Meet Michelle
“Every day I come to work, I know that what I’m doing has the potential to make a huge impact on this world.”
Michelle is tackling an important challenge: stubbornly low plastic recycling rates. Today, less than 10% of plastics are recycled, with the remainder likely going to landfills or incineration. She’s working to change that.
Advanced Recycling Can Simplify Plastic Recycling
“As the advanced recycling program manager at Exxon Mobil, I’m working in the Houston community with our collaboration partners to try to increase plastic recycle rates by leveraging our advanced recycling technology.”
What’s advanced recycling?
“We’re making advancements in recycling. The technology we have today, which I’m super excited about, allows us to transform hard-to-recycle plastic.”
“Traditional mechanical recycling is limited and focused, for example, on milk jugs, water bottles, rigid plastic containers.” (Mechanical recycling basically melts used plastic and reforms it for reuse.)
“With advanced recycling, we’re able to expand into films, artificial turf, food packaging, and different types of plastics. So we’re no longer limited. That’s going to enable our communities to take a wider range of the plastics that they’re using today and put them in the recycling bin.”
If successful, this approach can help significantly improve plastic recycling rates.
Michelle is part of a local collaboration working to simplify plastic recycling through expanding the use of a technology known as pyrolysis.
“The harder to recycle plastics that typically today can’t be mechanically recycled will be brought to a facility like ours in Baytown where we will thermally break down that material into its molecular building blocks. And then we can use that as raw material to make a range of valuable products, from fuels to lubricants to high-performance chemicals and plastics.”
Sourcing Used Plastic in Houston
Michelle helps to find more sources of used plastics that can be recycled.
“There’s a variety of places that we collect from. We source from individual companies today that don’t have a home for, let’s say, their plastic wrap that they use in their packaging. We even have partnerships with companies that have artificial turf that we are recycling, as well.”
But the source she’s most excited about is close to home: The City of Houston has set up multiple neighborhood collection points where people can drop off all plastics.
“The city is collecting all plastics, all numbers, all symbols. The program is called ‘Bag It and Bring It’. Bag all your plastic, bring it and drop it off. This material will be collected for inventory at a new plastics sorting facility that’s located right here in the city of Houston and will eventually become the material that is fed to our Baytown advanced recycling facility.”
The simple message to the people of Houston: If you can collect it, we will try to recycle it.
“It’s in the early stages, but how cool is it to be a part of something that has this potential? And how cool is it to be a part of a company that is committed to making it a success?”
The Exciting Potential of Advanced Recycling
And her community is getting excited.
“When we go out into the community and have conversations about what people can do differently now because of the advanced recycling capability, you see so much excitement. I’ve even had folks say, ‘I’ve been praying for this.’ People are coming to us and asking, ‘When is this coming to my neighborhood? When can I put all my plastics in a bag that absolutely says we’re doing the right thing?”
While today Michelle is focused on Houston, her company’s sights are well beyond the horizon.
“This pilot program that we’re modelling in Houston is designed to show how we can work together in partnership with the municipality and the plastics value chain to leverage our recycling facilities that we’re building.”
“This is not something that every municipality can do today, but our hope is that with this model, we can show how it can be done. And it can be used as a blueprint for other municipalities.”
Passion for Recycling
Michelle doesn’t just talk a good game at work. She also prides herself on modeling sustainable behavior at home… for her husband and two kids.
“I want my family to understand the value of recycling and how important it is that we protect the environment. It makes me excited to know that I’m able to instill a passion in them and help them see, ‘Hey, we can do this.”
And she extends that passion beyond her family to local school kids. For a very practical reason.
“One of the key components of recycling is education. We believe that educating the youth of today is extremely important to create the recyclers of tomorrow.”
You’re right, Michelle. What you’re doing “has the potential to make a huge impact on this world.”
We wish Michelle continued success.
