Deep ties

As the recycled materials industry has evolved, so has Greg Janson.

Janson recalls working in the industry as a 6-year-old with his brother, Matt, as early as the mid-1970s when their father owned and operated a scrapyard in New Albany, Indiana, that accepted different types of metal and paper.

A business expansion in the mid-1980s had the company, QRS Recycling, working with waste haulers while doing some commercial hauling of its own. It also operated several recycling facilities that processed commercial paper such as cardboard.

Eventually, QRS Recycling managed five commercial and residential single-stream processing plants in St. Louis; Louisville, Kentucky; and Nashville, Tennessee, before selling its St. Louis and Nashville operations to Republic Services Inc. and WM, respectively. The plant in Louisville was sold to paper manufacturing giant WestRock, which recently merged with Smurfit Kappa to form Smurfit Westrock.

Janson, who served in the Marine Corps from 1990-1998, became a manager in the business when it primarily focused on paper and held long-term feedstock contracts with a number of large paper manufacturers.

“We had a great relationship with the paper companies,” Janson says. “We were primarily a cardboard place where we had these great relationships and long-term contracts with companies like International Paper. Those companies actually invested in our growth, so they would provide capital for us to build these plants and feed their mills.”

That paper industry experience has informed Janson’s approach to plastics recycling, which QRS chose to make its primary focus starting in 2011 when it created the plastic recovery facility [PRF] model. The company, eventually known as Granite Peak Plastics, has worked with postconsumer, postindustrial and postcommercial polypropylene and polyethylene at its St. Louis facility since then, where it sorts, washes, grinds, extrudes and pelletizes material.

In 2017, the company began developing its own end market by creating a line of composite railroad ties. Eventually, that experience led to Janson’s current composite rail tie product, Triton Ties.

Designed as an upgraded alternative to traditional wood ties, Janson, the firm’s president, says Triton Ties not only last decades longer than their wood counterparts but can be installed using the same equipment.

“By 2017, we had become convinced that the postconsumer plastic reclaimer business was not our future, just selling a commodity, meaning a regrind or a repro, back into the market,” Janson says. “We took a step back and looked at the companies that were really successful in the postconsumer plastics business. They all had one thing in common: They bought a bale and they made a finished product. It became obvious that if we wanted to be in this business, we needed to eventually end up with a vertically integrated product.

“That’s kind of the evolution of a 6-year-old kid helping people unload newspapers from the trunks of their cars all the way to making a finished product now that hopefully is going to replace a lot of wood over time.”

To reflect that end market focus, the company recently changed its name to Triton Group.

In the following interview that has been edited for clarity and conciseness, Janson details Triton Group’s development of its rail ties, as well as the challenges and opportunities in the plastic recycling industry.

Recycling Today (RT): What has made your company stand out over the years?

Greg Janson (GJ): I think we’ve been very innovative over the years. We’ve continued to evolve.

We’ve stayed dedicated to doing everything we can to make this work, from being the first company to install a single-stream processing [line] in the three markets we were in—St. Louis, Louisville and Nashville—to starting commercial front-loader routes where we were servicing commercial producers of recyclable products that had never been serviced before, to expanding that into the regional [PRF] model.

Once we sold our St. Louis business, we opened up this network of plastic recovery facilities, and we were procuring in excess of 80 kilotons annually of mixed plastic that didn’t really have a home, particularly after China stopped buying.

We’ve been very innovative, and over the years we’ve been on the cutting edge, which became the bleeding edge when the fracking revolution took place. We got caught, had to close those plants down, but we’ve always been in the game. We’ve always been swinging, and we took those hits. We retrograded back to our facility in St. Louis, and we created a superior product and we’re still in the game.

RT: How has your military experience informed your approach to your business?

GJ: I came into the Marine Corps right after the first Gulf War and I got out in 1998. The peacetime Marine Corps that I experienced was different than what these guys that fought a 20-year war experienced. But even in peacetime, an experience like the Marine Corps is very transformative.

