MBA Polymers launches its first Corporate Responsibility Report

We’re pleased to announce that MBA Polymers has produced its first ever Corporate Responsibility Report. Through the new report, which can be found on our website, we share our sustainability vision and outline the policies we have in place to protect the environment and keep employees safe at our plants in China, Austria and the UK.

The report explains our integrated management system for health, safety and welfare, details our environmental commitments and covers our approach to being a good neighbour and exceeding customer expectations. Further, we also explore how MBA is contributing towards the transition to a circular economy.

Nearly 95% of the world’s top 250 companies now produce a corporate responsibility report, according to a 2013 survey by KPMG. Increasingly, smaller companies are taking up the challenge and proving that they are equally as committed to disclosing their social and environmental impacts as corporate giants. And as corporate reporting shifts towards value creation, more businesses are gearing up to share how they’re contributing positively to society.

“Over MBA’s history we have shown a deep commitment to sustainability and social responsibility,” says MBA CEO Nigel Hunton. “It’s our ‘raison d’être’. We will continue to strive towards our vision by implementing good practice and encouraging a culture of responsibility in every action we take. We hope all our stakeholders find the report useful and informative, and welcome their feedback.”

Please click here to view the report.

Plasticity HK 2013

Plasticity, ‘A Big Conversation on the Future of plastic’ is being held in Hong Kong on 6th June this year and Mike Biddle, President of MBA Polymers will speak as an ambassador for sustainable business.

Following its success in Rio last year, Plasticity is showcasing a range of innovative, sustainable solutions for the use of plastic and highlighting market opportunities for transforming waste into a valuable resource. With more than 280million tons of plastic produced globally each year and with less than 10% recycled, the opportunity is enormous!

Plasticity 2013 will share ways to harness this material in new and innovative ways. Discussions will centre on design re-use, innovation and waste reduction.

Bringing together leading practitioners from plastic supply chains, design, procurement, and waste management, Plasticity 2013 will deliver a packed agenda. Afterwards there will also be a site visit to MBA Polymers facility in Guangzhou for a behind-the-scenes tour of one of China’s most advanced e-waste plastic recycling facilities.

For more information and to attend, please visit the event website here

What are the future challenges for plastics recycling?

Following the Recycle Week news from WRAP revealing the UK recycling industry could create 10,000 new jobs and generate £20bn of net exports by 2020, our Director of Research and Development, Brian Riise, outlines his thoughts on the future challenges of plastics recycling.

Since plastic is still a fairly new technology, manufacturers are constantly improving it and using new types of material to optimise its characteristics for use in specific products. Bio-based plastics are also becoming more widespread.

Currently, recycling companies are recycling plastics from durable goods made 10 to 20 years ago, such as cars and fridges. Today’s plastics recycling challenges include tackling legacy flame retardants and trace amounts of heavy metals. In the future, new flame retardants may be used, as well as fillers used to achieve lightweighting, creating a demand for new separation processes. In the same way, the bio-based plastics have a different density and will require new technology to separate, in order to create a high quality recycled plastic pellet for use in new products.

The UK’s tenth Recycle Week offered a good opportunity to reflect on the recycling achievements made to date and look ahead to future challenges. While local authority recycling schemes across the UK have collected £2.4bn of recycled materials in the past decade, there is still a long way to go. Government support will be vital in helping to create the market conditions for the UK recycling industry to thrive and reach the £20bn of exports estimated by WRAP and the Environmental Services Association (ESA).

Moving to a circular economy, whereby every resource is kept in use for as long as possible, recovered and reused, will require a team effort from government, business and the public. Discovering new ways to recycling tomorrow’s plastics will play a fundamental role in this, and we are committed to continuing our research and development in this area.

At MBA Polymers, we supported WRAP’s Recycle Week by creating a poster of the Recycle Week image made entirely from recovered plastics. We got out and about around the country asking members of the public to pose with the poster and have posted a gallery of images on our Facebook page. Share your Recycle Week activities and insights with us here.

