Michael Biddle, MBA Polymers: Turning old stuff into new stuff
Michael Biddle, President and Founder of MBA Polymers, a company that was selected as a Technology Pioneer in 2006, gave this attention-grabbing talk about waste and recycling, and how his company tackles this issue.
Considering his presentation is about pioneering techniques to recycle plastics, to catch the public’s attention Michael surprisingly starts by referring to toddler behaviours. Small children like to keep their “stuff” to themselves, rather than borrowing or giving it away, unless it is broken.
Michael then parallels toddler behaviour with how most of us deal with waste in general: once it’s broken, we too prefer to get rid of it without necessarily thinking too much about where it is going to end up or other consequences. We are simply happy if someone else deals with it.
Watch this great video in which Michael Biddle demonstrates how his company deals with old “stuff” by extracting plastic from waste and reusing it to create new “stuff”.
Don't miss any update on this topic
Create a free account and access your personalized content collection with our latest publications and analyses.
License and Republishing
World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.
The Agenda Weekly
A weekly update of the most important issues driving the global agenda
You can unsubscribe at any time using the link in our emails. For more details, review our privacy policy.