Having spent much of his career helping make plastic parts, Rick Shaffer seems an unlikely candidate to quote Greenpeace and tote canvas bags. But the former Netstal executive, who now lives in Arizona with his wife, youngest son, dog, a motorcycle and a fleet of bicycles, is worried about sustainability — both for the environment and the industry.
Looking ahead to a presentation he’s planning for Sept. 3 at Molding 2021, the InterTech Rx LLC founder, consultant and recycling enthusiast is just trying to live his own advice: Be better every day.
He spoke with Plastics Machinery & Manufacturing Senior Staff Reporter Karen Hanna.
How does a guy with a career in plastics become an evangelist for reusable shopping bags?
Shaffer: I’ve made a really good living from the industry over the years, and I think plastics is a sustainable industry, but what we’re doing is not. For example, the number of pipette tips that’s needed, because of COVID testing, grew by nearly 5.5 billion in 2020. What do you do with that? It’s unthinkable that you could live without plastics, but continuing what we’re doing is not a good choice, either. Having a canvas bag that I can reuse hundreds of times, I’m good with that. I’m telling people, “Here’s what you need to do, and you need to take a holistic, comprehensive approach to the whole thing.”
What services does InterTech Rx LLC provide?
Shaffer: I help clients improve what they’re doing by improving productivity or profitability, or both. There was a piece on 60 Minutes about ocean plastics, and it was just shocking, that that massive amount of plastic just ended up in the ocean. I thought, “Why is that? Is it for real?” (Shaffer then referenced a chart showing resin production soaring from about 250 million metric tons in 2008 to about 350 million metric tons in 2017, while the amount of recycled resin peaked above 50 million metric tons before falling.) And that left a deficit of over 300 million metric tons of material that was going uncontrolled into the environment. That’s just completely unsustainable. And, so, I changed the direction of InterTech to say, “Everybody should join a zero-waste initiative.”
How did you get started in the industry?
Shaffer: I saw an ad for a company in Massachusetts, where I grew up, and they were advertising for draftsman. And I thought, “Wow, I learned that in high school, but I don’t really have enough of a background.” Anyway, I went to this interview at a company called Beloit Corp. I sat in the waiting area and had one of the worst ties and cheapest sport coats that anybody had ever seen, but, for an 18-year-old kid, I guess it was as good as it gets. I sat there and listened to a lady berate everybody in front of me. And, I thought, “Oh, man, I’m just gonna go home.” But I went in and lord only knows what I did, what I said, what I didn’t do, but anyway, the conversation went real well, and within about 10 minutes, she said, “When do you think you could start?” And I thought, “Like, tomorrow?” And she goes, “Monday’s good enough.” Then she said, “We have two specific segments of our business, and you can make your choice as to which one you do. We have 150 years’ worth of experience in the paper pulping industry, but we have a new fledgling business in plastics. Which would you like?” And I said, “The Graduate is a movie that was not all that long ago. And he said, ‘The future is in plastic,’ so I’ll do that.”
I hope she turned out to be better than she seemed at first.
Shaffer: Oh, my gosh, she was just as pleasant as could be. I mean, everybody in the company thought, “This woman is just miserable.” She was great to me. She brought me down to the director of the engineering and said, “This is Rick. He’s going to start as one of the new draftspeople on Monday,” and the director said, “We already hired two people, we don’t need a third one.” And she just looked at him and said, “George, I think I just told you that this is Rick, and he'll be starting on Monday.” And he just said, “OK, OK, OK.”
How much drafting experience did you have before landing your first job?
Shaffer: I took it in high school. And, fortunately for me, they said, “We like what we see. We like what you’re doing. And we’d like you to progress. But you need to have an engineering degree to do that. So, here’s what we’re willing to do is, if you’re willing to go to night school to get it, we’re willing to pay for your engineering degree.” And, I said, “That’s the only way I’m going to get one.” So, I was actually working during the day at Beloit. Then, I would drive down to Western New England College in Springfield three days a week to amuse myself with Calculus 123, differential equations and all the rest. I worked during the day and then went to engineering school at night for a very long time.
