Mark Badger has returned to his plastics industry roots by leading a recycling company's plastics operations.
Badger, who had been CEO of Canadian Plastics Industry Association until he left to join the private sector four years ago, is heading plastics recycling at Canada Fibers Ltd., a 25-year-old Toronto firm that has started up a plastics division called Urban Polymers, of which Badger is president.
Urban Polymers will start sorting, washing and flaking post-consumer and post-industrial PET in April. It will sell PET flake in the market.
By September, Urban Polymers plans to compound reprocessed high density polyethylene and polypropylene and compound it into high-value polymer pellets.
“We will be focused on appearance, performance and consistency (for HDPE and PP) in critical applications,” Badger explained in a phone interview. “Conventional recycling processes aren't there yet. We will invest heavily in equipment and people.”
Badger said plastics processors crave resins recovered from post-consumer and post-industrial scrap, but they are demanding in what they will buy.
Urban Polymers projects it will be able to process 25 million pounds per year of PET and 11 million pounds per year of polyolefins.
Joe Miranda, a founder and CEO of Canada Fibers, has extensive experience in materials recycling from municipalities and institutions and companies. Canada Fibers began as a paper fiber broker but twenty years ago diversified into materials recovery. Badger said the company handles about half the municipal recycling waste in the province of Ontario.
When Badger first left his CPIA post, he became CEO of Switchable Solutions Inc. in charge of polystyrene recycling through solvent techniques. Switchable Solutions has since begun focusing on using solvents to reprocess materials from western Canada's oil sands deposits.