Cornell saw PET bottle commercialization, expansion of recycling programs

Kingsport, Tenn. — David Cornell had a front-row seat in the early years of PET bottle development and plastics recycling.

Now, Cornell is going into the Plastics Hall of Fame.

He was the longtime technical director for the Association of Plastic Recyclers and had a 28-year career at Eastman Chemical Co. in Kingsport, where he still makes his home. He runs a consulting firm, DD Cornell Associates LLC.

Cornell, 72, remembers the Garbage Barge of the late 1980s, searching for a home for New York's trash. He's an expert on life-cycle analysis. He palled around with famous garbologist William Rathje, an archeologist who dug through trash, proving that nothing degrades in a landfill.

"He was highly flamboyant. He would show up to give a talk in Levi's and a sports coat. He was a showman," Cornell said.

Cornell was on the scene in the first days of recycling. He was nominated to the Plastics Hall of Fame by Edward Socci, director of beverage packaging research and development for PepsiCo Inc.

"Dave Cornell is one of the giants of the plastics recycling industry," Socci wrote in his nomination. "Through his leadership, dedication, compassion and long service to the plastics recycling industry, Dave Cornell put the 'small town' of plastics squarely on the map."

His efforts "helped to create the framework and arguments in support of plastics recycling," Socci said.

But in high school, Cornell was more interested in metallurgy and then got into biology. He got a grant from the National Science Foundation for a summer study of ecology at Denison University in Ohio.

He attended the University of Delaware, earning bachelor's degrees in math and chemical engineering in 1969. He got a job at GE Aviation near Cincinnati as a materials engineer working on performance data and failure analysis for aircraft parts, including fire-protective coatings.

While at GE, he earned a master's degree in materials science from the University of Cincinnati. He did a paper on the polymer polyoxymethylene (POM). Another project, on PET, led to a connection the professor had at Eastman Kodak Co. in Rochester, N.Y., and its Tennessee Eastman Co. in Kingsport.

Cornell went to Eastman in 1973, becoming a PET pilot plant supervisor. He was put in charge of commercialization of the polyester business. He also held marketing and technical services positions.

PET was developed for polyester fiber. It would be several years before PET bottles came out.

Monsanto Co. created the first plastic soft drink bottle, from acrylonitrile, Lopac resin, in 1975. The Cycle-Safe bottle held 32 ounces. Cornell said there was intense competition between Coke and Pepsi to come up with large bottles, and glass was not a good option.

"What they concluded was big bottles mean more sales. If we can sell more big bottles, we move more gallons," he said.

Coke and Pepsi demanded a one-year shelf life. Acrylonitrile passed that test. But then the Food and Drug Administration banned the material for bottles.

DuPont got active in PET for soda bottles. But Cornell said DuPont planned to both sell the resin and make its own bottles, competing with customers. DuPont ended up canceling the project.

"The world starts to turn. And it's now free-for-all time," he said.

Coke and Pepsi looked at vinyl and polyethylene, but those resins did not have the barrier properties needed for carbonated beverages, Cornell said.

That left PET. The soft drink giants did some testing and found out they didn't really need a one-year shelf life.

"So over time, and this was the late 70s, the shelf-life requirement changed," he said.

PET was cheaper than glass and optically clear. Cornell said the shorter shelf life prompted soft drink makers to streamline their distribution and get to market quicker.

"So, PET forced the beverage companies to make money," he said.

Soon, two-liter PET bottles were on grocery store shelves.

At the same time, the U.S. polyester fiber business was under attack as clothing production moved to Asia. Eastman officials asked: "So what ​ are we going to do with all this polyester polymer capacity? Because it sounds like the party is closing down," Cornell said.

Eastman started a PET reactor line in 1978, making green PET for 7Up. Cornell said it quickly sold out.

"The business was just growing by leaps and bounds," he said.

Cornell was the production manager over a group that made the polymers. He led development and commercialization efforts to define specific resin formulations and manufacturing processes for making bottles, according to the Plastics Hall of Fame nomination.

The industry began to look at recycling in the late 1970s and early 1980s, according to Cornell.

"It became obvious that we were going to have an issue coming down the road about recycling," he said.

Oregon imposed the first bottle-deposit law in 1973. Michigan's started in 1978.

