recycling, let's put in a number of years too. There's a great story be told on that side.

Very neat, and you're talking about that there's the chemical and the mechanical way of recycling plastic; if I'm understanding correctly. That sounds labor intensive, but so does creating completely net new product for virgin plastic. Is one more expensive than the other right now (and pricing may be a result of other factors beyond just the labor that has to go into it)?

Exactly. I guess the start with the virgin plastic. Everything's based off evidently the price of oil and natural gas. If you go all the way to the virgin plastic producers, there's a way to do it with crude oil and there's a way of doing it with natural gas, so they're really the ones that set the initial price by making contracts with some of the large producers. Think of a Pfizer of the world that needs to make their medical bottles, and they need to be food grade and medical grade. They'll go on a contract and reserve the number of plastic that they need. And there's a price that's set, often a month in advance, and that will set the bar for virgin plastic. 

Go back during COVID where while a lot of people were shut down, recycling kind of shot up because everybody was at home while people were producing a lot more recycled materials. There was a lot of shutdowns for COVID, so as stuff was shutting down, price was shooting up and the gap between virgin and recycle kind of grew and it made recycled plastics a lot more interesting. If we look at today, virgin plastics, a lot of plants that have been started (I can think locally there's shell in Pennsylvania that launched, so that’s essentially in our backyard), so the more they produce, often the price will go down. 

So, they've always coupled virgin plastic - wide spec plastic - so virgin is the perfect 100% right on spec plastic. The wide spec will be, I'm trying to give you an example of another industry… Think about maple syrup. The first start of the maple syrup that comes out versus the middle part versus the last part. The two ends are kind of separated and the middle part is the perfect one. Those two ends will be often wide spec, or if it doesn't follow a client’s specification, that will be resold as wide spec at a cheaper rate. And people right now, because everything is coupled together, they expect recycled plastic to be another couple of cents cheaper than that. So that's where, does it always work? At this moment, it technically doesn't, because the labor intensity of that first recycling part, and how much does that cost per pound, then you're already passing the price of virgin plastic.

So that's the part where we really see which companies are going also for the sustainability value of using recycled plastics. Some companies do have commitments that say we use 75% recycled plastic and that's how we sell our product. They kind of have to stick to that and follow us through the ups and downs of the plastic industry. Whereas you will notice that in these moments, and there's been a recycling conference in Washington and some of the bigger players out there were saying that too, there comes a day where the VP of Finance comes into your office like this is great but you know, the virgin plastic is easier to use, less labor intensive, people know what's in it versus the use of recycled and that's where the impact and some legislations that are coming through will probably play a big part as people need to be responsible of the plastic they produce to bring it back in the use of recycled products. So yeah, there's definitely an economic side to it that we have to consider.

I think you're hitting it spot on: you're seeing companies now going beyond just the economics of it and looking at their supply chain as a whole in terms of emissions. And I know that plastic plays a big part of that, so I'm very curious as to how does the supply chain get transformed and looking at either your classic plastic or your virgin plastic and then this recycled plastic option: does that have an impact when you're calculating your emissions and the different scope of emissions?

Definitely, because every time you're using recycled plastics, you're not reproducing and the chemical side of it, the heat that's required and all that. So, if you look at the life cycle analysis of a virgin plastic versus a recycled one, you're reducing your emissions by retaking. A lot of companies are looking at that ultimate goal of producing a bottle, sending it to the consumer and then it makes it back into another bottle: the bottle to bottle dream. With the type of collecting that's being done now, is that 100% possible? Probably not. There's also one limitation that's, and this goes back to my old life in marketing, we're very strict on the color codes, right? Going back to the Habs, the blue is a certain blue. The red is a certain red. So, if I make a product, it needs to be that red and that blue. Well, if I had some pellets with me, if I take a bail of HDP plastic, which comes from (a lot) your detergent bottles, milk jugs, more in the States. Put that all together and we get a light green. So, based on the fact that it's a light green, it's kind of hard to go back to a pure yellow. And so that's where the art site comes in, it's like what colors can be done from this? Ultimately in a lot of our products in our case, take a drainage pipe: it's black, it’s under the ground. The color is not as important. So, that's one of those like perfect products for recycled. Something that's more consumer facing? That's where you'll get a bit of a clash between, OK, great, what can we reintegrate into it? What colors can we generate? And is marketing OK with that? Is the company OK with that? 