End of Life Plastics 2013

End of Life Plastics 2013 is an international conference and exhibition on markets and options for end of life plastics. MBA Polymers CEO Nigel Hunton will speak at the event which will be attended by leading corporate responsibility managers and representatives of the technology supply chain. They will debate the optimum environmental solutions for managing end of life polymers and the market reality and economics of each option.

The conference is being held at the Maritim Hotel Cologne, Germany from 4th- 6th June and will feature a two day programme and exhibition.

The event will focus on the sourcing of sustainable solutions for the future, with the spotlight on waste management and ways of using plastic waste as a resource rather than sending it to landfill or incineration. Seminars will explore ways of recovering plastics materials including separation of contaminated or degraded materials. The event will also look at alternative solutions in a world where technology is advancing rapidly and promising many more sustainable uses of plastics in the future.

For more information and to attend, please visit the event website here

MBA Polymers publishes first Corporate Responsibility Report

MBA Polymers is today launching its first ever Corporate Responsibility Report. Click here to view it.

The report covers MBA’s vision for sustainability in the future and outlines the policies we have in place both corporately and at each of our plants in China, Austria and the UK. It explains our integrated management system for health, safety and welfare, and includes sections on caring for the environment, being a good neighbour and delivering what our customers expect.

Chief Executive, Nigel Hunton commented, “Over MBA’s history we have shown a deep commitment to sustainability and social responsibility. In fact it is our ‘raison d’etre’. We will continue to drive towards our vision by implementing good practice and encouraging a culture of responsibility and action in everything that we do. This new report reflects that. Whether an investor, customer, supplier or just interested in our business, we hope everyone finds the report both useful and informative.”

Towards a circular economy: learning from plastics recycling mistakes and consolidating our successes

Recycling pioneers and influential thinkers, including MBA Polymers founder Mike Biddle, speak to Recycling International about the world’s major recycling challenges, highlighting the key recycling successes and failures we can learn from to help propel the world towards a circular economy.

Explosive population growth coupled with a marked increase in affluence among developing nations, notably China, are driving ever higher commodity prices, explains Mike Biddle, MBA Polymers founder, as the demand for ‘stuff’ and ‘stuff to make our stuff’ continues to rocket, depleting our natural resources at the rate of knots. The ‘circular economy’ is the only option to meet this demand sustainably without causing further damage to people and planet, Biddle says.

In fact, Professor Michael Braungart, author of the best-selling ‘Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way we Make Things’, says we should stop talking about ‘minimising the damage’ we’ve caused to date and move to a more positive mindset where we perceive all waste as ‘nutrients’ to create new products. After all, he says, to quote Albert Einstein, ‘No problem can be solved by the same type of thinking that caused the problem’.

So what can we learn from the recycling highs and lows of the past 15 years?

Technology is driving major advances

Biddle explains that from his perspective, the single most important development has been the huge technological advances in recycling processes, such as automated sorting. This has both increased recycling rates and raised the quality of recycled materials.

Legislation catalyses competition

Janez Potočnik, European Commissioner for the Environment says legislation has been a driving force in catalysing competition to recycle waste and waste reduction in Europe. This creates economies of scale and makes recycling a more economically viable option, Biddle explains.

The recycling sector now accounts for 50,000 facilities and 1.5m jobs in Europe. Meanwhile, thanks to the introduction of binding legal obligations and targets across the European Union (EU), some 35% of municipal waste was recycled in Europe in 2010, with municipal recycling rates increasing from 19% in 1998 to 40% in 2011, while 40% of Europe’s waste is now covered by a target.

That said, there’s still a huge amount of work to be done to reach the EU’s key target of recycling 50% of household waste in Europe by 2020.

Although some countries are blazing a trail in recycling, including Belgium, Denmark, Austria, Sweden, The Netherlands and Germany (although Braungart suggests that Germany is in fact a big advocate of incineration), many EU member states are lagging behind, quite dramatically in some cases, with nine states still land-filling more than 75% of their waste. The European Commission (EC) has plans in place to help ten ‘problem states’ improve, explains Potočnik, and embrace the economical benefits of recycling. The EU Waste Framework Directive should be a powerful force in catalysing further progress across Europe.