In 1987, the Garbage Barge grabbed headlines as it wandered the seas carrying more than 3,100 tons of trash from New York, searching for a home. The idea was to ship the trash to North Carolina, but officials there turned it back.

Rutgers University started its Center for Plastics Recycling Research, and Cornell was a founding member, rating project proposals for funding and advising the center on technical and business realities.

Then came multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns by industry groups like the Council for Solid Waste Solutions, which tried to counter an anti-plastic sentiment in some parts of the country that led to product bans. Cornell served on the technical committee.

Eastman was a founding member of the National Association for Plastic Container Recycling in 1987, and Cornell played a key technical role. The Association of Plastic Recyclers started about that same time.

In 1994, APR created the post of technical director, and named Cornell to the position. APR members were small independent entrepreneurs who were fierce competitors.

"These are guys who hock their wife's engagement rings to pay for the power bill. They're dreamers on one hand, and hard-headed as can be on the other. They are owner-operators," he said.

He held that position at APR until he stepped back in 2015 to spend more time at home caring for his family.

The big resin companies also tried to make money in recycling. Most failed.

PET, by far the most-recycled plastic, has a built-in market in the carpet industry. But Cornell knew early on that technologies would be needed to recycle PET bottles, so he patented and developed systems for sorting dissimilar plastics and routes to chemically recycle PET

"We can take the polymer apart, and reassemble the raw materials and remake it," he said.

He holds 15 patents in plastics, plastics recycling and other areas.

Cornell worked at Eastman until being asked to take early retirement in a corporate downsizing in 2000.

Cornell played a big role in plastics recycling at a critical time for the industry, according to the Plastics Hall of Fame submission: "Prior to Dave's engagement, plastics were seen by many as an environmental blight, unworthy of public support. Plastics recycling was considered an impediment to the growth of the plastics industry. Through Dave's efforts, plastics recycling is now a mainstream commercial activity, helping to improve the health of the overall plastics industry and dramatically improving the industry's environmental impacts."

Cornell said people were jumping into recycling in the early days. The plastic lumber industry took off, but many of the companies ended up failing.

He recites what he calls his "standard speech" when they asked him for advice: "Where are you going to get the raw material, first question. Second question, what are you going to make? Third question, do you have the process that gets the stuff you collect into the stuff you want to make? Fourth, do you have enough money to both build your plant and operate your plant?

"I've sung that song hundreds of times," Cornell said.

He said a good example is polystyrene foam, which suffers from very light weight and low density.

"You've got to have value to drive recycling. Recycling isn't a charity. If I can't make money, I'm not doing it," he said.

Cornell led the creation of the APR Design Guide for plastics recycling and numerous testing protocols for plastic packaging recyclability.

Another major achievement: working with the Society of the Plastics Industry Inc. to provide the Food and Drug Administration with guidelines for recycled plastics in food-contact packaging. That helped set the stage for FDA letters of nonobjection.

Cornell was also at the forefront of the movement toward lifecycle analysis — highly detailed studies of every impact of a product, including the carbon footprint from things like production and transportation, recycling, consumer use, waste management, and water and energy consumption. "You have to do it if you want to get a holistic picture," he said.

In 1990, Cornell participated in a major weeklong workshop in Vermont with leaders from government, industry, environmental and other disciplines to hammer out guidelines for how do lifecycle analyses. The result was a book called "A Technical Framework for Life-cycle Assessment.

He has also been active in plastics recycling issues at ASTM International and the National Academy of Sciences.

Cornell analyzes data and writes the annual report on U.S. bottle recycling, a widely quoted document from APR and the American Chemistry Council. "My job is, first of all, to question the numbers to make sure they are consistent. I want to see trends. We do sanity checks. We do quality control," he said.

More than a dozen plastics recycling leaders endorsed Cornell for the Plastics Hall of Fame. APR President Steve Alexander called him "arguably one of the most influential voices in the history of the plastics recycling industry." His protocols and standards for recycling testing and design serve as the foundation of the industry, he said.

"He stands with the short list of industry giants in establishing, nurturing and guiding the industry from development stage to its role today as a key contributor to sustainability and circular economy efforts worldwide," Alexander said.

Read the Viewpoint on the Hall of Fame and find links to other profiles.