There's also the FDA side of things. If something is within food contact, then there's more regulation that comes into play. Think of a medical syringe. Evidently, you're putting medicine inside your body. Will you want that to be done from recycled materials with less control? Maybe not. But then there's another gamut of products that they're making with virgin right now, they could be 100% recycled for sure. 

I think there's a lot of work on the marketing side of things of understanding what can be done with recycled materials and start asking that question, I think business is going out. I love it when someone reaches out on LinkedIn and says (and sometimes will be smaller companies doing a product) what if I did this in recycled plastic? What are the limitations that I should consider? And sometimes they're impressed by how close to a specification that they have of their product that we can get to and that it can be used if they only tweak a bit what their final product is going to look like. So, there's a lot of work on that side marketing-wise.

On the chemistry side, evidently the better our recycling gets, the better the sorting is done, the better we'll get to it too. Because in terms of, I'm looking at here to the plant. So, if someone sells us a full truckload of blue drums that are coming out of the agricultural side, they're being ground and washed and they're all 100% blue. Well, I'm looking out here and there's one that's white. Clearly not the same color, so if you blend that in, you just played a big part on the color side. So, there's a lot of identification that needs to be done by people that actually know what plastics they're identifying. A lot a lot of technologies are coming out. We were at the plastics show in Washington and they've got now these live scanners with artificial intelligence that will live scan a product and tell you exactly which plastic is in it, so that definitely helps your driver on a lift look at a box and other than just  knowing at a certain point by experience and being able to identify it, using that technology to scan and say, OK, great confirm this is the plastic I'm looking for. Let's put it back into the recipe. There's a lot of that too that comes into that come into play.

That's super exciting to hear that there's new technology coming out that's going to help facilitate this process as well. I work with a number of different product managers and engineers, and I'm aware of, at least to a certain extent, the kind of thought process that goes into designing a product. So, let's say if you have someone who is looking to create a product that includes plastic and it can be virgin or recycled plastics, are there any considerations that those product designers need to keep in mind in terms of the way they create their product to ensure that, at the end of the life, that the product can be recycled? Things like glue or paint: does that have an impact? Or, at the end of the day, plastic is plastic?

Yeah, sometimes one of the big things is thinking about using as much as possible the same plastic within the design. We'll look at products around you and sometimes for the look of it, you'll add ABS product because it's stiffer on one side. Or you wanted to create an effect on another side or a texture. And then you'll start mixing a bunch of plastics together. Well, once that's grinded back and the sorters come in, can they detect that part and is it able to be sorted back in? So that's definitely one consideration in terms of is there a way of doing this in one single plastic so that there's only one label at the bottom that says this is HTP 100% (the bottle, the cap, the enclosure) everything that's in it, it's 100% HTP. That's a lot easier to recycle. 

One thing that I've been getting into and I find really interesting is, on the American side, there’s the Association of Plastic Recyclers – they’ve come out with the APR design guide. So they're now putting out there a full documentation for the engineers to say here are the considerations of making a recyclable product. And then I guess the next step will be here are the considerations of integrating recycled products within your design where possible. So, I think that's one big change too with these organizations doing a lot more research. And where I think the big push - and that's why I think there's a lot more company interest - you can feel that there's some regulations coming in terms of EPR (the extended producer responsibility). So whatever packaging you put out, make sure that you can actually take back and that you create that circle effect of creating demand for recycled materials, because that's the that's probably the way the industry will get to work is if there's always a constant demand of bringing it back and it's not just another option to virgin. Because when prices are, where they are out now. Again, we understand some customers saying, well, there's rail cars and rail cars available are virgin plastic. We're going to run this for this year, but if there is that either the internal commitment, which is probably the best one because you really feel we have some of our customers that it's we're going recycled and it's within their product that they sell. So, if they're selling to a LEED certified building builder and here's the outside skirt and here's the guarantee that it's made of 85% recycled plastics and they're saying 85 because they need to incorporate that other percentage of virgin plastics for the design and the structure and what it needs to be done. Well, at least it's there and it's their own commitment and we can feel that, on our side, because they'll come back to us and say are the modifications we need to make. Here are the products that we have that were scrapped, can we put them back in? Will we get the same specifications? So, you know that side of internal commitment. 

