I was recently invited to the Northeast Recycling Conference and Expo by The Coca-Cola Bottling Co. of Northern New England. Although it stands to reason that a major bottling company that does business in several bottle bill states would be involved in recycling, the Expo was largely geared toward municipal waste stream managers. While there, I met with Mike Elmer, the general manager of Seacoast Coca-Cola, a branch of the larger regional company to talk about the company's involvement in recycling.
First, how is your company connected with the Coca-Cola Co.?
We have exclusive franchise rights to manufacture and sell (Coca-Cola products) in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Northern Massachusetts, Cape Cod, a little bit of Connecticut. Mostly, we are northern New England. We're owned by Kirin Brewing Co. out of Japan. We're great partners with the Coke Co., but in no way owned by them.
Why are you here at the Northeast Recycling Conference and Expo?
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We felt it was important to get a message out about our corporate and social responsibility. We feel we really have a great story to tell and we spent really the last year refining that. It isn't just feeling like we've got to go green. There's a lot of things we do that are green. It's just been a matter of telling that story. We're pretty good marketers so we really felt we should be able to do that effectively.
This is our second year at the Northeast Resource Recovery Association's conference. Some people are surprised to see how much we do from a sustainability and recycling standpoint. So, it's kind of nice to get that message out there.
What are you telling people as they come by your booth?
What we take them through is the new PlantBottle (technology) that has just been introduced. All of our Dasani products now come with a bottle that's made of 30 percent plant material which replaces that much petroleum, that much PET in the bottle, and they are at the same time 100 percent recyclable. They still go through the same curbside or other recycling process for plastics.
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Then, he'll explain some of our business practices, what we do with the aluminum and plastics that we collect and tell you how valuable it is in the recycling stream.
Let me ask you a question from the business side. It's great to be involved in green efforts and things like that, but you're running a company. At some point it has to come down to the bottom line. What's in it for you, as a company, other than just goodwill?
Honestly, the investment we have against the green part is probably just our time here {at the conference]. I'm honest about that when I talk with someone who's skeptical about recycling. We do this because it's good business. I mean all this stuff saves us money. It saves us money to use a plastic pallet instead of a wooden pallet that can break and then has to be replaced. The plastic pallet can be used 50 times over. When they break they melt it down and send us a new one. We have cleaner warehouses because of it, not little bits of wood everywhere.
Plastic crates instead of cardboard crates to hold the product is an investment for us. It's a big capital expense to build up a big enough fleet of 2-liter and 20 ounce holders, but over time it pays us back because we are not rebuying cardboard all the time. There's also, obviously, a green benefit in that. We're not cutting down trees, or having trees cut down on our behalf.
The same thing with plastic and aluminum, you can make a perfectly good bottle out of recycled plastic. You can make a perfectly good can out of recycled aluminum, and it's cheaper than sourcing virgin materials of either. The more access we can get to either, the better off our business is going to be. It's not like we just decided to go green because that's good. We've been doing it because it's good business. It also happens to be a good story.
Let's go through the numbers, how much do you recycle?
In one year of using plastic crates, it saves about 9.1 million pounds of cardboard. In one year we save about 16,000 oak trees by using plastic pallets. Everything we ship, we wrap in a stretch film, like a Saran wrap now, for security. We collect it all back in a central warehouse now and we sell it to a company called Trex Decking. That's the plastic fake wood decking, and they love this material. They kind of bind it with wood shavings and things like that. And we get paid for it, so there's an economic benefit, but it also gets this out of the waste stream. This is like pure petroleum, these products. So it's being reused instead of being lost into the environment. They also make this kind of plastic molding used in house-building and things like that.
In Massachusetts, Vermont and Maine, all the manufacturers, beer and soda, are required to recover their share of containers that they put into the market, so because of that, we're a pretty big recycler. We bring a lot of plastic and aluminum back into our house. All the plastic that we bring back in, we crush the bottles then bale it and sell it to a company called Ultra-PET which is in Albany, New York. They, then, chop it and you'll see little bits of bottle, bits of labels, caps, and glue. That's then cleaned through a hot water separation process. You end up with clean flake that can be sold to any plastics manufacturer, not just back into the bottling system.
Ultra-PET also has a food grade process that does the same thing, so it can be cleaned right down to the point where it can be turned into a food container or a brand new soda bottle.
Picking up what looks like a green plastic test tube with a plastic bottle cap on it, Mike Elmer continues:
This is a preform. These are manufactured in just a few places in the country. We happen to source ours from Virginia. We ship them by truckloads from Virginia as small preforms instead of truckloads of empty bottles. We ship them up to Hudson, New Hampshire where there's a blow molder. Those things go through a process where it is injected with hot air inside a bottle-shaped mold, like a Coke bottle mold that forms them into bottles. For every truckload of preforms we ship, we'd use ten trucks for finished bottles, so we gain 90 percent efficiency by shipping preforms instead of bottles. From Hudson, New Hampshire, they travel to Londonderry, New Hampshire.
We manufacture about 70 percent of what we sell in Londonderry. What we don't manufacture, we buy as finished goods out of North Hampton, Mass. By manufacturing we mean bottling. So we'll buy finished goods on things like Vitamin Water, Minute Maid, PowerAde, but all of the Coke and soda products, all of the Dasani water, Nestea products are manufactured right in Londonderry and sold through Northern New England.
How much is recycled material worth?
Aluminum right now is at 85 cents per pound on the resale market and in very high demand. PET, petroleum-based, like all things petroleum, has been going up and up. It's about 36 cents a pound right now for recycled PET. When you compare everything else that's in the roadside bin, paper, mixed paper is about 2/10's of a cent per pound. Steel is worth a nickel a pound. Glass is actually a loser in recycling. It's great to recycle glass and it should be, but it's cheaper to throw it in a landfill, but it has zero to negative value. Cheaper plastic, like keg cups or butter cups, zero value. HTPE is just 24 cents a pound, but not nearly the volume you would see of beer cans, beer bottles, soda can, soda bottles.
The message is to get all of this into your recycling bin. It helps the local town offset the overall cost of your waste handling, because there's a wonderful market for all of these things. It keeps the value of these products local and there's a great system already set up for that. We argue that this is a better system than says states with a bottle bill. There, you need to take it on a separate trip to a redemption center and it's a dual system. You've got the emissions of cars going to the transfer stations and redemptions centers, you got the emissions of my vehicles driving to pick up empty bags, making extra trips that way.
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When you compare it to a bottle bill state, there is an incentive for bottle bill state consumers to keep track of their bottles and bring them back. In states without a bottle bill, it comes down to altruism.
Correct. It's a habit. You know, 20 years ago when there wasn't a viable curbside or a viable or transfer stations system for separation and collection, I believe that was a reasonable approach to have a deposit. Now that there's a system already in place and there's a habit of recycling, your milk jugs, your paper all can go into the same bin, why not all of the other plastic and aluminum products that you have. Why not keep the money local and keep your taxes lower.
Brad Sylvester is a freelance journalist and writer. His writing on environmental issues is regularly published on Yahoo! News. You can follow his environmental issues page on Facebook or find him on Twitter @back2n8ure.
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