What was more important to you: learning on the job or that degree?
Shaffer: I think they both were so complementary. When you’re working, in essence doing the job, you can apply what you’re learning. It just makes all the difference in the world.
Where did you go next?
Shaffer: I ended up working my way up to become the manager of the engineering department. After that, the folks at Demag contacted me to start their plastics operations in the U.S. My response was, “I’m not a sales guy. Why do you want me to start your plastics operations in the U.S.?” And they said, “Because ours is a high-tech sale, and you’ve got to understand it.” I started for Demag in ’83 and built up their operations until they bought Van Dorn in, I think, ’96. I took over as president at Netstal in 2002. I created InterTech in 2010 and was consulting for a few European companies. That kind of migrated into doing the same thing with the start-up operations for a couple different companies. Then, I went to Flex to start their precision plastics initiative. I was spending 24/7 there, and it was just untenable. So, I decided to get back out on my own again.
What’s the typical profile of a company that InterTech might deal with?
Shaffer: The profiles that I deal with are varied, from small to medium to large, mostly the bigger companies. A lot of them have their own sustainability initiative. The problem is, they don’t measure it, and they don’t really do it. Some of the brand owners, like Pepsi, they have a green initiative, and they’re going to do whatever by whatever date. But you can’t wait until the year before the goal and do something. I think they’ve already shifted their projection out twice.
When you look at that deficit between the amount of resin that’s pumped into the world and the amount that’s actually recycled, what worries you most?
Shaffer: There’s two big things that bother me. One is the plastics industry seems to be hell-bent on greenwashing the situation and just saying that plastics is not the problem. And, in a certain way, it’s not the plastic that’s the problem, it’s people throwing the plastic away that’s the problem. If it is recyclable or compostable, doesn’t necessarily mean that happens. For example, suddenly everybody likes PLA because you can compost it. Well, you can industrially compost it, but only under certain conditions. And if you don’t compost, it’s a seven, meaning it’s unrecyclable. And, to say something is compostable and degradable, the consumer thinks, “Oh, I’ll just throw it in the backyard,” and, you know, 100 years later, they’ll still have the thing in the backyard. I think the brand owners have every incentive to not tell the truth. You go to the grocery store, and you see a plastic fruit container with a label that says it’s recyclable. And when you really look at it, it’s really not because the only way you can get that shelf life is with an oxygen barrier. There is an alternative to that. I try to tell brand owners, “Here’s the solution. I can show you a way to make a shelf-stable package without using a gram of EVOH and it’d be 100 percent recyclable.” But they say, “But then we’d have to actually do shelf-life testing, and it’s going to take a year and a half.” But, at the end of the year and a half, you're going to have sustainable packaging.
Don’t say it’s recyclable unless you really recycle it, and you have a way to do it.
What’s the other problem?
Shaffer: I think the knee-jerk reaction of manufacturing is, “If we can change over to a bio-based material, that solves the problem.” But the problem is that we consume the ability of the Earth to produce bio resources by July 29, more or less. If you look at overshootday.org, you can get the raw data behind it. In the U.S., we consume our fair share of ecological resources we consume by, like, March, where some of the other countries are later on in the year. If that doesn’t scare you, something’s wrong.
What do you advise your clients?
Shaffer: One of the first things that I would say is, “If you’re in a hole, stop digging.” It should never get to the point that I incinerate a plastic part or throw it in the waste bin. Maybe you can’t make somebody make cleaner electricity, but you can use less of it. And you can help reduce post-consumer scrap. We also have to lobby for regulatory changes, and get better traceability, and a better way of marking products that can help with, “How do I identify what material it is, so it is actually recycled?” Then I usually go into, “OK, what kind of issues are there with consumables?” Because you have to buy resins, and there’s not much else you can do about it. There are issues with each of these things, but there's potential to be able to move the needle on all these. Even if you just stop bringing products into the market that are non-recyclable. We get all these wonderful, fancy packaging solutions that look really great. And then when you really look at them, you're like, “Whoa, OK, how are you going to recycle that?” Even simple products, like a tube of face cream. Nine times out of 10, the tube is HDPE, and the cap is PP. People aren’t going to take that apart and recycle the two pieces separately, and the automation system is not going to get there. Why not make the tube out of PP and then have a monomaterial?