But then you add this layer of the talks now are coming in where they're going to be aiming for about 30% recycled materials within your design to be integrated. Again, now we're talking about American law, and you know all the layers of government there. So, there's some states that are pushing it faster than others. Here in Quebec, Recycle Quebec has mandated Eco-Entreprises Quebec to take care of the EPR. So, as of January 1st, 2025, they will be kind of taking over 100% of making sure that producers are reintegrating materials and putting those laws into place. So, I think the next couple of years will be very interesting in terms of what does get set, what kind of limitations or barriers to make sure that there is supply and demand and it's the right one. 

In the States, you will hear a lot about the FDA approved recycled plastics, so the milk jug (which we don't have in Canada, we're still milk bags) but the milk jug is that that kind of perfect plastic product that if you take it from the curbside wash it, grind it, put it back, it's reapproved to go into the material and since it's almost clear, then color wise you can do whatever you want with it, but that's a limited supply. So that's where I think the first easy design you know, can people go into the actual of what we get. So, like I was saying, here in Quebec, ours bail that we grind and wash end up being a light green. In the States, it might be more bring out brands out there so we can think about the color. So, a Tide bottle will introduce a lot more red within the state. Evidently, the color is going to change with the recycled product there too. So, looking at the design in terms of that. So, to go back to your question, for people that are designing a product, there are resources now. The APR, they've got that design guide that's out. I know it's being translated in multiple languages and kind of being accepted by other organizations in each country. And that's a great starting point. And those people are there to increase the demand of recycled plastics and to help these companies towards let's hit all the specifications you need the regulations in your industry, but here's the way to do it with making sure its recyclable.

So maybe that is the first step that if let's say you have a startup or small medium sized enterprise, and they either see the regulations coming or they really feel that they want to make a positive environmental impact and they want to start exploring going towards recycled plastics. Is it consulting those guides that is probably the best first step? Or would you have other recommendations that designers and engineers start considering if they're looking at bringing in recycled plastic material?

I think the size of that organization, the teams that they have involved and the big companies that are already involved in terms of being members of the association kind of brings them that that force of creating these design guidelines and they're basing it off of engineers that are currently making products and the limitations that they've communicated back to them. 

But locally, what I really like (and again, now that we're post pandemic), we are meeting with some people where they are making a product, they'll send us the specification of what they're currently using in terms of a virgin plastic. And they'll ask us, is this possible? And that's the fun part where the team does evidently wants to concentrate on the big volumes that we have and what's working now. But these projects sometimes are the are the fun ones to work on to see can we make a there was a pen designer that wanted to make it out of recycled product was trying to see what colors should I use? Can I use your product? How much percentage? Trying to play along with that. So those are the types of customers that we like to make samples for, send it off and say “give it a try here. Here are some go-to products that we'll usually make at different specifications. Try that out and see. So that's where there's a bit of a back and forth with some, but when they land on it after then they know that they can get the source and probably they also know that, because we're recycling it, we know that we have volumes for it too, because that's the other part of the design processes. 

Some of these companies do go on to be really huge and they need millions of pounds of it. Is there, within the recycling locally, is that product being recycled right now? We can think back to the days where we had to sort our own bins at the curbside and we had to place stuff and now we're throwing it all and it's being it's being sorted. But what is being generated? What's actually making it back at this time? What's cost feasible too? Some stuff is a bit harder to recycle. So I think that's one part. 

There's that online design guide that is there and then maybe consulting some local recyclers; they'll be able to tell you and I know that a lot of sorting centers too are really good at telling, when they when people take some businesses take the time to go in and say “here's the bottle that we're manufacturing now. My chemist says it's recyclable. Is it?” And then the person will look at it and will tell you. Is there something wrong? Is there something wrong with it? Is it possible? Because they have the hands on experience of knowing what do the - so when I say manual sorters, it’s the actual people that are on the sorting line recognizing certain products - what can they recognize and also what the optical sorters and that technologies, the other part that's changing rapidly, you know, add in cameras and AI. I think we're going to really improve that percentage of what's truly being sorted, because there's all kinds of limitations at the at the moment in terms of recognizing colors and stuff like that. 

Maybe going back to the to the source, I know that - if I think back to my marketing days - if I had one person saying, OK, we're planning X amount of trees, it will, you know we'll save out this amount of CO2. That's the amount that we're generating here. Bingo. You’ve compensated the CO2, but then there's a little star at the bottom that says, oh yeah, but “the tree needs to grow for 100 years”. So actually, we can doubt that. It's always good to, before you get that first opinion, turn around and maybe ask some of the actual industry players that are out there about what they've lived and is it possible and go from there. 