Environmental and social risks of ‘blind exporting’

One of the major waste issues facing the world today is the export of waste and recyclables to other countries – in particular to developing nations – perpetuated by the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ mentality, says Biddle. China has created a strong domestic recycling infrastructure to support its spiralling demand for material goods, creating a worldwide network of brokers constantly seeking scrap and waste streams to sell to Chinese processors.

However, if developed nations continue to export recyclables to countries such as China, this reduces domestic recycling and associated job opportunities, and lowers the availability of affordable recycled materials for domestic manufacturers. And of course, it’s not just an economical argument – ‘blind export’, Biddle highlights, spells a multitude of environmental problems, affecting local communities and eco-systems through unsafe burning in open pits or illegal dumping of waste in rivers, just for example. Meanwhile, by-products of unsafe recycling can find their way into global eco-systems, meaning we are not completely ‘exporting our problems’.

To prevent illegal waste shipments leaving Europe, Potočnik says we need much tighter controls at ports in all EU member states.

Changing attitudes to recycling

Europe is ahead of the US in terms of its stance on recycling, Biddle believes, quoting Churchill’s famous line ‘We can always count on the Americans to do the right thing, after they have exhausted all other possibilities’. At a global level, the younger generations are more switched on to environmental issues and concerned by how their products are made, while people generally are developing more of a ‘love hate’ relationship with plastic, realising that this ‘space age’ material that brought us innovations in product safety (such as helmets), light-weighting in vehicles and food preservation, is ultimately damaging our environment and polluting our oceans. Attitudes among legislators have evolved positively, Potočnik believes.

Cradle-to-cradle concept gains traction

Braungart’s ‘cradle-to-cradle’ concept, whereby all products are designed with end-of-life in mind and waste no longer exists, is rapidly gaining popularity around the world, among designers, business leaders and even celebrities, with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Brad Pitt among its many converts. With 15 million copies of his book sold worldwide, Braungart says he ‘feels like the industry has finally discovered that the world isn’t flat’. At a consumer level, people are more interested in how a product can enhance their lifestyle than in pure ‘ownership’.

Textiles manufacturer Desso has gone completely ‘cradle-to-cradle, Braungart explains, while increasing its market share from 16% to 24% in the process, highlighting the commercial benefits of adopting this philosophy. Meanwhile, Unilever has reduced the impact of its ice-cream packaging by developing a ‘cradle-to-cradle’ solution that allows its packaging to degrade two hours after exiting the freezer.

Looking ahead to the future

Mike Biddle anticipates greater consolidation in the recycling sector, leading to three key benefits: higher quality recycled plastics, more consistent quality and performance of recycled plastics, and better technology. As for MBA Polymer’s role in this, Biddle wants the company to help close the loop on key waste streams, including electronics, packaging waste and end-of-life vehicles.

Importantly, Potočnik concludes, Europe is in a position to lead the world in recycling best practice and help developing nations to learn from our past mistakes, escaping the unsustainable Western pattern of consumption and production that has brought us to our present resource depletion crisis.

To end on a positive, note, Braungart believes his cradle-to-cradle concept is flexible enough to be applied to all sorts of businesses and organisations, presenting real opportunities to eliminate waste and design a host of innovative products for the future.

For more on closing the loop on plastics waste, listen to one of Mike Biddle’s inspiring speeches by visiting our video library.

Season’s Greetings

Making music from waste with Landfill Harmonic

Have you heard of Landfill Harmonic? It’s the most inspiring orchestra you’ll come across, an orchestra whose instruments are entirely made of landfill waste and played by children from one of the poorest slums in Paraguay.

Located just outside Asunción, the people of Cateura live on and from landfill waste. In a community consumed by poverty and rife with social problems such as violence and alcoholism, music teacher Nicolas Chávez and rubbish picker Nicolás Gómez began a project to transform the lives of young people in the area. The result is ‘Los Reciclados’, the ‘Recycled Orchestra’, or ‘Landfill Harmonic’.

