For Tribu Persaud, his approach to sustainability is not complicated.
"My philosophy is simple: Plastics are a miracle material, and we are looking a gift horse in the mouth or worse," he said. "When handled properly and designed for reclaimability and recyclability, the vast majority of plastics can be conventionally recycled."
Persaud, business development director for PVC recycler and compounder Norwich Plastics in Cambridge, Ontario, said that when end-of-life plastics can't be recycled — because of mixing of polymers or contamination from other materials — they should be properly disposed instead of littered.
"At Norwich Plastics, we strive to divert as many pounds from landfill as possible, helping companies and brand owners reach their sustainability goals and help them achieve environmental, ecological and economic targets," he said.
This focus also is present in Persaud's personal life, in which he recycles, takes public transit as much as possible, and tries to buy from local or domestic product manufacturers.
"Now that our governments are employing regulatory methods to curb the waste plastics issue, I do my best to comment and participate in crafting the road map to ecological success for communities, governments and polymers," he said.
Persaud's father, Paul, and his partners started Norwich as Norwich Recycling in 1987. Tribu Persaud started working there at age 12, on the day he received his social insurance number. His first job at the plant was hand-stripping armrests from GM cars, separating the polyurethane foam, PVC skin and polycarbonate/ABS substrate, as well as sorting and folding PVC coated fabric scrap.
At Norwich, Persaud later worked with credit card sheet manufacturers to divert contaminated cards and sheet from landfills, helping to recycle about 25 million pounds of PVC materials per year. He also helped companies adopt circular recycling programs and develop separation and contamination removal and reduction techniques and processes.
Persaud also has worked with and has been an active member of the Vinyl Institute of Canada, helping that group develop Canada's first medical vinyl recycling program. This year, Norwich received a grant from the Washington-based Vinyl Institute to start a medical vinyl recycling pilot in Rochester, N.Y.
Over the course of his 35-year career, Persaud estimates that Norwich and other efforts he's been involved in have diverted hundreds of millions of pounds of PVC products from landfills.
To expand sustainability, Persaud said the easiest step for the plastics industry is to design for recyclability. The industry also can have a plan for end-of-life management and understand how end use is going to get the product back into an end-of-life management plan, he added.
According to Persaud, the biggest challenge in his career has been "the change of culture" in the plastics industry.
"In my teens and early 20s, most of our management teams/employees were working with the shippers and inventory people at larger facilities on getting scrap out of landfills, with the odd meeting at the C-suite level," he explained. "In today's world, sustainability and end-of-life management is high on everyone's priority list, and because of this, I get to participate in a lot of industry events."
Persaud added: "The challenge for me is staying humble by remembering that it was through the hard work of our partners, employees, customers and suppliers that kept our business alive and well over the past 35 years."