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Biodegradable Plastics: From Cradle to Cradle Transcript
Highlights
Introduction
Justin Crane: Good afternoon, and welcome to today’s internet web seminar, “Biodegradable Plastics, From Cradle to Cradle.” This seminar is sponsored by the EPA’s RCC Web Academy, Recycling and Solid Waste Management Educational Series. I’m Justin Crane with the EPA Contractor MDB, Incorporated, and I will be handling the technical aspects of today’s seminar.
While we’re waiting for others to log on, I would like to cover a few housekeeping items. By now you should have the GoToWebinar application running and should see the welcome presentation on your screen. If you are having technical difficulties using GoToWebinar, you can go to www.gotowebinar.com 
and click on support and frequently asked questions in the upper left-hand corner of the page. If you are not able to use the GoToWebinar application to view the presentation it can be downloaded from the RCC Web Academy web page.
For those of you joining us via the phone lines there may be a short delay of the seminar visuals. Presenters will pause briefly in between slides to compensate for the delay. The presentation slides will be advanced by the presenter. To ask a question, please use the GoToWebinar control panel and type your question in the area that says questions. Click send to submit it to the moderator.
After today’s seminar, there will be a short survey. Please take a moment to fill out the survey. Your feedback is vital to helping us to ensure we are providing the highest quality speakers and information to meet your needs.
Today’s seminar will be moderated by Laura Moreno. Laura Moreno is an Organics Expert from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Region 9, which covers California, Nevada, Arizona, Hawaii, and the Pacific Islands. Laura focuses primarily on increasing capacity for organics recycling and anaerobic digestion. She works to divert food scraps from landfills, which currently account for 18% of the national waste stream.
With that, we are ready to start the seminar. I will now turn the time over to the seminar moderator, Laura Moreno. Laura?
Laura's Introduction of Speakers
Laura Moreno: Hello, everybody. Greetings and welcome to the July 2009 edition of the Resource Conservation Challenge Web Academy. We are happy to have all of you joining us. This 90-minute monthly education series is hosted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to provide training and a networking opportunity to state and local governments, nongovernmental organizations, and other stakeholders.
As Justin mentioned, today’s topic is on readily biodegradable or compostable plastic. Over the past few decades, we have seen a rapid rise in plastics generation, from less than 1% of total generation in 1960 to 12.1% in 2007. The U.S. generated almost 31 million tons of plastic in 2007. While many types of plastics are recycled, some plastics are difficult to recycle where markets do not exist. As a result, plastics make-up approximately 17% of the total waste stream.
Containers and packaging make-up the largest category of plastics. For these applications compostable plastic technologies have emerged to replace fossil fuel based plastics with plant based plastics. Today we will hear from experts who will provide a cradle-to-cradle perspective on compostable plastics, from extraction to consumer use, to recycling.
We have three knowledgeable speakers lined up. The first speaker is Dan Sawyer from NatureWorks. Dan will describe how the largest manufacturer of biobased plastics is researching the life cycle impact of their product. He will also explain NatureWorks’ role in facilitating the recovery of biobased plastics.
Following his presentation, we will hear from Karl Bruskotter from the City of Santa Monica. Karl will provide the local government perspective on compostable plastics and highlight the bioplastic certification and labeling.
For the third and final presentation, we will hear from Dave Baldwin from Community Recycling and Resource Recovery. Dave will describe how compost facilities manage bioplastics and how integrating bioplastics can affect compost quality.
After each speaker, we will pause and answer one or two burning questions. We will also have time at the end of the session for your questions. Thanks, again, for participating. Now, let’s get started.
Dan's Bio
Our first speaker is Dan Sawyer. Mr. Sawyer is currently the Technical Director for Asia Pacific and Japan and serves on the NatureWorks’ LLC’s End of Life Recovery Team. Effective August 1st, 2009 Dan will assume the role of Managing Director in Asia Pacific leading both technical and commercial teams in Asia.
Since joining the early cargo corn milling project producing PLA on a semi commercial scale in 1995, Mr. Sawyer has worked in most technical positions in the organization as he and the project have grown into the business they are today.
Mr. Sawyer held roles in quality assurance and production before joining the Applications Development Group. In 2006 Mr. Sawyer led the Bottle Technical Development Team and also the implementation of the Beverage Marketing Plan in North America. Mr. Sawyer holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota.
Now, we’re going to hand it over to Mr. Sawyer.
Dan's Presentation
Dan Sawyer: Thanks, Laura. And just one second as I get my presentation up for all to see. Of course, we start with the EPA disclaimer, and you can read through that at your own leisure. We’re presenting on our own accord, and not necessarily representing the EPA’s opinions or endorsements, but hopefully we’re in line and lined up with what they’re trying to accomplish at the EPA.
My presentation was put together by a college Brian Glasbrenner who couldn’t join on the webinar today. So I apologize for that switch but we work very closely together so hopefully I can present everything that he has put together in clear fashion. And put to light some facts and fictions that exist around our Ingeo biopoloymer, the trade name that we use in the industry. And thanks again for everybody thats joined in. I see over 200 people. So it’s great to have everybody in the audience and hopefully we can shed some light on things and have a great discussion today.
