Extrusion expert Cronin sees bright future in recycling

By Bruce Geiselman

Seeing his first extruder in operation while a freshman at the University of Massachusetts Lowell set Kevin Cronin on his career path. 

Since graduating in 1979, he has held executive positions with a number of plastics companies. Since 2014, he has been VP of sustainability and R&D at Ultra-Poly Corp., one of the largest plastic recyclers in North America. The company has facilities in Portland, Bloomsburg, and Berwick, Pa., and processes both post-industrial and post-consumer plastics. 

Cronin recently spoke with Plastics Machinery & Manufacturing Senior Staff Reporter Bruce Geiselman. 

What attracted you to plastics? 

Cronin: It’s a pretty funny story. I was originally enrolled as a mechanical engineering major. After my freshman physics final, which kind of beat me up, I said, “I’m not sure I could take four years of this.” 

I was waiting for a buddy of mine to finish the exam, so I had some time to kill, and I happened to stumble into the plastics engineering department. I didn’t even know it was a thing. I saw a couple of grad students who were working on a project compounding polyethylene, and they were running a little 1½-inch extruder, extruding strand and pelletizing it. I was completely taken with that.  

I literally changed my major the next day. I went into the program and have never looked back. It started with the allure of machinery and seeing plastics being processed. 

What was your first job out of college? 

Cronin: I was with GAF Corp. They’re mostly a building products company, but at the time, they had a small engineering resins business with PBT [polybutylene terephthalate], and I was hired to be a development engineer working on the new compound developments in that group. 

I was there for a couple of years, ’79 to ’81, I guess, and they were looking to get out of that business. It was kind of a small sideline business, and, seeing the handwriting on the wall, I decided that I would look elsewhere. 

How did you end up in recycling? 

Cronin: For the first 30 years of my career, I worked for resin producers, and a few different ones, but I spent about 18 years with Hoechst Celanese. It was Celanese; it was Hoechst Celanese; it was Ticona, and it’s back to Celanese again.  

Throughout all those years, I worked in engineering resins. I spent a long time doing a lot of different things, including executive management. Then, in 2007, I started to dabble a little bit in the recycling space in the sustainability side, and I was hired by a private equity group to run a couple of companies that they had purchased and put them together and create a more significant recycling effort. 

I got bit by the bug at that point. I had left Celanese in 2004 as they moved out of state. I just wasn’t that interested in relocating. I worked for Oxford Performance Materials for a few years helping that start-up get established and I was looking for something else to do, and this kind of came up. I got walked through a recycling plant and said, “Yep, this is where I want to be.” 

After working in the industry for as long as I did, I recognized that we had a solid waste issue. Plastics do so many positive things in life, and, obviously, get beat up pretty good by environmental NGOs. I decided it’s time to get creative and be part of the solution.  

In 2007, I was hired by the private equity group to become CEO of a couple of companies that had been brought together and formed Nicos Polymers Group, which was a recycling operation. It sold and did toll processing of scrap plastic. I ran that business until 2009. 

The 2008 downturn hit recycling pretty hard; a lot of prices cratered, and since the company was essentially a leveraged buyout, debt service became an issue.  As a result, ownership changed, and they wanted to go in a different direction. 

I left to start my own business, PolyEncore, and I ran that for about three years. It was focused on sustainability initiatives and working with some relatively large companies. We helped a division of DuPont with a pretty significant sustainability issue that they had in flexographic printing plates they produce for the flexographic printing industry. They are highly engineered styrene-based copolymer elastomers. We put together a recycling strategy and started to execute against that and keep stuff out of landfills. 

From 2011 to 2014, I hired Ultra-Poly to be a processor for me for some of the scrap that was being generated that I was helping get reclaimed back into productive use. Ultra-Poly also ultimately became a customer of mine, and we became pretty close business partners. By mutual agreement, I joined the company, and they effectively bought my business from me. That’s how I landed at Ultra-Poly, which was 2014. 

What does Ultra-Poly do? 

Cronin: Ultra-Poly is a family-owned company and has been recycling plastic materials since 1974.  

We have grown to be within the top three largest asset-based plastics recycling companies in the country.  

The headquarters plant here [in Portland, Pa.] is about 140,000 square feet of manufacturing space, and we just built and commissioned an additional 125,000-square-foot facility at the same location. In addition, we have three embedded tolling operations. We partner with plastics product manufacturers that produce significant amounts of scrap in their operations. We put our own facilities within the confines of their facility. We provide all the equipment. We provide all the staff, and we run the recycling operations for their captive reuse of the materials.  

