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Reverse vending machines help contribute to the circular economy. In this episode, Tad and Julianna sit down with Mike Noel, Governmental Affairs Manager at TOMRA, to discuss how reverse vending machines work and how they contribute to the circular economy, how regulatory trends are creating risks and opportunities for businesses, the core pillars of TOMRA’s business, and how TOMRA’s sensor-based sorters are reducing carbon emissions related to mining.
Can You Tell us about your work in Governmental Affairs and how regulatory trends are creating risks and opportunities for businesses?
So it's my job to pay attention to public policy related to the circular economy, especially for packaging, plastic, glass, and aluminum. There's a lot happening these days. You may have heard about the Break Free from Plastic Pollution Act. But some of the trends we see, you'll notice that when an NGO, like Greenpeace, starts calling for something from the big brands like Pepsi or Coke, that’s typically how it starts. Then two or three years later we actually see those brands make those type of commitments.
For example, a couple years ago, NGO’s started to call for targets that have an absolute reduction in plastic use or single use plastic. I remember hearing that and thinking that seems quite aggressive, and I'm not sure how that's going to work. But sure enough, two or three years later, those brands are setting those concrete commitments with timebound targets. Now the NGOs are shifting and they're saying, ‘okay that's great, now a certain percentage of the products you sell should be in reusable packaging,’ which is a paradigm shift. So I do expect over the next two to three years, we'll see a lot more reuse and there's a number of different organizations out there that are helping the brands really innovate their business models and the packaging formats to meet that.
So I think there's a bright future in reuse. It might take a while, but there's opportunity. Then there are related policies like Senators in the White House at the Federal level is talking about setting a virgin plastic tax similar to Europe. Something to make virgin plastic use more expensive and incentivize recycled content. A number of states have already passed recycled content requirements. In Washington and California if you're going to create a plastic bottle, 25% of it should utilize recycled content. That's obviously a boom for the recycling sector. It will be interesting to see if that really increases the collection of plastic. Maine and New Jersey are working on similar policies and I expect to see many more of those types of policies.
We know that there are a few core pillars of tomra’s business: collection, food, and mining. Can you tell us a little but more about each of these
There's three main divisions, but our core business concept is that we aim to use materials more efficiently and help companies use materials more efficiently and collect them. TOMRA is known for pioneer advanced technology in collecting materials and sorting them for recycling. We do that through two main divisions. The TOMRA sorting business provides optical sorters and robotics to sort everything that would go in your curbside recycling bin, and making sure it can be separated properly and retain that material value.
We also do TOMRA food, which helps to sort food before it reaches the consumer. For example, we process 70% of the world's french fries, and we help divert 10% of them from going to waste. We help to essentially avoid 25,000 truckloads of potatoes going to waste. So it's a big business. I think we do Nutella’s hazel nuts as well. Then we have TOMRA mining as well. We essentially help to identify where the minerals are within ore, so we're able to make it far more efficient, cutting your energy footprint from sorting in half, and reducing the amount of water you need to do that mining operation.
Then the other division is TOMRA collection, which is really where I spend most of my time providing technology and services specifically for container deposit systems. This is the system where a consumer will go to the store, they'll pay for the price of their beverage and a small deposit on top of it. Then they can take back their can or bottle to the store or a recycling location and get back their deposit. So we provide the machines where people, when they go back to the store, they can put it into what is known as a reverse vending machine. Reverse vending machines automate that deposit redemption process. Then we also do a lot of the backend services like picking up containers. We also own some processing facilities to prepare the material back to market, and we own a plastic recycling facility in the Northeast.
TOMRA is the world leader in the field of reverse vending, can you explain more about how reverse vending works and how it is contributing to a circular economy?
So most of them are in the 10 states that have container deposit laws where beverage containers actually have a financial value. So that's where these reverse vending machines (RVMs) are offered and where they make economic sense. The 10 deposit states are California, Hawaii, Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Iowa, and Michigan.
It's not necessarily a new concept, but the technology is getting better every few years. The automated RVM was invented by our two founders, the Planke brothers for a retailer with a deposit system in Norway. The retailer was having trouble accepting all these cans and bottles by hand and paying out the deposits. So the retailer asked these brothers for help because they were engineers and they designed the first, fully automated RVM. So RVMs automate that process.
It literally scans the barcode of the container that goes through which is really important because then that tells the distributor to pick up their product to recycle it. So it keeps track of every container and then critically, and a lot of people don't know this, the RVMs in almost all cases compact the containers which is critical because that saves a lot of space, both at the retailer, but critically on the truck as it's picked up.
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ABOUT mike noel
Mike is a sustainability professional that has worked with private, public and civil sectors to accelerate positive environmental impacts. Mike is the Governmental Affairs Manager for TOMRA, the world's largest provider of recycling technology which specializes in optical sorting to raise the value of recyclable material, incentivize collection of wasted resources, and reduce food waste.
At TOMRA, Mike advises North American policymakers on circular economy topics including container deposit return systems (“bottle bills”) and Extended Producer Responsibility programs (EPR). TOMRA has nearly five decades of experience in container deposit systems and operates in every major deposit system in the world. Before TOMRA, Mike spent 6 years at the change agency, Futerra, working with organizations like Google, The North Face, and the Ocean Conservancy to define their circular economy strategies and public campaigns. Mike studied Marketing and Environmental Policy at Fordham University where he led a campaign to establish the University's Sustainable Business program. Mike is based in Connecticut with his family.