Fresh Perspective

Raj Bagaria

Director at GDB International Inc.

For Raj Bagaria, finding a career in the recycling industry has been a lifelong journey.

His father, Sunil Bagaria, founded New Brunswick, New Jersey-based recycling company GDB International Inc. in 1993, which allowed Raj to grow up around his family’s facilities and warehouses.

“It’s been very much a part of who I am growing up around our company,” he says. “People who I now have the privilege of working with are people who have been there since I was born.”

Although he always intended to work at GDB in some capacity, Bagaria accepted a position with Dallas-based Boston Consulting Group to ensure he had different experiences upon graduating from the University of Pennsylvania.

"It’s been very much a part of who I am growing up around our company.”

“I had a really great team that I worked with there, made a lot of very nice connections, and that really set me up for coming back to the family business with the right set of tools, the right mindset and the right aptitude to take on a little bit more of a senior role,” he says.

After two years in Texas, Bagaria returned to New Jersey and accepted a director role at GDB. Today, he is responsible for overseeing the company’s plastics and postconsumer recycled plastics operations, which has rebranded as GDB Circular, and promoting the development of the company’s plastics recycling facilities.

When it comes to navigating some of the unique challenges of working for a family business, Bagaria says he’s learned to value the disciplined and slightly more conservative nature with which GDB operates.

“Coming in as a young buck in the company, I was maybe aggressively trying to push new ideas and have the company evolve a little bit faster than may have otherwise naturally been the course,” he explains. “Over time, one of the things I learned to appreciate is the prudence that comes with slow decision-making. That’s a value that a lot of our long-term partners, customers [and] suppliers appreciate in our business.”

In the following interview, Bagaria discusses regulations affecting plastics recycling and the roles of artificial intelligence and optical sorters in the industry.

Recycling Today (RT): What does the plastics recycling regulatory landscape look like right now?

Raj Bagaria (RB): A lot is uncertain right now. There are a lot of big mountains that are moving in the industry, and a lot of traction is being gained in legislative arenas around the country, predominantly state legislatures. The few that come to mind are, of course, California, Oregon and … Minnesota. EPR [extended producer responsibility] is rampant. It’s growing pretty quickly, and it’s getting a lot of eyes from our industry—not just in plastics, by the way, also metals and paper. Any notable recycler is certainly thinking about EPR far more than they were one year ago, whether voluntarily or involuntarily.

RT: What emerging technology do you have your eye on?

RB: I’ve had multiple calls [recently] about using artificial intelligence to map out and identify the contamination levels and the breakdown of feedstock bales coming into our facility. This is something I think can help bring some great visibility to suppliers and recyclers and help the recycler, which would be us as a service provider, give better feedback. ... That’s No. 1.

No. 2 is we see a lot of advancement from optical sorting for flakes and for pieces of film using pneumatic and RGB- [red, green and blue-] or infrared-enabled sorters. That has come a long way and is almost commonplace in most recycling facilities.