What is the biggest takeaway for your clients?
Shaffer: I usually say, “Start with one relatively simple thing: Eliminate the waste that you have, within your own walls.” A lot goes into it, but most people find is that it’s hard to monetize something when you don’t know how much you’re wasting. It’s staggering the number of things people don’t measure. If I ask a processor, “How much material do you deliver to the hopper of Machine 17?” They’ll say, “Well, the costing department, they add in 10 percent to the material costs to be able to take care of handling, and for each startup, they add 10 percent scrap to the customer’s purchase price, so, it’s not hurting me.” That’s great that you’re not losing money generating waste. But if you think of it the other way around, how much more money would you make? The slogan that I use is just make it better.
What’s another example of what can be done?
Shaffer: One of the ideas that I’m trying to push through is to be able to set up regional re-pelletization consortiums, where there’s certain materials that, to be able to use them efficiently, you’re going to have to bring them in and regrind and pelletize. What if we had a reprocessor in Arizona and that reprocessor could collect that regrind or parts from suppliers from all over the place, and they have to participate in making sure they keep it clean, keep it marked and keep it separated? If they could re-pelletize it and sell it back, that would take care of a huge amount of waste.
How important is finding or creating an incentive for the changes you want to see?
Shaffer: It’s like it’s cheaper to pollute the planet. If the government gets involved, they’ll make sure that changes. The government is really good at influencing what we do, but they only have two levers to pull: They can ban something, or they can tax it. If we don’t do something, they politically have to at some point, and they’re going to do the wrong thing. I mean, they absolutely will do the wrong thing. But doing nothing, that’s how we got to where we’ve gotten. I’ve done enough of the economics to know it can make sense. Let’s say you’ve got a margin of 100. You invest 20 percent to reduce waste. But you’ll gain 5 percent back with productivity, and you’ll gain another 30 percent back because of efficiency, and you’ll gain another 15 from saving on consumables. You’ll gain another 3 percent because of warranty issues, and you can reduce scrap by another 4 percent. So, you pay this 20 percent, but you end up with 37 percent more than you had before, even though you’ve spent 20 percent. And you made it better.
What sort of reception do you get when you are presenting this sort of information to the industry?
Shaffer: I’ll have to let you know after the molding conference. Everybody wants to save the planet until they find out it costs money, and then they stop wanting to save the planet anymore. But I think if you can address sustainability, along with profitability, then it at least gets people to look at it the right way. Solving the problem is a little bit like boiling the ocean at this point, and people just look at it and say, “Well, there’s nothing I can do about it. That’s your job.” It’s just wrongheaded to think that way.
What gives you hope that this is going to change?
Shaffer: I am an eternal optimist, and I do think that eventually people are going to get to the understanding that, if we keep going the way that we’re going, the outcome is just not going to be good for the industry. There’s no reason in the world that plastics can’t be the leader in sustainability. We created the problem, and we created it by all of our innovation, and, so, I’m reassured that we can fix it. We all have to do this. We caused it as a group, and we have to cure it as a group.
What do you perceive as your legacy?
Shaffer: I hope they say, “Here’s a good guy that was a champion of the plastics industry. He did whatever he could to get people to do the right thing. He did a lot to try to make sure that the industry is not just sustainable from a plastics standpoint, but sustainable from a standpoint of being a citizen for the environment.” It would be a shame for people to not be able to make a good living in an industry that can be totally sustainable, but let’s just do it the right way.