First of all, what in Ingeo, our trade name, again, is not -- it’s not an oxo-biodegradable plastic. You may have heard quite a bit about these products that have come into the industry recently. It’s not an additive that is put into a traditional polymer and out there to promote degradation of traditional polymers, breaking them into smaller pieces. That’s what oxo-biodegradable plastics are, and there’s some varieties of those that exist. We’re certainly not in that category.
We’re also not an additive with organic materials. Some of the early attempts at degradable plastics were truly degradable materials, like starches or other degradable plastics, such as EVA or PVOH, that were blended in with traditional plastics. And what we’re about is really something quite different.
What we do is we take carbon dioxide and water and through the use of plants -- well, actually, we’re not doing it, mother nature is doing it, produce the plant starches that are used in our production process of the raw material.
Our parent company is Cargill Incorporated, and they extract the sugars or the starches from the plants and from those sugars they produce through fermentation processes, lactic acid, the same lactic acid that’s present in your body when your muscles are sore or in yogurt when it’s tangy.
We take the lactic acid at NatureWorks as our starting raw material and preliminarize it, making it into the plastic resin chips that we sell to our customers, that are over on the right side of the screen. It looks like much other traditional plastics look in the industry. And then we sell those plastic resin beads or chips to our customers who produce through a wide range of processes fiber and packaging, as well as food service applications represented in the middle. And we try to link together our story and our production lifecycle with their end products through the use of our brand in Ingeo.
One of the questions that come up, as we look at the next slide, is well, what is the plant material that you’re using today? And our production facility is in Blair, Nebraska, so the most readily available plant sugar is corn today. And so the question comes up is, well, you’re trying to produce a very large-scale polymer, how much corn are you going to use up, and how can we supply enough corn for both feeding people and producing the bioplastic?
And our production facility, we’ve just recently completed an expansion to 140,000 tons, 300 million pounds a year, which sounds quite large, but when you look at the corn supply in the U.S. it actually turns out to be pretty small in comparison with biofuels, with ethanol, which accounts for roughly 25% of the use of corn today in the U.S.
Ultimately, when we get to our full production capacity, we’re not running quite at full scale today, although we have the capacity online, we’ll account for 0.02% for our Ingeo biopolymer of the U.S. corn crop. Our footprint is quite small. It’ll be even at full capacity less than 0.05% of the global corn production.
Another question that we commonly get is when you use corn as a feedstock what is the efficiency of conversion, how many kilos of corn do you use or pounds of corn do you use for every pound of PLA production?
And the answer is 2.8 pounds per pound of PLA production, and that sounds a little shocking, it sounds very inefficient at first, but when you start to look down and break-down the anatomy of the corn as a feedstock it starts to shed some light on things.
We come from the starch portion of the corn kernel, and that’s about 65% of the corn kernel. That starch is also used for fructose, for sweeteners in your sodas, Coke and Pepsi both, fermentation derived materials of all types including ethanol.
When you look at the other 35% of the corn kernel, the germ, the hull, and the husk, and the fiber, the various components, those are also utilized by our parent company, Cargill, and I’ll break that down in the next slide in how they go about and use it. It’s really quite a highly utilized kernel of corn when it’s all broken down and used.
When you look at it, on the next slide, we ask what can you get from one bushel of corn? And a bushel of corn is about 56 pounds, if I remember right, or 65, I get those two mixed up. From that bushel of corn 1.6 pounds of corn oil can be extracted, along with, as we’re going down on the left side, 13.5 pounds of gluten feed, which is used as an animal food primarily. So that’s how it really does enter the food stream, and 2.6 pounds of gluten meal, which is really high in protein, can be used for amino acids or poultry feed even.
In addition to that, from the starch portion you can produce either 32 pounds of starch, a variety of end uses listed there, 33 pounds of sweetener, if you’re looking for a quick pick me up in the afternoon after lunch, beverages and soft drinks. Or if you look at the biofuels, 2.7 gallons of ethanol or alcohol of other varieties, or alternatively 22.4 pounds of the biopolymer.
So it’s not just the biopolymer that’s being produced, it’s the biopolymer and animal feed in a variety of different products. So ultimately if we produce more of our polymer it requires more corn going through the mill but it also produces more feed as a side product. Just to put it in reference, the U.S. uses 1 billion pounds of starch just in corrugated paper every year.
And so going on to the next slide, ultimately we’ll look at other feedstocks. People question the use of corn as a feedstock, and for us we view it as a step along the way. It’s a readily available sugar source that people know how to ferment and use as a feedstock for fermentation derived material, like lactic acid.
Down the road we view biomass as a feedstock. The next generation really will be driven, though, by biofuels because they account for so much of the biomass or biobased product production. So we’re going to not direct the way the industry and the farming industry goes, but we really believe that we can benefit from it.
We’re well positioned to take advantage as those biofuels mandated by U.S. laws start to demand the use of biomass, we’re well positioned to apply fermentation technology and produce our material from those kinds of biobased, biomass feedstocks that aren’t the part of the corn that’s used today as a feedstock.
So in the next slide, as we look at it, mentioned by Laura earlier on, we look at the impact, and what we call it is an eco profile. And that’s really the cradle, if you will, to what we call our factory gate, so cradle to pellets produced.
We took a snapshot on the lower left, starting in 2005, looking at our production system, and every input and output going back as far as we can, back to the planting of the corn and the tilling of the earth and everything included. We took a snapshot in 2005 as we were up and running and understood our commercial process fairly well.