With the local synergies, I've found that some of these projects have started up as what seemed to be a one off little project; here's a bucket of a couple of kilograms of a plastic turning into monthly truckloads of recycled plastic, and now a full out certification that we're certifying we're taking back their product, grinding it, putting it back at a certain percentage, mixing it back to get their specifications going back. So, we've created that circularity between ourselves, so we're kind of helping each other out. I think those stories will be more and more as people connect and have those discussions.

And you mentioned briefly at the beginning of the call that you started in this role during the pandemic. Maybe you can't necessarily speak from your own experience as to what the industry looked like before, but I'm sure you've heard stories as to how the past few years have shifted the industry. Do you feel that – you mentioned the pricing at one point was a little bit in favor of recycled plastic - do you feel like the pandemic has had any other impacts on the industry?

Yeah, well starting in that moment was kind of a whirlwind too. You had to learn the industry pretty fast because we were still working as an essential business since you can't just stop the curbside recycling either. So can't stop the recycler; you have to keep that going. The industry, definitely - the fact that a lot of business started looking into more recycled material - they really pushed for it, they needed more and they started integrating more. The fact that they now have teams that have tested the materials and know that it works, I think that's helped a lot and it's pushed a lot of people towards recycled materials. 

There's also a big push by a lot of the larger virgin producers; you'll see that a lot of them now have divisions of recycled materials too, so that's definitely growing growing the industry on that on that side. 

And the fact that they know that some regulations are coming, you don't want to get caught off guard if government changes, someone comes in next day, executive order. If you had something where you have to put 50% recycled plastic, well the businesses they got ready for it and got their teams ready to integrate it will be good to go, but the ones that have to struggle last minute and start scrambling to find recycled plastics and find the right ones, I think they're going to have a bit more trouble.

So, that that definitely advanced a couple of years, but there was a there was a high that we've hit in terms of pricing where I think it was, it was good for everything. It almost made no sense that it cost that much, so I think what our industry likes and needs is a more stable month over month pricing. There can be a slight increase as we go, a lot easier to follow in that you still have to buy and sell materials, so the calculation is based on that and run to these large month to month or yearly contracts if we if we want these businesses to be able to survive and steadily grow too because we think about the acquisition that that we've made when we did it just in that time too of the of the pandemic and the high prices. And then two months later, everything crashes down by $0.20 per pound. You still have to financially readjust and look at your inventories and make sure that you adjust. So yes, and also the stable side of the industry, I think everybody lived through it and hopefully we learned from the mistakes of this last experience. It was great while it was going up, but you knew it had to stabilize and come back down because there's a limit of a price that you can put on the final product too. I think that's a big part of it.

Well, I want to be mindful of your time because I know you are at work right now while we're chatting about this, but there's a few questions I would love to dive into which is this idea of greenwashing. Certainly, we're seeing - on the topic of regulations - that there are possibly some regulations coming out that might help address this. But, in the meantime, there is certainly greenwashing going on in different industries. I'm curious if this is impacting and if this is something that you're seeing within the plastics industry?

Yeah, and I guess the surprising part of it is that sometimes you don't even realize that you're potentially greenwashing kind of going with what's with what's known. If you dig into it, you'll notice that there's a big debate about the recycling symbol and the number of plastic too, because the symbol that identifies a plastic is essentially the recycling sign with a number in the middle. But that identifies a plastic, but doesn't fully mean everywhere, at least, that it's recyclable. So, sometimes as a consumer, we’ll turn it around, we'll look for the sign. Oh, great, it says the 2. We will put it in my bin. So there's that first part too of what are we putting on to our products? 

There's a side of it too, with in terms of some of the certifications that are out there. There's so many third-party stamps that put on products that are greener. I think those are words that are becoming, once you're on the other side and start realizing what's going in and seeing who's advertising what, like, wait a second, is it really? If a business says that they use 50% recycled materials, is that a yearly thing? You know, there's like in terms in terms of the year we use 50% recycled plastics. Are we in this product is composed of 50% recycled plastic. So I think that, and again going back to that old life of the marketing, you'll get a bunch of data of what's being done and you're looking at stuff like, “oh, great, so we can say this”. It’s true, but I think there needs to be that side of being a mindful marketer of maybe double checking some of the things that we're putting out too because we're also not only tricking our consumers, but once the consumer gets it will they then be able to recycle it? Will they be able to recycle it locally? 