The greatest thing about the military is that it’s a leadership laboratory because you’re really just dealing with people. I was an infantry officer. So, you’re 22 years old and you have a platoon of 40 guys, and your weapon is not a plane that you’re flying or a tank that you’re driving, but it’s that group of brains. It’s a premium on leadership. You see a lot of great, inspirational leadership, a lot of selfless servant-type leadership and, frankly, you see some bad leadership and you learn from both of those.

And then there’s a whole planning process that goes on in the Marine Corps. You’re constantly given missions, and you need to plan those and task your people accordingly and trust them to get the job done. When I got out of the Marine Corps in 1998, I came from three years as an instructor, teaching a lot of younger infantry officers. I was a captain at that point. And when I came to the recycling business, it’s kind of like when you don’t know what to do, you do what you know.

It was my first or second day on the job [in St. Louis] and my brother had given me a turnover, but I didn’t really understand the business, so I literally went out and bought a map of the St. Louis market and started marking everywhere with a [recycling operation] on the map. I got it laminated and I got out the phone book and just started plotting the various folks in the city. I plotted the other recyclers as the enemy and I plotted the haulers, or potential allies. I looked at all these positions on the map and started realizing that a lot of the local recycling business, a lot of the MRF [material recovery facility] business, is driven by logistics—how close you are to the various haulers … and what capabilities do you have that can make their life easier. So, I think [military experience helped] from a planning standpoint, and then we’re trying to identify where am I strong, what are my capabilities, where are my competitors weak and then how can I exploit that?

From a servant leadership standpoint, it’s about really being there for your people and listening to them and understanding what their hopes and dreams and aspirations are and helping them get there. But also from a planning standpoint, are we going to dominate this market, and what capabilities do we need that we don’t have, or what capabilities do we have that we can use?

There’s a lot of things that translated directly to that, and you bring that tangential knowledge to whatever you’re doing now.

RT: How did the name change to Triton Group come about?

GJ: Our future is really in the Triton Tie, and the Granite Peak name was tied to a larger group. … We could’ve retained the name, but we just decided to create a name that more accurately reflects the focus of our efforts, and our plastics recycling ultimately is a supporting effort to make the best composite tie.

We want a very resilient supply chain. We will always be in the plastics recycling business. We’re going to buy bales and we’re going to use our processing expertise to make the material we need to put in the railroad tie. So, the Triton Group is just a nod to that vertical integration.

RT: Why did you decide to focus on the rail tie as an end product?

GJ: We were a plastics recycler in search of a market. The greatest problem facing the postconsumer and postindustrial plastic recycling industry is the lack of a fundamental, sustainable market, particularly when it comes to polyethylene color, polypropylene and a lot of film grades.

My experience in paper was to fulfill long-term contracts. We had 25-year contracts with paper mills, and they had to take what we produced. The drill became how we could creatively mine the waste stream to fill that contract. We didn’t have to worry about where our paper was going. We were able to do things like get into the commercial collection business. We bought front-loader trucks and put thousands of front-loader containers around our markets. We serviced all those containers and were recovering cardboard from customers that really didn’t have the ability to recycle previously. We could get creative about recovery because we had a reliable market to sell into.

That same market [with] long-term 20- or 25-year contracts just doesn’t exist in the postconsumer plastic business. When you talk to these guys about a contract, they think a year is a long contract. The fundamentals really don’t exist to invest and grow the business if you’re selling regrind or repro into the market.

When you take a look at those other companies, you say, “OK, we should vertically integrate.” So, what is a product that has tremendous volume potential, but it’s basic enough to where it also has a pretty broad envelope of plastic properties that can go into it? We set on the railroad tie. We did that in about 2017. We all got together—my brother, Matt, and some other partners we had—and we took a look at the various markets out there. And we looked at the rail tie and said, “There’s 20 million of them replaced every year, and we should make the replacements. There’s [about] 160, 170 pounds of plastic in each one, and this is a voracious market.” That’s why we settled on that.

