MBA Polymers

MBA Polymers is a recycling company with operations globally that recovers plastics from waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) and auto-shredder residue from end-of-life automobiles (ELV).





== Company history ==

MBA Polymers was founded in 1994 in California by Laurence "Trip" Allen III and Mike Biddle. Allen and Biddle were coworkers at Dow Chemical in Walnut Creek, CA where Allen developed a novel approach to recycling packaging plastics. The pair left Dow in 1992 and initially wanted to prove that it was possible to recycle plastics from complex packaging waste streams but they ultimately focused on durable goods recovery. The company now specializes in recycling durable goods from waste streams such as waste electrical and electronic equipment and auto-shredder residue. MBA Polymers raised money to develop its technology for extracting and recycling plastic from many stakeholders. In 2017 Elephant Equity, a private equity investor based in Munich with focus on cleantech activities, has taken over 100% of the shares.





== Development of the recycling process ==

The key innovation of the MBA Polymers approach was that a mixed waste plastic stream could be sorted into usable pure plastic varieties. Recovery of durable plastic products in earlier processes required that each type of plastic part be identified and sorted by hand into separate batches. The sorted parts were ground and could then be pelletized for reuse but it was costly and difficult to acquire enough of any given type of plastic to justify the expense.