smart Collaboration
Trek bicycle frames are recycled at the Lake City facility of MIT-RCF. (Photo/Materials Innovation Technologies)
pounds. “Before we started our company in South Carolina,
goods back into production. On its website, the state
people were just throwing this in dumpsters and throwing
Department of Health and Environmental Control helps
it in the landfills.”
match companies that want to get rid of a material with
The second shade of green is really where the environ-
companies that need that material.
mental benefit occurs, Stike says. “It takes
For BMW’s Westbrooks, the collabora-
96% less energy to reclaim carbon fiber than it does to manufacture virgin carbon fiber, so if we can put a million pounds of carbon fiber back into the supply chain, that is a million pounds of carbon fiber that you do not have to produce from raw materials.” The third shade of green is sustainability. “Think about a Boeing 787,” Stike says. “The material is used in that plane for, say, 30 years. Instead of it going to a landfill, we can reclaim the fibers, and then we can put them, let’s say, into a Corvette car for
tions that help him find homes for waste
“Before we started our company in South Carolina, people were just throwing this in dumpsters and throwing it in the landfills.” Jim Stike president and CEO, Materials Innovation Technologies
20 years, and then let’s say when the car’s
and byproducts can result from referrals or the occasional sales rep who’s just driving by the plant and stops in. Many of the arrangements develop from connections within the recycling industry, however. “Because the recycling and waste field is such a small field, everyone kind of knows everyone else, so your name is usually given out,” he says. Westbrooks is a member of the state’s Recycling Market Development Advisory Council, whose members share ideas on a regular basis. “It’s a nice network we’ve created. We
ready to see its end of life we could put it
have connections ranging from South
into a Trek bike, so you get multiple uses of a very good,
Carolina going all the way to California.” For BMW it’s a
advanced material called carbon fiber.”
win-win, enabling the green-conscious manufacturer “to
Recycling trade groups and state government agencies try to encourage and facilitate efforts to put reclaimed
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www.RecyclonomicsSC.com
find homes and outlets for a lot of our hard-to-recycle products.”