At the same time, we were already working on improvements to the process, being that it’s a brand-new process. And in 2009 we’ve really started to implement our next generation of technology based on a whole package of technology improvements, starting with a new lactic acid technology that was implemented this year and had quite a big impact on our overall eco profile.
We’re already looking at the future and what that means to us in terms of new feedstocks, the biomass feedstocks, further process optimization, we’re less than a decade old here. And then ultimately onsite renewable energy as a possibility. And these are all things that we’re considering as we look at sites for our second plant. We’ve already started looking at those because of the time that it takes to site and build a new manufacturing facility.
So when we look at that eco profile we look at what we call greenhouse gas emissions as the net, and this slide is slightly different from the one that was posted on the website. I don’t know if we can get that corrected in the future but, and the difference is jus something to clarify where we’re at today with our current technology.
And what we look at is the kilograms of CO2 equivalents per kilogram of polymer in terms of greenhouse gas emissions compared to the other polymers that are out there in the marketplace, and where you can see is when we took that first snapshot in 2005 we were right there competitive with some of the best polymers that have been optimized over time in terms of their greenhouse gas emissions.
When we took that step forward in 2009 just with the technology we’ve implemented already we’ve moved ahead to just a 1.3 kilogram impact in terms of greenhouse gases, and we already have a good line of sight on what it would take to get to 0.8 kilograms of CO2 equivalents per kilogram of polymer.
The next slide puts it in another perspective, when we look at energy use, nonrenewable energy use, specifically. So that doesn’t include the energy of the sun that’s input into growing the corn but looks at the process energy because, of course, all the other traditional polymers based on petroleum based resources don’t use solar energy or renewable energy as a big part of their total energy.
So when we looked at ours we were already a pretty big step improved in 2005 over traditional plastics. The implementation of our current technology dropped by about 16% and, again, we have a line of sight to a much improved impact in terms of energy use just in making those resin chips or polymer as it’s produced coming out of our factory.
On the next slide, we’re on slide 12 for all of those that are checking the numbers at the bottom. A question that we get is you’re using a plant resource, doesn’t that use quite a bit of water in growing the corn that you’re using today?
And it does have an impact in terms of water use. What we benefit from, actually, is that the corn that we’re using comes from an area of about 100-mile radius around our factory, and in that particular area there’s very little external irrigation. Most of the irrigation comes from natural rainfall in the region.
When we look at the total water use we were not as good as some of the best polymers that have been optimized in the industry when we first took our snapshot in 2005. As we look forward into 2009 and identifying some of these improvements that we’re looking at, we can get down there already below the best in the industry in terms of water use, even including that irrigation water that the other polymers based on oil and petroleum resources don’t include.
Now, in the next slide you can carry that forward and not just look at the resin production, but also look downstream at parts produced by the resin. And this is where it carries forward into some of our converter base, and that’s where we extend the term from eco profile to lifecycle assessment when you start to look all the way through the material type, the clam shell weight.
In this example, like a solid clam shell, including the end of life treatment after the consumer takes the package home, uses it, what happens to it after that. And the location turns out to be fairly significant because we’re shipping our polymer wherever we’re going. We don’t have localized plants at this point, we hope to in the future, so that’s taken into account in this assessment.
And people really have wondered, well, what about you compared in the past to virgin PET, what about the comparison to a recycled material, like recycled PET? So we included that in this comparison that we did.
As you look at the next slide that popped up, slide 14, we compared with, starting with virgin PET, that’s the zero percent rPET, and we compared on an exact identical weight clam shell, and then factored in the use of 50% rPET and even 100% rPET.
And when you look at these climate change results, again, the CO2 equivalents per this case a thousand clam shells, a basis that a food service provider would use them on, it’s a pretty significant improvement with today’s process.
Again, this is on the basis of the same weight clam shell. In reality this converter, and this is a real life example, was able to lightweight through the stiffness of our material and also through lower density than PET they were able to lightweight by 25%, so you can imagine where that bar would go if it was only 75% on the Ingeo 2009 versus where it is in this fabricated example here, where they’re predicted to be the same weight. In reality they weren’t.
Again, the same thing with nonrenewable energy use. Pretty comparable to 100% rPET on the basis of a same weight, but again in reality this example was about 75% of the same weight, 25% weight reduction. But we wanted to give it the worst case scenario comparison at exactly the same weight. And that depends case by case, whether it can be light weighted to that extent of 25% or not really depends on the actual article.
The reason for rPET, and we’re not trying to discourage recycling, we believe it’s a very good thing. If you’re going to use PET you should use rPET included in the article as much as you can. The point is is even 100% rPET clam shell, the rPET is actually coming primarily from bottles, and those bottles are using a significant virgin input so, thus, the impact of using 100% is not as much as one might expect in terms of a reduction of energy use or greenhouse gas emissions.
So with our material in Ingeo, what do we look to do and what’s our end of life vision? We’re consistent with the EPA looking to stay on a journey towards zero waste, and it’s not something that we can do overnight. Our material doesn’t give you an overnight solution, but we believe that it can be a step along the way. We want to keep our material out of landfills. They’re filling up all over the country. We have lots of land space but that’s not the best use of that land space, in our opinion.
Composting is desirable to us, especially for food contaminated packaging. Hopefully, we can play a part in helping with this green waste diversion, and it’s not going to be simple, as you’ll probably hear with some of the subsequent presentations. But we believe our material can be a tool in the tool cabinet in that direction.