It’s all post-industrial recycling in those operations. They’re all fairly unique materials that we’re recycling. We’ve developed processes for each one of them. 

We also have to bring business acumen. For instance, we integrate into their ERP systems for inventory visibility and things of that nature. We do a lot of reports relative to throughputs and things. We run a truck fleet through our operations, so we also manage logistics. It’s an involved and deeply ingrained collaborative partnership. 

In addition to those operations, we operate another facility that has been in operation for about 10 years that was purpose-built to handle thick geomembrane sheet that comes out of the oil and gas fracking industry. When they drill a well in the Marcellus Shale, in the western part of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, they have to put down a 40- to 60-mils-thick polyethylene sheet. The pad is there to protect the ground from any drilling fluid that might get spilled or anything that might come up out of the well while the drilling is going on. It protects the surface from penetration of any of those fluids.  

After the well is commissioned, all of that material is rolled up and was historically going into landfills to the tune of 250 to 300 million pounds per year in Pennsylvania alone. We saw an opportunity there, developed a process to dry-clean that geomembrane material, and we’ve built a plant to do that.  

We recover that material, and it goes into applications as mundane as garden edging and as highly technical as going into blown film for contractor-grade trash bags.  

It’s a stream that other people have looked at, but it’s extremely dirty. With that kind of weight and those kinds of contaminants, you have to handle this stuff rather uniquely. We pick it up with an excavator. We shake the dirt and mud off it to start, and then we put it through a series of mechanical separation steps to remove the rest of the contamination; that is sort of our own special sauce. We have to dry it. We’ve done a lot of custom equipment development and built a lot of it ourselves. It’s unlike any other plastics processing facility you will ever see except for at the end of it are two extruders that pump out pellets. 

That particular plant is in Berwick, Pa., but we’re actually decommissioning that plant because we are moving that to our new, 125,000-square-foot facility. 

What is your role at Ultra-Poly as VP of sustainability and R&D? 

Cronin: Let me talk a little bit about sustainability in the plastics industry at large. This is a little editorial comment from me on our need to be doing more as an industry relative to sustainability and trying to reduce the negative impact that plastic is having on the environment.  

I’ve been in the industry my entire career. It’s been exceptionally good to me, and it pains me to see all the negative press that we get without any offset for the positive that we’re doing. It’s all about trying to minimize that negative and let the positive speak for itself. So, we are spending a lot of time on developing new approaches to post-consumer materials. 

We have, for instance, recently received our first LNO (letter of non-objection) from the FDA for a polypropylene compound. We are collecting that material from a major retailer in the United States who is collecting plastic coat hangers. 

We get them back here, and we’re reprocessing them into an FDA-grade polypropylene for injection molding ... that can be used for food packaging. Working that reverse-logistics capability allows us to get at that material before it gets commingled into other waste streams in a MRF or a municipal recycling facility. We effectively reduce the carbon footprint of that material by capturing it before it gets there. 

How has the plastics recycling industry changed over the years? 

Cronin: It’s changed quite a bit. I’ve been involved in it since 2007 — about 15 years now. 

The key driver for recycling for many, many years was cost-reduction. If I can get a reasonably good material that has been reclaimed, usually it sells at a price that is less than virgin. If I have an application that can be successfully met by utilizing recycled resin, why would I not, right? So, molders used to look at things in that way. 

Now, [the motivation] has gone from economically opportunistic to more strategically significant. All one needs to do is look at some of the very large CPG [consumer packaged goods] companies — Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive, Coca-Cola or Pepsi-Cola. These large brands all have sustainability reports just like they have their annual financial reports. They are looking at their businesses very holistically from a sustainability perspective, and as large consumers of plastics in their packaging of their products, they have all come out with very aggressive targets to increase the amount of recycled content that gets utilized in their packaging. 

Another example of the drivers being more strategic than opportunistic is that the polypropylene and the polyethylene markets right now have kind of gone crazy for a whole host of reasons that I won’t necessarily get into right now. But prices are historically high even for the virgin materials. I can tell you that post-consumer FDA grades of material often sell at a premium to equivalent virgin material. The reason it does is because it allows the brand owner to correctly and rightly claim that it has post-consumer recycled content in their product, and that’s important. The public — the consumer — wants that.  

Another thing that has changed in the industry is that 10 years ago, there was a lot of talk about so-called greenwashing — making claims of recyclability or claims of recycled content that could not be verified, or in fact were false, or were a wink and a nod. You just can’t get away with that these days. For instance, companies like ours, we go through a third-party certification body that reviews our compounds. We have certifications that certify our compounds. I’ll throw one out: UP 1189 homopolymer polypropylene injection grade is a minimum of 95 percent recycled content. The nonrecycled content might be a small amount of filler and maybe some colorant. That third-party certification is something that a lot of folks now must do, including the brand owners. It has brought the need for basically world-class business practices within the recycling industry, and that has not always been the case. 