From 2017 until now, we’ve learned a tremendous amount about how to make the tie as strong as it needs to be. But we got into it because we wanted to vertically integrate into a part that represented the conditions that our plastic experience could feed.

RT: What are the benefits of using a composite tie over wood?

GJ: The No. 1 selling point is that it’s a superior product, and that has become more pronounced as wood has become less and less resilient.

Most rail ties are made of wood [such as oak]. Previously, when old-growth forests were being harvested, the ties that were being made from that oak tree—and you can get about four ties from a mature oak tree—those lasted 20, 25 years. After all the old-growth forests had been harvested, they start harvesting newer growth. Those trees are probably 80 years old as opposed to, maybe, 150 years old. And what they found out is that new-growth hardwood, for whatever reason, is not as strong as the older hardwood. So, whereas old growth was lasting 20 to 25 years in the higher-moisture areas of the U.S., the Southeast and the Pacific Northwest, these new-growth wood ties are only lasting about eight to 12 years.

The railroads have a problem, and they need a superior product. So, No. 1, the tie we’re putting on the market is superior to the wood tie that it’s replacing and, No. 2, a wood tie, in order to even hit that eight-to-12-year mark, has to be soaked in creosote, which is a petroleum-based tar that acts as a preservative on that wood. That creosote has some environmental liability. No creosote has to go into the composite tie. You get a superior product, you have no environmental liability and, on the flip side, you also have a great home for plastic that is difficult to recycle.

It’s kind of a win all around. It’s more expensive to go with [the composite tie] initially, but it’s going to last 50-plus years and save the railroads millions per mile over that lifespan. It can be [installed] with the exact same equipment that’s used to put in wood ties, and it can also be interspersed with wood. It does not have to go in as a system altogether. You could [install] five wood ties, then three composite, then four wood ties, then two composites, for example.

RT: What types of plastic are used to create the rail ties?

GJ: We’ve worked really hard to maintain a wide envelope of plastic we can use, but the plastic in the tie is 100 percent olefins.

If the tie was 100 percent HDPE [high-density polyethylene], that would be fine. But because of some other ingredients we use, we have a pretty high tolerance for polypropylene, and we can also use LDPE [low-density polyethylene].

What we wanted to do, [instead of] really narrowing the specification and saying we need a 0.5-1.2 melt of HDPE only, we wanted to [be able to] use a 0.7-5 melt HDPE. We can use a pretty good percentage of polypropylene and we a large amount of LDPE if we wanted to. If you’re going to scale this to 1 million-plus ties, you really need to be able to access all those streams that make sense.

The other key ingredient is glass fiber. Virgin glass fiber acts as a reinforcing agent for thermal plastics. You have to think of it like you think of rebar and concrete, because if you were to make interstates with just concrete, they wouldn’t last very long. You’ve got to use that rebar for reinforcement. We use a significant percentage of virgin glass fibers.

The definition of a composite is two or more materials combined into a distinct third material or unique material. That’s what this composite is. There’s also carbon black that makes the tie black and acts as a UV blocker. And there are some other additives at a small percentage.

Currently we operate our prototype line, which is very close to what we would use to duplicate [production], and that line could do about 85,000 ties a year if it was running full-on.

RT: Should more plastics recyclers consider developing an end product? Is that where the industry is headed?

GJ: If we really want to scale recovery, we have to do something different. I like to say that plastic recycling works, but it’s not working.

I’m what’s called a “demand hawk.” I know by firsthand experience that if you do not have that foundational demand, you don’t have a business.

We are going up against all this virgin plastic that’s being produced, and part of that virgin production is wide-spec because it’s just produced as part of that process. About 7, 8 [or] 9 percent of all virgin production ends up as wide-spec; it’s not quite perfect. That floods the market to the molders, and they’re going to use that instead of using recycled plastic. For years, recycled plastic has been a one-trick pony—cheaper than virgin—and cheap enough that some molders will put up with the difficulties of using postconsumer plastic. I like to say it’s hard to compete with perfect, which is virgin and wide-spec, when the price of perfect keeps getting cheaper.