Recovery as a bottle, when we look to go into bottle applications, we want to end up in the same application or higher end use applications, not down cycling, as you will, as the products recycle. The ideal for our material in a Ingeo bottle is recycling through hydrolysis, and I’ll talk a little bit more about that. Back to the feed material, feedstock, lactic acid, ultimately going through further processing back into virgin quality and Ingeo resin. We’ll look to leverage future innovation and technology here to find a better choice for our planet, our business, and a better way of life going down the road. It’s a journey to us.
When we talk about the end of life solutions or waste management, we wanted to put together a diagram that shows exactly what happens. And what we quickly found is it’s very complex. When you look at this next slide, on 17, that I’ve put up here, the different colors represent a different sort of waste streams, if you will. The blue recycling, red is landfill, green is organic waste or composting, black is incineration or brown. It gets very complex very quickly, and this article is actually on our website with descriptions of each of the steps along the way to help sort that out for people so they can understand the various options. I’ll go through some of the details in how we fit in some of these in a much more simple and clear way in the next slides.
After use, for us, I mentioned before landfill is really the least desirable end of life option. And the reason we say that is because you’re really throwing away the raw materials and energy that go into the making of polymer. We get tagged sometimes with just being a biodegradable material, and that’s not always the benefit. We want to reuse that raw material and energy just like people do when they recycle traditional polymers.
So landfill practices are changing and we want to show how our product fits in. So on the next slide people ask the question, you know, if your material is biodegradable won’t it biodegrade in the landfill and give off methane, and methane is a much more effective greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide even?
So we took a look at three of our grades that represent our portfolio of products pretty well and did an accelerated landfill test with OWS, and the conclusion that they came to is over the period of several weeks of an accelerated condition meant to represent a much longer time in the landfill there was really no evidence of biodegradation with our material in the landfill. And that’s really due to the conditions in the landfill not being right for the break-down of our polymer. So you’re really sequestering the carbon that you put into the landfill.
Now, when it comes to, in the next slide, reusing that carbon, we look at composting and the option of food and green waste diversion from the landfill.
On slide 21 we talk about how our material fits into composting, and I think some of the subsequent presentations will go into more detail. But we really encourage our customers to certify that their products are compostable. We don’t want green washing going on, and the FTC has a whole outline of what that is, and what to do and what not to do in terms of claims.
We want to be very transparent and part of that is getting products certified, and we’ve done that with our raw material, and the certification and criteria that are out there in the various organizations are biodegradation, material characteristics, disintegration, and eco toxicity.
And those are components of the ASTM tests that are conducted here by BPI and certified by BPI here in the States. In Japan it’s the Biodegradable Plastics Society or various different names that they’ve come up with, but they certify through ISO standards. In Europe they follow the EN norms. And, again, Certco is the current certification body, although there are some others that are looking to do that. And each of those different organizations has evolved their own logo, all that should be pretty recognizable in the regions as compostable. We really encourage people to follow through and certify that the products are compostable so that you can reutilize that carbon in a next life as compost.
Another end of life option that we look at is incineration with heat recovery, and where that comes into play is there are a number of big cities where they just don’t have the landfill space left, and they’ve installed incineration and try to at least recapture that energy as the product breaks down through incineration. Where that’s used in a large amount is actually in that mixed plastic waste stream that comes off of some of the recycling processes.
And we took a look in the next slide, number 23 here, at the impacts that our material, the Ingeo would have in incineration. We did it in a simulated incineration, ideal temperature range of a thousand degree C, and it turns out that like other organic materials we come out pretty similar to but a little bit higher in energy value than other cellulosic material, like wood, paper, municipal solid waste. Not as high as some of the oil derived polymers that look much more like a fuel going into the incinerator.
But one thing that we benefit from is we really burn pretty cleanly. Most of what comes off is primarily carbon dioxide and water from the combustion at a thousand degree C, so we’ve done some preliminary evaluations and that really is only represented at a thousand degree C. So ultimately, you know, it could be affected, the outputs could be affected depending on the incineration conditions. But it seems to show that our energy value comes out in a pretty good range, and the decomposition is relatively harmless products and you can recapture some of that energy in incineration.
The end of life option that we really do like to talk about is recycling because then you can make some of the best use of that energy and raw material that goes into making plastics, both mechanical recycling which is kind of the traditional recycling you think of with bottles, reusing the material, grinding it up, and cleaning it up and blending it back into articles again.
But the other option, that I mentioned earlier, is that feedstock recovery, going back to lactic acid, in our case. Because we just have one monomer we believe that’s something that’s pretty simple to do and can produce virgin quality again the second pass through.
One question that’s come up in the industry is how in the world can we get it out? And the first question is are you trying to just be in with the PET stream and do you think you can be in there?
And the answer is, no, it’s not our intent to be recycled right along with the PET. We don’t want to be in that resin code one by any means. Initially, our material will be treated as other non-PET or high density polyethylene in the bottle stream, separated out as that mixed plastic stream that comes off.
With critical mass, though, we believe that PLA can be isolated into its own value stream, and we’re starting to see quite a bit of interest for that as a value stream. The equipment that we found to be most effective at sorting is near infrared sorting equipment. It’s rather expensive, I won’t hide that from you, but it’s becoming more widely used at the larger municipal recycling facilities, recovery facilities and reclaimers in isolating PET.
