[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 158 (2012), Part 11]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages 15971-15972]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




     RECOGNIZING MIKE BIDDLE, PRESIDENT AND FOUNDER OF MBA POLYMERS

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. GEORGE MILLER

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                      Thursday, November 29, 2012

  Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I rise today and invite 
my colleagues to join me in recognizing and congratulating Mike Biddle, 
President and Founder of MBA Polymers, a plastics recycler, upon being 
awarded the 2012 Gothenburg Award for Sustainable Development.
  In receiving this prestigious award, which is considered the 
equivalent of a Nobel Prize for the Environment, Mr. Biddle joins a 
distinguished list of past recipients, including UN Secretary General 
Kofi Annan, Vice President Al Gore, and the former Prime Minister of 
Norway and Director General of the World Health Organization, Gro 
Harlem Brundtland.
  The United Nations estimates nearly 85 billion pounds of electronics 
waste is discarded around the world every year. Yet due to the 
difficulties involved in separating and sorting through the different 
types of plastics, only a small fraction of these plastics are 
recycled, while the rest is tossed in landfills, burned, or shipped to 
third world countries for environmentally toxic and often dangerous 
extraction methods.
  A self-described ``garbage man,'' Mike Biddle set up a lab in his 
garage in Pittsburg, California nearly twenty years ago to begin 
experimenting with ways to sort and recycle complex plastics in an 
attempt to turn these landfills into what he calls ``above ground 
mines.'' Since then, Mr. Biddle has developed and patented a 30-step 
plastics recycling system that includes magnetically extracting metals, 
shredding plastics, sorting them by polymer type, and producing graded 
pellets to be reused. What is truly remarkable is that this process 
uses less than ten percent of the energy required to make plastic from 
oil while carrying little of the risk to the environment.
  Mr. Biddle should be commended; his story illustrates the sort of 
progress that can be made towards an economically and environmentally 
responsible solution to plastics waste around the world.
  However, his story is also illustrative of a greater problem here in 
the United States. While MBA Polymers remains headquartered in 
Richmond, California, the company's main processing facilities operate 
in China, Austria, and the United Kingdom, where their respective 
governments have implemented forward thinking electronics-waste 
recycling regulations that ensure a steady stream of complex plastics 
and materials for MBA Polymers to utilize.
  While the United States produces more electronics and plastics waste 
per capita than any other country in the world, rather than take 
advantage of this resource, U.S. brokers ship nearly ninety-five 
percent of the plastics waste that is collected here overseas. In 
short, we are literally shipping jobs overseas because of our failure 
to implement a competing plastics recycling program in the U.S.
  As we are paying to ship plastics to third-world countries with 
little labor protection and no environmental controls, many countries 
in Europe and Asia are reaping the benefits of reusing and recycling 
their waste products. Furthermore, in doing so, we are adding to our 
dependency on foreign oil by needlessly consuming petrochemicals to 
make plastics, while simultaneously adding to the concentration of 
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at a time when all nations should be 
focused on reducing their carbon footprint.
  The United States cannot afford to continue to watch from the 
sidelines while foreign countries become more energy efficient, more 
economically competitive, and enhance their energy and natural resource 
security--all while creating good, sustainable jobs. A national policy 
of plastics and waste recycling in the U.S. is desperately needed. In 
doing so, we

[[Page 15972]]

could create tens of thousands of new skilled green jobs, we could save 
a materials manufacturing base and millions of barrels of oil per year, 
and we could do it while better protecting our environment.
  It is our responsibility to ensure that more entrepreneurs like Mike 
Biddle aren't forced to take their business to international 
competitors. Rather, it's time to bring these good, green jobs back to 
the U.S. with a broad policy to encourage recycling and green product 
development here at home.
  Again, I applaud Mr. Biddle and his team at MBA Polymers for winning 
this important award, and I look forward to working with my colleagues 
in Congress to help create an environment in which Mr. Biddle's 
successes can be realized here at home.

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