Without anything changing, I don’t think that’s a viable business to scale. I don’t think we’re ever going to come off of the percentages that we’re on now and, in fact, I think we’re probably going to see a regression.

What needs to change? The legislation going on now is very promising. It’s all got to be focused on that. Some people ask if it’s chicken or egg, is it demand or supply, and I say it’s not a chicken or egg. Demand has to come first. For years, there’s been way too much focus on supply. [For example, someone might say,] ‘We must double the amount of polypropylene collected.’ OK, what are we going to do with it? Because there’s not the foundational, sustainable market for all this polypropylene to go into. That’s trying to be addressed with legislation.

The problem with that is there’s a quality gap between what brands want and what is available at scale. [Brands] want FDA- [Food and Drug Administration-] grade, colorable [resin], and that’s doing fine. PET’s [polyethylene terephthalate’s] doing OK. HDPE natural is doing great because it’s FDA-grade and colorable. But, again, it’s really that HDPE color, polypropylene and some film grades that are struggling, which is the majority of the volume found in the postconsumer stream.

The other thing that’s promising is chemical or advanced recycling. The promise of chemical recycling is that it will provide that voracious demand the industry needs to increase recovery. That’s got its own challenges. But I do believe there are technologies out there and there are markets that are starting to develop that are going to scale, though it’s not going to look like what people actually thought it would look like.

When this [process] was originally talked about, it was [described as being] able to take all your plastic, throw it all together and give it to us and oil will come out the other end. Now, as we’ve gotten into it, what we’ve realized is that it’s not nearly that easy. It’s going to take an input material that’s not a whole lot different than what mechanical recycling needs, but there are some differences. The differences are primarily that chemical recycling is not nearly as dependent on the properties of what’s going in. You can combine polypropylene, polyethylene, colors, various properties and melt flows. All those things really don’t matter in chemical recycling.

I’m looking for a scenario that’s going to allow us to get creative in extracting the plastic out of the waste stream because we have this reliable, foundational market to sell it into.

RT: We’ve seen some brands set 2025 goals that have not been met or have been pushed back. How can they close the gap and how should they engage with companies like yours?

GJ: I’ve been pretty vocal about this. I think the goals were made without a full understanding of what would need to happen for them to meet those goals. I think the vision of the goals is pretty narrow.

When I really lose my patience is when these companies blame the recycling industry for not producing the supply they need. I think the change needs to come from two directions. I think the definition of circularity needs to expand.

What people love is a customer-facing product going back to a customer-facing product, and they think that’s full circularity. This is represented most effectively by the PET bottle going back into the PET bottle.

But that’s one of the few products that that can happen with. It’s an FDA-grade monosource that can be turned back into an FDA-grade product and you don’t have to deal with colors. If you walk down your soda aisle in the grocery store, you walk down your water bottle aisle, you’re going to see mainly clear PET. If I want to look at polyethylene and I walk down my detergent aisle, I don’t see any clear bottles. I see Tide orange, Gain green, Downy blue. Brands have equity in their color, so it’s important to them. Then you also have the fact that those HDPE bottles are not FDA-grade. The postconsumer stream gets all of those, and you end up with this product that is not colorable and it’s not FDA-grade, and it’s difficult to find a home for that. Those HDPE bottles are rarely going back into that same product.

Where that could be expanded is if brands think of circularity as their entire supply chain. I like to talk about yogurt cups. That white yogurt cup is probably not going to go back on the shelves as a white yogurt cup. That’s a primary package. A secondary package would be a crate made out of that yogurt cup. And then the tertiary packaging is the pallet those crates are stacked on, and that could also be made of that postconsumer polypropylene yogurt cup.

Instead of just looking at primary packaging, I believe the brands need to expand their vision to look at secondary and tertiary packaging. They need to scour their entire logistics chain to see where it’s possible to use the packaging they’re putting into the waste stream. We need to expand those goals. We’re going to be successful when the marketing guy and the molder and the recycler and the sustainability representative and the production person are all sitting around the same table, figuring out how to use PCR [postconsumer resin]. Collaboration has to take place and, ultimately, that collaboration needs to result in long-term contracts.