That's one big thing that I've noticed the work of, there's Tricentris, which is a municipal recycling facility, and they're doing a lot of work on the marketing side and getting one of representatives, which they like to call the Coach du Bac. So he goes out and on these TV shows and he'll say this is doable. This isn't. And even when he's doing that, what you'll realize is that's doable for his series of companies in a certain area, but maybe out here in the Eastern Townships, do we have the same company picking up our trash? Maybe not, and they might not be accepting that that material. So no. In terms of a greenwashing, I think there's one side of the industry of thinking of, as you're putting out your stats and your labels of thinking about are you trying to just trick the customer into thinking it versus a full a full sustainability side? But like you said, I think some regulations are coming in some changes and there's also some third-party approvals that you can get that are now kind of you know globally accepted. 

I've seen I think one that's “ocean-bound” plastics are one big one where if you look at some of the definitions as any plastic that's recovered within 100 miles from the ocean. Was it really ocean bound? So, there's some stuff like that that sometimes you kind of have a double check on the stat. Like, wait a second. It's kind of like if we're here near Cowansville, there's a lake and it's attached to the Missisquoi River that goes into, I guess we're ocean-bound. So little things like that too that I think consumers are also getting smarter because you can actually check out some of the stuff a lot of. 

I always love someone that debunks some marketing campaigns and hence says this is not true because the backlash of being not true is something else. I’m noticing a lot of industry players that have got caught for saying something was recyclable and then the municipal recycling facilities coming out and saying “no, we don't recycle. It actually goes into trash”. The backlash of that is a lot worse than the couple of months you got of good marketing in saying you're sustainable. 

And this idea of playing our part, you mentioned during the pandemic you had this moment of deciding to change your career trajectory. Was it in that moment or was there maybe another experience where you realized that you wanted to dedicate at least part of your time professionally to having a positive environmental impact?

I guess there's a couple of moments when I think back. I think the first in a business setting where I've had the sustainability side kick in back here in the Eastern Townships, there was a small music festival that we were working on and we worked with a group that was called L’Eco Squad. And essentially it was pretty simple; we were noticing that a lot of people were just taking the cans of whether it be beer (evidently, mainly beer in this festival) will be just thrown on the ground and people weren't paying much attention. And we worked with this group where they came in with this huge container and essentially it's the now machines that you see everywhere inside some of your supermarkets where you put the can in. But they had a contest going: bring in the can, and you get your chance to win something. But you also had three or four people that were there just educating a lot of the youth that was there. Some of the parents are saying, hey, when you go back home by the way, here's what actually goes into your recycling bin. Here's what you should put, here’s what you shouldn't put, and I remember that we took a lot of time to put that in. There was no money attached to it. There wasn’t a sponsorship. It was nothing. It was just good. But we there was a lot of positive feedback that came back from that being installed, so maybe that was one of the first dots.

With the Habs, I also took care of a tree planting initiative and just seeing how it got people within the office to get together and go out and realize some of the impacts that we might have as a large sports organization that's flying these players across the country and looking at the impact that you can have. 

Then I guess the last one is having kids that was I think that was a big one where you realize like what kind of impact am I having on their life? So part of it was coming back, coming back home to the Eastern Townships and seeing what was here. And on top of that kind of finding out, like I said, these are hidden industries where back when I was at the Canadians, it felt like my alma mater would call me back every year for a sports marketing conference and tell the kids about this and how great it is. But sometimes now I'm thinking, we should go back there and tell them that there is a hidden world of businesses that we don't know exist. I'm sitting here and when I came in, branding wasn't a big thing because it almost wanted to be a hidden industry because it's B2B and you don't want we're not putting all their customers on it. We don't have a poster with all our customers because you don't want to be yelling out to your competitors hey, here are all our customers, right?

You're not customer facing as much. I have friends that come down and I'll come and show them what's hidden here and in the Raleigh shop. So Raleigh was a big bike manufacturer back in the day and that's shut down when China kind of took over the biking industry. So, from the outside, some people are still convinced that there's bikes that are being done here, and then we open the doors and we show them the size of 150,000 square feet of materials and machinery to do recycling and 4.5 million lbs. per month of recycled materials that come out of here on a monthly basis, you kind of get the jaw-dropping moment of like “OK, wow, that's being done in our in our little city here in, in Waterloo or Cowansville”. Those are moments I think that people that want to go into the sustainability side, there's just a quick research and the industry I think is looking for a lot of people coming out of university to be just interested in coming into these different brands and playing a part.