So the largest reclaimers, our maybe top 15 or so reclaimers in the country are increasingly using this technology as the means to purify the PET. And what we’ve found in industrial trials is that really does work in keeping our material out of the PET stream. We had an industrial recycler here in North America that ran trials, spiked in pretty high levels, levels that would put the bottles in one of the -- in significant equivalents in the marketplace, and they were able to separate it out and purify the PET down to a level of just over 400 parts per million.
And then when they went ahead and made sheet, the product that they produced from their recycled PET, even at 100% they were able to produce it with no appreciable affect in the end product. They were able to produce a salable product from that through the near infrared sorting that they did on the frontend.
On the next slide we talked a little bit about the resin code, and there’s some confusion to consumers, basically, as we see it. With us and our material, because we weren’t included in those first six resin codes developed back in the ‘80s by the SPI Society of Plastics Industries, we’re lumped into the number seven category, which is other plastics or blends of plastics.
And that’s quite confusing to consumers. It doesn’t help the recycling industry in any way, so we’re part of a group through the ASTN that’s seeking to establish new resin codes as part of the ASTN taking over the resin code management from SPI. So within SPI there’s the D20 Plastics Committee, 2095 Recycled Plastics Committee. We’re involved in a group within that to try to propose new resin codes, one unique for PLA in general.
I mentioned earlier the recovery back to lactic acid, and people ask, well, why do you want to go all the way back to lactic acid? What it allows us to do with just one monomer is reach very high purity. With two monomers in PET or some of the other plastics, it’s a little more difficult to do this.
We can reach high purity that’s suitable for polymer grade. At very high yields we can get near one-to-one recovery, a pound of polymer in, a pound of polymer grade lactic acid out. And initial results show that other polymer contamination doesn’t seem to have an affect. Those polymers aren’t affected or hydrolyzed under the conditions that we break our polymer back down to lactic acid under.
Lactic acid also has a range of end markets, not just polymer. The economics seem to work. We seem to be able to through partners that we’ve worked with produce a lactic acid that’s market competitive in price.
It also eliminates competing with the virgin resin, so we view it more as a feedstock rather than a competitive rPET type equivalent. And, of course, it will help our eco profile quite a lot when we’re able to recover, just like they do with PET, some of that energy and input that goes into making the polymer the first time around.
This seems like a future, a futuristic vision but in reality it’s not, it’s already starting to happen. We’re working, on the next slide here, 28, with WRR Environmental Services Company here in the U.S., who have been recycling some of our off grade production resin. They’ve also taken on some post-industrial resin, and they’re starting to look at what would the process have to be to do post-consumer resin. They’ve done some trials, and we’re starting to look at undertaking the process to get an [L&O] in place so that that could be used in food contact in Ingeo resin in the future.
Galactic in Europe is a global lactic acid producer, and they’re building a 1,500 metric ton per year plant that they plan to have operational later this year to do just that, to chemically recycle PLA polymer back to lactic acid that they sell into the market.
And, ourselves, we’ve actually recovered over 20 million pounds of lactic acid from off grade resin. When you start-up a brand-new plant with technology that hasn’t been commercialized before you produce some wide spec material, and we’ve been able to recover that material and put it right back in to our process of making virgin resin. We’ve also done some testing around pilot scale post-consumer source material and recovering that and what it would take.
So coming to the end here, our Ingeo resin is new to the world of biopolymer. And by biopolymer that really to us means it comes from renewable resources, which lessens our dependency on oil, gives us a better environmental footprint than traditional polymers when you look through the whole lifecycle analysis, even all the way through to end of life. And end of life it really gives us more options than traditional plastics offer today, including that option of helping with food waste diversion programs and through composting.
Recycling as kind of the core of our energy recovery end of life option, and aerobic digestion is another option where you might first digest the material along with food waste and then compost what’s left that doesn’t digest in the anaerobic conditions. Incineration, recovering that energy with a relatively clean stream of [specimen].
So we really look forward to working with the EPA further and with the industry out there in helping realizing this vision.
Karls' Bio
Laura Moreno: Thank you, Dan, that was great. Unfortunately, don’t have time for any questions, but just to let everybody know who submitted a question, we will have time at the end, so no worries.
I want to introduce our second speaker, Karl Bruskotter, who has over 20 years of experience in environmental and public health issues, the last eight of which are with the City of Santa Monica where he served as an Environmental Programs Analyst. Karl focuses on developing and implementing the City’s sustainable procurement, toxic use reduction, integrated pest management programs, and zero waste programs, among others.
Karl, are you ready?
Karl's Presentation
Karl Bruskotter: Yes, I’m here. Okay, good morning to some of you, and good afternoon to the rest of you. Unlike Dan, I’m going to go ahead and read this whole EPA disclaimer verbatim -- no, I’m just kidding, everyone. Got to wake-up, with the slide show. Okay.
So where is Santa Monica? I work for the City of Santa Monica. We’re on the West Coast, so if you’re in Los Angeles, downtown Los Angeles, and you go about 15 miles directly west, you’re going to find the Community or the City of Santa Monica.
And one thing that we have here is we have a lot of tourism, and we have a huge daytime population. The actual resident count might be about 90,000, but the daytime population especially in the summer can go as high as 500,000.