What is the most significant improvement in recycling that you have witnessed? 

Cronin: I would say product consistency. It is far more common to have a specification that is much closer to a virgin material rather than: “Here is some stuff that I’ve got; you need a polypropylene injection grade, try this and see if it works.” We tailor our compounds to meet very specific end-use property requirements. We have discussions with engineers all the time. The technical competence of the products that the recycling industry puts out is ever-increasing. It requires some significant skill sets in understanding materials and material property balances and things of that nature. 

We run a 110mm twin-screw extruder here that we use as a reactor, and we are creating very specific compounds at 4,500 pounds per hour. 

Has there been an improvement in extrusion equipment? 

Cronin: There has been much more significant application of some of the high-end equipment.  

Twin-screw extrusion is sort of the pinnacle of compounding, right? We have a lot of single-screw machines that we compound on, which work perfectly fine for a lot of products we produce, but you need to get into twin screws to make very precise compounds, and twin screws are not typically found in recycling operations. Some of our competitors are using them as well, but that application of higher-end processing equipment is something that is becoming part of the price of admission. 

As far as other processing equipment for recycling, there’s a lot of really good activity that’s going on.  

I can’t compound something if I don’t know what it is. There is a lot of really good technology developed over the past few years and it continues to be developed along the lines of sorting capabilities. Commingled streams for polypropylene and polyethylene can now be scanned via IR scanner, which is a relatively high-speed sorting process. I can also apply different optical sorting to separate colors. If I have a mixed color stream, I’ll be able to separate colors and capture the most value for clear and white streams in those mixed streams. Companies like Satake, Buhler and Eagle Vision — there’s a whole host of them — are making some impressive scanning equipment that allows us to further refine materials and get good separation. 

Even in size-reduction equipment, the equipment has become more robust and more fine-tuned to specific needs within the recycling space. A shredder that is going to handle big, bulky rigid material is different than a shredder that can handle linear low-density film, for instance. It’s amazing to watch a rotor spinning at 120 RPM driven by a 200-horsepower motor stop because it got wrapped with linear low-density film, and that can happen. You must have the right blade setups. 

I also have to toot our horn just a little bit because we are using single-screw extruders that we build ourselves. We do that because we have learned through years of painful experience that we need them to be robust and have specific feeding capabilities. Our extruder designs are proprietary. We buy barrels and screws and gearboxes. Outside of that, we do our own thing. 

We’re operating 10 single-screw extruders across our plants that either have been completely built by us from the ground up or have been modified to the point where effectively we’ve rebuilt them entirely with our own modifications. Our twin-screw extruder is a little more complicated of a machine, and we haven’t built one of those … yet. 

What is the future of recycling? 

Cronin: The future is exceptionally bright. We are members of the Plastics Industry Association, and I happen to be the chair right now of the recycling committee.  

First of all, industrywide, if we don’t get it right, it’s an existential threat to the industry. If we can’t figure out how to get more of this stuff back into productive use again, that’s not a good thing. Some of the best and brightest are working on this. All the major resin producers, all the major oil companies that have resin production, are working on things like chemical recycling, which is going to be part of the whole continuum of getting plastic waste back into productive use, be it PCR [post-consumer resin] or PIR [post-industrial resin]. There is a manifest opportunity. There is an awful lot of innovative work going on in that regard. 

The biggest challenges are coming from the NGOs, the big outside organizations that are environmentally focused. There are a lot of people who are opining on the plastics waste problem, which is real, but they are opining when they don’t really understand what is going on. 

For instance, there are several bills in Congress right now specifically stating that things like chemical recycling, which involves pyrolysis and breaking polymer scrap down into building blocks and repolymerizing it should not be considered recycling at all. This idea is kind of silly, because, effectively, that’s an approach that is similar to what you do with glass and cardboard recycling. 

These are some of the challenges we face. But I think the opportunities are significant. We are very bullish about growth. There are many streams of significant plastic waste that can be captured and reclaimed with some ingenuity and technology. 

There are legislative initiatives coming down the road. Things like extended producer responsibility, where there will be taxes or surcharges back to brand owners who are using plastic packaging, and that surcharge would be used to help fund growing infrastructure for recycling in the United States. That’s a pretty significant opportunity that will help drive continued growth in recycled volumes.