In a region where a real violin is worth more than a house, the young Landfill Harmonic players now have access to instruments made entirely from waste. With violins and cellos made from oil drums, flutes made from water pipes and spoons, and guitars made from packing crates, the children have come together to make beautiful music, conducted by Chávez.

The limitless power of music has injected hope and happiness into an otherwise challenging existence in the slums, and has given the children a real sense of optimism for the future. Now, with funds raised via Kickstarter.com, Landfill Harmonic is getting ready to embark on a world tour, during which they’ll share their magical music and spread their message of hope to countries across the globe.

Chávez also has plans to open chapters of the ‘Recycled Orchestra’ in other developing communities, with a view to helping many more young people thrive. This will also help to raise awareness of major global pollution issues and highlight the importance of giving waste a new lease of life.

To see Landfill Harmonic in action, click here.

Meet some of the world’s biggest landfill sites…

At MBA Polymers, we’re committed to diverting plastic waste from landfill, where it remains for hundreds of years, polluting the environment. Currently, just 10% of the plastic produced in the world is recycled, so there is significant scope for countries to expand their recycling infrastructure and build large-scale, resilient recycling markets. We’re helping to drive this change by developing high-tech processing plants to transform post-consumer plastics into valuable raw materials for new products.

Finding viable alternatives to landfill will become increasingly important as the existing sites become full and governments incentivise greener forms of waste management.

Here, we look at some of the world’s largest and most polluting landfill sites, past and present, and explore how they’re being used, as well as their effect on the environment.

Packington, UK

The Packington Landfill outside Birmingham is one of the UK’s biggest landfill sites. It’s technically a ‘land raise’, as it forms a towering hill of waste in the countryside, rather than being hidden underground. Packington takes rubbish from Birmingham and Warwickshire but has previously accepted waste from locations including London and Glasgow. Today, Packington covers around 380 acres of former grassland with more than 19m tonnes of waste. Once it is full, it will be covered with a non-permeable layer of clay or plastic, followed by a layer of soil, in which grass will be planted. Some 15 miles of underground pipework siphon away the methane gas produced by to generate electricity.

Puente Hills, US

Puente Hills Landfill, one of the largest landfills in the US, holds 127 million tonnes of waste, and at the time of its closure in 2013, it still had 10m tonnes of capacity. The site had been in operation since 1957. It covers 700 acres and some of the rubbish is buried up to 150 metres deep. As at Packington, the methane gas is funnelled away to create energy (at the Puente Hills Gas-to-Energy Facility), and will continue to do so for some time, as the waste continues to decompose.

Olusosun, Nigeria

The Olusosun Landfill is a 100-acre dump in Lagos, Nigeria and is the largest landfill in Africa. It rises up 25 metres in places, and extends 35 metres underground. The site receives up to 10,000 tonnes of rubbish daily, together with waste from container ships, largely e-waste. As people scramble to extract the precious metals from the electronic waste through burning, the chemicals they use result in the release of toxic fumes. Indeed, thousands of people live in shanty towns around the site, scavenging for scrap to sell. As the city of Lagos has expanded, commercial and residential areas have moved closer and closer to the site.

There are plans afoot to harness the methane from the site to supply a small proportion (1%) of the energy required for Lagos’ 21m residents, many of whom currently use diesel generators to power their homes when the mains electricity supply falters.

Jardim Gramacho, Brazil

Jardim Gramacho (‘Jardim’ means ‘garden’, in Brazilian Portuguese) was established on the ecologically sensitive wetlands of Guanabara Bay in the 1970s. It operated for more than 30 years before closing in 2012, receiving up to 9,000 tonnes of waste per day. The site is estimated to contain some 60m tonnes of rubbish and spreads out over more than 300 acres. Rubbish pickers combed the site for scrap to sell, even forming an ‘association’ of collectors, or ‘catadores’. In 2010, a film entitled ‘Waste Land’ covered the story of a Brazilian artist, Vik Muniz, who created art with the help of Jardim’s rubbish collectors.

The open air site, also known as ‘Trash Mountain’, has caused significant environmental concerns over the years, on account of both the greenhouse gases released to the air and the toxic residues leaking into the sea. The Brazilian government announced ahead of the Rio+20 conference that the site would be replaced by a modern recycling plant.