And even though I’ve done my best to take care of some of the background noise here, which I can more or less control in my office, you may hear some in the background outside the building, but hopefully it won’t be too bad.
With my presentation, I’m pretty much going to talk about sort of how bioplastics came to Santa Monica, talk a little bit about the bioplastic certifications and labeling and markings and such, and how they’re collected and disposed in our community and some other communities, where we send them, and then what happens to them when we send them away.
Now, this picture here, if everybody can see it, there’s all this white stuff floating, and this is a watershed river we call [Biona Creek]. This runs into the Pacific Ocean here, into our Santa Monica Bay. And everything that you see floating, if you haven’t guessed, is all disposable Styrofoam food and beverage containers. And I actually live downstream of this, and I can tell you that this net only caught part of it, and a lot of this material you see actually ends up and pollutes the ocean and our marine environment.
So with that, in 2007 our City passed what we call a non-recyclable plastic disposable food service container ban. Now, I know that’s a mouthful. The primary reason again that we banned non-recyclable plastics like that in our community was to protect the Pacific Ocean and marine life in it from plastic pollution.
Other reasons, it fits in pretty well with our zero waste strategic plan, it deals with a lot of the issues surrounding petroleum and petroleum made plastics. It addresses some of the issues of human health. And, obviously, if we have less of that trash and plastic debris along our coast our tourists are certainly a lot happier.
So what’s allowed? We allow any food service containers, again, we’re talking about disposable food service containers that are either recyclable or compostable. And who does that cover? That covers our own operations and it covers pretty much every food service vendor in the City, whether it’s a restaurant, a mom-and-pop diner, a food truck, a caterer, they’re all covered.
So the next slide is slide six. And very quickly we’ve dealt a lot with the definitions of compostable and biodegradable when we were putting the ordinance together, and still it comes up a lot. What’s the difference between compostable and biodegradable.
And for the purposes of this presentation one of my coworkers joked around, she said, “I would consider myself biodegradable, but I wouldn’t consider myself compostable.” So when we refer to composting we’re basically talking about materials that can be sent either to a commercial type compost facility or that can be put in a home garden heap or compost heap or compost bin, and that they’ll actually break-down.
It’s also important to know that pretty much as far as I know the bioplastics, they do not break-down in a home compost bin or home compost heap because they just simply don’t get the temperature and the duration for composting that’s necessary to break-down the bioplastics.
So this part is where I thank the U.S. EPA and Laura, who is our Grant Manager. We actually got a grant a couple years ago from the EPA to help look at the issues of bioplastics in our community, how we could collect them and separate them from other waste streams, such as trash and recyclables, and how we could work with plastic container manufacturers to create more readily identifiable markings and identifiers on the bioplastics and compostable food and drink containers, so that the public would know what to do with these containers. And also so what the recycling facilities would be able to do with these containers.
Next, slide eight, so we have banded in our community, and so what is everybody supposed to buy? What are we supposed to buy, what are the food -- all the food vendors buy in Santa Monica? And they have a couple -- they have a few different choices. They can buy recyclable containers, such as the PET plastic clam shells and stuff like that, or aluminum. They can also buy compostable containers, such as paper or Bigos. If anybody is not familiar with Bigos, that’s a feedstock used to make compostable containers that comes from sugarcane and then also bioplastics, which of course is the focus of this webinar.
And with the bioplastics there are a lot of different types of bioplastics with a lot of different types of markings. It’s really kind of the wild, wild West, and Dan kind of mentioned that earlier, NatureWorks is not the only manufacturer of a resin for bioplastics, and there’s a lot of different manufacturers of bioplastic food containers coming in from all over the world, and it gets quit confusing.
And so let me back-up and give the definition of bioplastics. I think Dan pretty much covered it, also, is really the big difference between bioplastics from petroleum plastics is that the bioplastics come from renewable resources, such as cornstarch, which was described, vegetable oil, [P starch]. You hear that it will be able to come from algae, different grasses, all these different materials, as opposed to coming from fossil fuel. I’d say probably the most common type of bioplastic resin would be the polylactic acid that was described by Dan.
So what kind of markings? We’ve collected a lot of different compostable containers and bioplastics, and we have a whole showcase we can do in one of our offices over here, that my coworker, Josephine Miller, put together. And I went and looked at the bins she had with all the bioplastics.
And some of the bioplastics to identify what they look like, in the beginning I think most were clear and they would look a lot like the clear polystyrene petroleum plastic containers, but now you’ll see a lot of black, they’re brown, they’re white, they’re different colors. Again, I put in -- these are all the different markings and logos that I’ve found on them, they say they’re compostable, they say they’re biodegradable, they list PLA, made from corn, they cite a standard.
I’d say one of the most common markings, again, that was discussed earlier was this chasing arrows, I’ll call it, and the number seven within the chasing arrows. And that’s extremely confusing to the public. To figure out what other means, every once in awhile we might see PLA below the seven, but even when it says that, the average consumer is not going to really identify what that means. So this identification of the bioplastics is a real challenge.
And, in fact, just a couple months ago the City of Santa Monica hosted a bioplastics workshop which was attended by both of the presenters on this webinar and environmental activists, a lot of local government that has to deal with these materials, a lot of distributors and retailers of bioplastics materials.
And one of the things for us that has come out of it so far is our discussion of what will we require, if we’re going to have bioplastics in our community what are we going to require. And we’ve also talked to some other jurisdictions and municipalities about the same thing.
