GREEN ATTRACTS INVESTMENT DOLLARS: If you have a solid idea for anything green or clean, and it involves recycling plastics or making bio-based products, there are plenty of investment dollars available. "There are so many dollars being invested in the clean-tech space right now, that if you have the right team and the right idea, you can find investors if you look in the right space," said Eric Koester, a lawyer in the Seattle office of San Francisco-based law firm Heller Ehrman LLP, which claimed to be one of the top 25 U.S. law firms for merger and acquisition activity in 2006, based on its number of deals. Koester spoke at the Global Plastics Environmental Conference, held March 6-7 in Orlando and sponsored by the Society of Plastics Engineers in Brookfield, CT. According to Koester, investment in clean technology is no longer a "niche play," but a mainstream venture-capital market because of growing bipartisan political support and consumers' renewed appetite for Earth-friendly products. "There are a lot of investment dollars in areas such as California, Oregon, Washington, Wisconsin and the Northeast, where laws are environmentally friendly and support clean technology," said Koester. "That is where investors lean toward putting their investment dollars. It is more of a pull than a push, particularly in California and the Silicon Valley." U.S. and European clean technology venture-capital investments topped $3.6 billion in 2006, according to Cleantech Venture Network LLC in Ann Arbor, MI. That's a 44% increase over the $2.5 billion invested in clean technology in 2005 and more than twice the $1.7 billion spent in 2004. Plastics News, 03/26/07, online.
Seven years ago, second-generation owner Ron Greitzer was searching for a way to keep the family recycling business thriving. The textile cut-and-sew companies that long had supplied Los Angeles Fiber Co. with cloth for recycling had moved their operations to Mexico. He still remembers walking through the plant in Vernon, CA, admonishing a worker for tossing a carpet into the recycling machine. "'You can't do that!' I screamed," Greitzer said. But when the worker laughed and said he'd been doing that for 15 years, Greitzer realized the company had found the new feedstock it needed. "We had to retool all our machines, but we knew we had a plentiful feedstock, because there are 5 billion pounds of it going into landfills each year." Today, the company diverts 100 million pounds of carpet each year from landfills -- enough, Greitzer said, to fill the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, CA, three times. Los Angeles Fiber was one of two winners in plastics recycling and one of nine environmental award winners Global Plastics Environmental Conference, held March 5-7 in Orlando. The conference is organized by the Society of Plastics Engineers Plastics Environmental Division. Plastics News, 03/28/07, online.
If there was any doubt as to how quickly the issues of sustainability and bio-based resins have shot to the front of plastics firms' agendas, the Global Plastics Environmental Conference erased it. Despite competing sessions, nearly every presentation on bio-based and biodegradable materials was standing-room-only and elicited a barrage of questions focused on how well they work and where efforts to bring such products to market stand. Company after company repeated the same mantra -- that they are working to develop products from renewable resources or on projects designed to improve end-of-life product recycling, or both. Plastics News, 03/26/07, online.