Sulaibiya, Kuwait

The Sulaibiya area of Kuwait City is home to the biggest tyre landfill on Earth. It can even be seen from space. Gigantic holes are dug from the sandy earth and filled with old tyres, now numbering more than seven million. Sending used tyres to landfill is now illegal in the UK, but other countries outside of Europe, including Kuwait, can pay for tyres to be taken away. In 2012, a fire broke out in the Kuwait tyre dump – also visible from space – in which five million tyres burnt uncontrollably, releasing smoke and toxic chemicals into the air.

To learn more about MBA Polymers and our work to divert plastic waste from landfill, please visit our website.

Transforming one of China’s most polluted boomtowns with urban sustainability innovations

Channel News Asia explores the major challenges facing one of China’s most populous and polluted cities, Guangzhou, and examines how advances in waste treatment and recycling, urban architecture and water purification are helping this thriving boomtown to build a more sustainable future. In particular, MBA’s Mike Biddle explains how a new plastic recycling facility, developed in partnership with MBA Polymers, is helping to turn the tide on the city’s plastic e-waste.

With Asia’s urban population set to soar from 1.9 billion to 3.3 billion in the next 28 years, many of its people will be living in the fastest growing ‘boomtowns’ in the world. The continent’s population has quadrupled in the past seven centuries, placing ever greater pressure on the world’s dwindling natural resources.

The economic powerhouse of Guangzhou, South China’s largest metropolis, has become a major manufacturing and trading hub in the past 30 years. Rampant industrialisation has catapulted this prosperous port city to new heights, quite literally, spreading a sea of energy-sapping skyscrapers across the cityscape. Meanwhile, explosive urban growth has seen Guangzhou buckling under the weight of providing power to its 40 million inhabitants, causing frequent outages in the summer months, when temperatures regularly reach 40°C.

What’s more, a colossal amount of pollution is created by the city’s manufacturing industries and inhabitants, turning many of its hundreds of waterways into toxic sludge and making the air thick with dust, fumes and toxic chemicals. One of the major challenges faced by this city, as it scrambles back from the brink of ecological disaster, is how to deal effectively with many hundreds of thousands of tonnes of plastic waste arriving at its ports each year, exported from foreign nations and shipped in by the world’s giant electronics manufacturing industry.

Guangzhou is situated right at the heart of this ‘electronics manufacturing hotbed’, yet ironically, it does not currently have the resources or processes in place to capitalise on the commercial opportunity presented by the efficient recycling of e-waste. The city’s 400,000+ recycling companies are poorly regulated and often clean and process plastic e-waste in ways that poison the already heavily polluted skies and waterways with toxic fumes and chemicals.

MBA Polymers partnered with the Guangzhou Iron and Steel Enterprises Group in 2005 to tackle this immense recycling challenge. Together, they created a high-tech recycling plant in the heart of Guangzhou with the capacity to process more than 40,000 tonnes of plastic per year.

So what makes this processing plant different?

Many plastics have similar densities, and traditional processes have failed to separate them efficiently, contaminating the recycled material and rendering it unusable. MBA Polymers’ engineers developed an automated sorting technology that sorts the seven different types of plastic e-waste by density and character make-up, eliminating harmful by-products and ensuring all recycled plastics – which are sold as pellets for raw materials – are usable.

Additional features include a sophisticated vacuum to swallow the dust and fumes, which is then filtered by bespoke cylinders, with funnels carefully channelling the by-products away for safe disposal.

The result is that within three years of operation, the plant is already processing 25,000 tonnes of plastic e-waste annually. Together with the 309-metre high Pearl River Tower, an eco-skyscraper that generates 300,000 kWh of energy by harnessing the power of the elements, and a clever underground bio-reactor to purify the city’s water, the MBA recycling facility is helping the city metamorphose into a more sustainable Asian boomtown, shining a light on the type of innovative thinking that’s required to sustain the cities of the future.

To learn more about our processing plant in China, visit our website, or contact the MBA Polymers team.