So one would be green markings. And again on these cups to the right you can see they’re clearly labeled, they have this green band and they’re labeled compostable. And then also we would require that they meet a certification agency logo, and although it’s very small these cups do have this logo within that green band there, that you can see.
So next, what will we require when we talk about the compostability standard? The bioplastics in our community were going to say that they have to meet this ASTM D6400 or one of these other compostability standards. Again, ASTM D6400 being the most popular standard, that I think you’ll see in the U.S. and North America.
And then not only that, we wanted to meet the standard but then again it’s kind of Wild West out there. Certainly, anybody can put a standard and label their bioplastic food or beverage containers with that marking, but how do we really know that they meet those compostability standards?
And that’s where a third-party verification organization really comes in handy, because now we have the standard that we wanted to meet and we also wanted to make sure that there’s an organization out there that’s not affiliated with the standards developer that will say that this product is verified to meet that standard. And again on the top is the Biodegradable Products Institute. Again, it’s the one that we’re most familiar with here in Santa Monica and probably more familiar in the U.S. and North America.
If anybody is going to ask a question about AIB Vincotte Center out of Belgium, I would quit typing the question because I don’t know anything about it.
Okay, so what do others require? San Francisco is also requiring green markings. Seattle requires brown markings on their bioplastics. And then there’s a lot of other stories. I think the main point that I want to make here is that really there needs to be some national consensus on what these markings will look like, what kind of standards they need to meet, if they need to say compostable on it. There needs to be some universal agreement for the manufacturers of these products and the distributors of these products to really move forward, because if everybody, if a lot of different states and jurisdictions are asking for different specifications, we want a red band with compostable in small letters, and another says we want pink bands with compostable in big letters, it’ll just be a mess and it’s not anything that the manufacturers can work with. And at the end I’m going to show a few different groups that I know that are working on these issues to get some kind of universal consensus on what these identifiers will look like.
Okay, now the next slide, you should be on slide 15, and you’re going to see a picture of three bins. This is actually not in Santa Monica, this is in San Francisco, where they also only allow compostable and recyclable containers.
So now what we’ve talked about, how the bioplastics got to our community, what we require, vendors to buy, and then at the end what does the public -- if you go to San Francisco, you go to Santa Monica, I mean what are going to be your options?
And this picture you can see in the blue on the right, that bin would be for recyclables. You could maybe throw your bioplastic in there. You could maybe put it in the green container in the middle, which is for compost, or the black bin on the left. And it’s very confusing to the public as far as which bin to throw it in.
In fact, one story, we have this place called the Aquarium of the Pacific out here in Long Beach. A beautiful aquarium, amazing marine life that they have, and they’re very into conservation and education, and stuff like that. And one thing they went out and they bought the bioplastics. They wanted to do good for the environment, and they had the bioplastic containers, you’d find all that at their cafeteria. The thing is when you get done with your compostable bioplastic containers you have two options, you can either throw it in the trash where it’s going to go and be land filled, buried, or they provide a recycling bin that you can put the container in where it will go and contaminate the recycled waste stream.
So although they’re good intentioned, anybody setting up a program, anybody on this call wants to do in their state or their community or whatever, I think one of the more important things to do is really look at what kind of composters and recyclers and what kind of infrastructure you have set-up to actually deal with these products and these materials at the end of their life so they can actually turn into compost or be recycled effectively and not be land filled or burned.
This is just a quick picture from a restaurant. Everybody should see the clear clam shells and some of the little sauce cups are bioplastics. We have some coated paper cups. We have some Bigos clam shells here. This is typical of what you might see at one of the restaurants out here in Santa Monica as far as if you’re getting food to go or disposable food containers.
So the next slide, okay, this is again quite confusing to the public. If anybody is not already familiar with the chasing arrows one through six, those all represent plastics that come from petroleum sources. The number seven could also be a plastic that comes from a mixed petroleum source, but again the confusion is that it could also include one of these bioplastics.
And again the general public doesn’t have a clue as far as what to do with that product, so again moving forward and from this call and the different groups working together it would be terrific if some kind of label or markings or identifiers were really clear so the public knew what to do with these containers, because I think a lot of the public wants to do the right thing, they’re just not sure what to do.
And in our community it is -- when we banned non-recyclable containers one thing that we did find out that there’s a fair amount of frustration from the community because we only allow compostables and recyclables but we don’t necessarily collect all those. So you could come to one of our signature venues out here, which is what we call our Third Street Promenade, and if you get a to go container over there that’s a bioplastic you’re only going to have one place to put it and that’s in the trash.
But what we’ve done with the help of this EPA grant is that we are at this point piloting collection of what we call a three-bin system, which would be collecting trash that will go to landfill, recyclables, and compostables. And we’ve been doing that with a fair amount of success at our popular farmers markets, which we have about four or five a week that are heavily attended. And also at our senior center. And also at an elementary school.
We’ve also been doing that at a lot of our City events, and at one point we’re planning to introduce that system to residents but we’re still working on signage and education and figuring out, again, the infrastructure to effectively collect these materials with minimal contamination.
If you look here, this is a typical sign you might see that talks about if you’re going to go into one of our farmers markets this is a sign that you would see posted at one of the entrances. And it talks about how it’s a zero waste zone. If you go in, all we allow from the food vendors, we have both people that sell produce and vegetables and stuff like that, and also we have what we call prepared food vendors. And they can only serve food and beverage in compostable and recyclable containers.