When a brand says the PCR isn’t there for them to use, my question is, how many contracts have you signed? How much collaboration have you tried to do with recyclers and molders together to see what you can use in your full complement of materials that you buy to support your product?

We were able to creatively mine the paper stream because we had 25-year contracts and we had a customer willing to work with us. In order for that to duplicate itself in plastic, we need a commitment, because you can’t go out and get the capital necessary to invest in the equipment that’s required unless you have that long-term contract.

We’ve always got this looming shadow of wide-spec that’s hanging over the whole market because molders can seamlessly switch back and forth between recycled and virgin [resins]. That’s a fundamental problem. We’ll start to see success when we start to see long-term contracts signed. We would like to bring that stability to the market.

RT: What are some things you wish the general public better understood about what you do?

GJ: There are a lot of people employed by [the plastics industry]. If recycling wasn’t a real business, that wouldn’t be the case.

What I would tell people is, by and large, what you’re putting in your curbside bin is being recycled, and I’m talking [more than] 90 percent of it is going where it’s supposed to go. I’m not saying recovery is 90 percent; there’s a lot of stuff that can’t be recovered in that mix. But by and large, it’s going where it needs to go.

Nobody’s making a business model of collecting recycling and then dumping it in a landfill. I would tell people that plastic recycling works, but it’s also not working because we do not have the economic fundamentals of long-term demand that would support investment into the market.

If people really want to impact recycling, they need to continue to do what they’re doing, continue to put the material in the bin, and then talk to the brands and ask why they’re not using more PCR. Why aren’t you signing more contracts? Why aren’t you collaborating with [recyclers]? Plastic recycling is doing its absolute best on shoestring margins to continue to do what we’re doing.

Recycling works, but it’s just not working the way it needs to work.

RT: Are there any noteworthy industry developments to look out for in the coming years?

GJ: I want to tip my hat to Eastman. I think when it comes to the chemical recycling space, they’ve done a tremendous job with their [process for] colored PET, and they’ve been a real player in that. They made a real commitment, and they have it up and running. That’s been neat to see.

I think EPR [extended producer responsibility] is going to have a tremendous impact. It’s going to inject some capital into the industry, but we have to be smart about the way we use that capital. I’m very encouraged that EPR legislation contains the necessity for responsible end markets. We need to understand that reclaimers are not end markets, reclaimers are a middle spot to eventually sell to molders. It’s the molder that’s making the product that’s the end market. But I like the fact that responsible end markets are a part of the discussion for EPR legislation. I think that’s really important.

I think APR [the Washington-based Association of Plastic Recyclers] is doing great work on demand and their staff is doing great work on working with states and identifying products that are targeted toward the problem polymers that need better markets.

We’re starting to see a little bit of an alignment of legislation and industry, and then you throw in a little social consciousness and you can get a real systemic change. I see that happening. Of course, it can be very slow.

Then, the great promise out there is chemical recycling. It’s with the potential for demand that it could actually bring to the marketplace.

RT: What would your advice be for an industry newcomer?

GJ: Don’t think people are going to buy something because of the environmental benefits of it. It has to make sense economically, then it has to make sense performance-wise. If you have an inferior product that costs more, that’s not going to be a business model that’s going to get past the CFO.

You need a product that solves a problem by using the positive properties of plastic to replace inferior materials. That’s where the success is. You’ve got to use the positive properties of postconsumer plastic to replace inferior materials, and when you look at the companies that have been successful, that’s exactly what they’ve done. It’s composite decking replacing cedar, plastic drainpipe replacing clay and steel, polypropylene paint cans replacing metal, PET carpet replacing wool.

It comes down to that business case, and the recycling industry has it. If we can get people thinking about executing on that business case more, we can make this industry successful. But don’t think people are going to buy your product just because it’s better for the environment.

The author is associate editor of Recycling Today and can be reached at cvoloschuk@gie.net.