There's a fun part of knowing, when you go back home, that not only have “OK, great, we sold X amount of plastic”, but we know that that's going at the product and at the end of the day, here's how much it's saving. So, keeping the positive side of it. I see all this bad press about plastics in general, which some of it is merited. There is too much plastic and unfortunately it is ending up in in places where it shouldn't. But I think that at the end of the day, we're proof that we're doing a big part of it. If people each play their part, each play their role. Now that I'm in it and got surrounded by people with a lot of experience that guide me into the chemistry of it and all the true scientific side of it, it's a lot of fun.

And would you have any advice for others who are maybe mid-career, having a similar realization to you, whether they're in that media marketing world and want to transition over or in another industry and just want to come over to more of a sustainability-oriented career? Do you have any advice?

One big one is, and I know sometimes we're shy to go out there and ask people, but reach out to, I mean, LinkedIn now it's incredible for that the number of times I'll get a question from someone that's back in Montreal or at a marketing agency who just goes wait tell me more about what you're doing. Reaching out and asking those people, “what does a day in your career actually look like?” Because sometimes I find that we will do assumptions. I feel like when I was at the Habs, people thought that I was just hanging out with the players all day. At the end of the day, I was still making the same Excel sheet that you're doing for your media plan. It's just that there were 41 home games, which is kind of kind of cool, but if you if you reach out and ask people about what their careers are, I think we're all the same where we like to talk about what we're doing and the impacts that we're having on the environment.

And the other one is maybe a mentor inside that industry. Like I was saying, when I got here and I saw the owner. He's been in plastics for seems like forever. One of the funny things that they do in plastics, they'll take a pellet, they'll chew it, they'll burn it, they'll smell it and they will know more than by that $20,000 machine that's supposed to tell me what's in it, they'll know just like that. So, these are people who lived the start of sustainability. It was a kind of the Wild West at first; they had to try a lot of different products and a lot of different things to figure out what is recyclable, what isn't. So you know, just have a chat with some of these people in the in the industry and that's where you realize where it started. And it's, I mean, we're light years away of where it started.

I think people do have to just reach out and get that question or just some bit of research cause there's a lot of hidden business, like hidden in the sense that there might not be concentrating on making their website great, but they're doing a great impact on the on the backside. Thankfully now discovering a lot of a lot of those now that I’m in the industry.

And you mentioned that sometimes it can feel really frustrating when you see some of the bad press that plastics in general, even recycled plastics might get. Or, if we go even larger, and you're looking at the news in terms of climate impact and if it feels really heavy sometimes, do you have any resources that you leverage for yourself just to keep yourself motivated professionally and even personally to just kind of keep on going?

I think a lot of the times that I get these uplifting moments is when we have industry conferences and we're seeing some of the great work that's done by other companies and to kind of know that you're on the right path. And realizing that what's being broadcasted by the news is maybe the easy part, the top layer, they're just getting the quick information. Like all this is really bad, but let's dive deeper and doing some of that research and reaching out to some companies that are using recycled materials and what's coming up. These conferences are always great, even sometimes the government is doing a lot of consulting the public or consulting businesses sitting on those meetings and noticing the number - like that, you're not alone there. We all want the same things in terms of regulation changes. Seeing that you're not alone. 

And now this podcast; like this is a good is a good example too. It's just hearing the other stories and then you go back, and you say, hey, maybe I can be a bit more vocal about what I'm doing if that can help someone else know that hey, here's the good that's being done in this in this industry. 

And I like to end every episode with the same question of asking: what do you think it's going to take for both leaders and businesses to be resilient going forward?

Pick one big part and, the fact that we kind of lived through the ups and downs recently, I think there's a lot of creativity that needs to be to be out there looking at your day-to-day business. But thinking what if? And, can I do it differently? 

The second part is a lot of the relationships. I know that in my role, I'm kind of buying and selling, right? There could be a way to do a quick buck and kind of get this supplier to give something, but having that longer term relationship view kind of helps us go through these ups and downs. I know sometimes having a call with one of our suppliers and saying here the truth about the next month; this is what things are looking like. Can you help me? And we'll reduce but we'll only reduce by this much instead of fully cutting someone off because a better price came up is like is there a way to keep us going and I find that those are the probably the best partners that we've had after for the really long term. So, I think business wise, creativity and building and keeping those long-term relationships.

Well, I could talk plastics for hours, but I thank you so much for already giving so much time and knowledge and I completely agree with you that a lot of these B2B industries need to get the word out there. So, thank you so much for your time today.

Thank you very much for having me, Lauren.