Here’s another sign. One thing that has been really useful for us, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this model would work for you, is that when we’ve introduced the zero waste City events or at our farmers market or at the school or the senior center, in the beginning you really even with real clear signage as far as what goes and what is banned, what can be recycled, what can be composted, it helps to have volunteer interns.
We were lucky enough to get interns from our high school and one of our community colleges that come in and they volunteer their time, and they kind of educate people when they go over to dispose of their items in either of the bins. And that’s been really successful and really kind of a fun experience, an engaging experience for the people that are at these events.
Just another picture of our lovely interns. This is at a City event. In the picture you’ll see that we show a brown bin, that happened to be all we had at the time. We really are going with the green bins, at least out here in southern California the green bin will be sort of the color coded standard for collecting the green waste and the compostables.
This picture is at our Senior Center, and again we just recently launched it there. And it’s sort of funny because the main contamination that we have is that we have plastic forks and spoons and knives, and those are probably the main thing that we have to deal with as far as not contaminating what we throw in our compost bin.
And the next slide, so where do we throw these materials or where do we send them? A lot of our -- we do have pretty aggressive waste diversion goals in our community, and we try to send as little as we can to the landfill, but anybody on the call that deals with -- knows what the challenges are and we do send a fair amount to our landfill.
And one of the things that is going to happen in the next couple years, which will be a benefit, is that our landfill is going to close. And I say that as a benefit because currently it’s cheaper for us to send trash to a landfill than it is to send it to our compost facility.
But the greater LA area is really in a situation right now where they’re running out of places to bury their trash, as I’m sure a lot of communities around the country are. So once that landfill closes it’s going to be much more expensive to send trash to be land filled way off in the desert, and it’ll be much more -- it’ll be even cheaper comparatively to send it to our compost facility.
And, again, the next speaker on the call after me is going to talk about the compost facility. And, again, we’re very fortunate to have such a first class compost facility and our region that we can send our materials to.
If the recyclable -- oh, I just wanted -- one thing here, I’d say and the speaker after me would probably agree, if you’re looking at collecting recyclables and compostables probably the biggest enemy to compost is glass. If nothing else, you want to make sure that people don’t put glass in a compostable because if anything is going to wipe-out a batch of compost it’s going to be broken glass, so it’s just something to keep in mind.
And also if we get too much, if we don’t effectively minimize the contamination in our recyclables, as well, and people put food soiled containers in there and stuff like that, it can go to trash, as well.
And a quick note on closed loop recycling of bioplastic resin, Dan mentioned the possibility of that. It sounds attractive. I see it as a possibility for beverage containers, but getting to the point where you would do that for food containers seems-- the possibilities seems a lot more remote as far as actually collecting the food containers. But, again, that process for the beverage containers seems more likely, and that obviously would happen out at the recycling facilities where they sort those materials.
So what are some of the challenges for bioplastics that I see? These are some issues that came up at our Bioplastic Workshop that we had, and I don’t want to put Dan or anyone on the spot but just everybody should be out there that these are some of the issues that the advocates bring up. Some of these issues are more a perceived threat than a real threat, and some are kind of a combination in my opinion.
So you’ll hear the terms genetically modified organisms come up, so the GMO issue, I’m not going to go into it but I just want to let you know that it will come up.
Also, the feedstock issue, I think Dan was pretty clear in illustrating the fact that corn going into bioplastics is a very small portion of the corn, but still there’s that public perception that anything that takes corn away from poor people in developing countries is really a negative.
And then also, of course, we have the made in China syndrome, where some of these bioplastics are coming from and there’s very little regulation to know what’s going into those bioplastics.
And, again, another common theme we’ve talked about is the challenge of properly identifying and labeling the different bioplastics and compostables so that the public knows what to do with them and so the recyclers know what to do with them.
And an example on the Wild West part is if anybody is not familiar with bioplastics, at least the first generation has a heat tolerance. They’re not really designed for hot food, they’re not designed for coffee, they’re not designed for real hot food. Much better for salads, sandwiches, cold drink cups, stuff like that. But we’ve had a lot of companies bring to us what they call the next generation of bioplastics that can take these real high heats, hot foods, hot drinks, but they come with virtually no logos or certifications or meeting any standards.
So it’s really pretty sketchy as far as what people can bring to you, and it’s important to be aware of that. And, again, that’s why at least in our community we’re going to be recommending that any bioplastics meet a standard and that also it’s verified.
Some of the main benefits, again, if you look at the picture, we’re on slide 25 now, if you look at the picture on the right, this is a picture that I got off the internet, and you can see it tells people what they need to do with their plastic and food containers. They have to take the lids off, you need to wash them out, you need to flatten them, you need to do all this stuff. And there’s a lot of people that won’t go to that much trouble to clean all these containers out.
So one of the real attractive things about the bioplastics is that they can have food all over them. It’s not a problem, they can just be thrown in the compost bin, they don’t need to be cleaned. And I see that as a real benefit, and I know Dan pointed that out earlier.
So, again, it does fit in very good with our zero waste program. It comes from renewable resources. I appreciate the fact that Dan talked about the future of maybe more sustainable feedstocks and really kind of looking at the overall environmental footprint or lifecycle analysis of the different feedstocks.
And also for us our bioplastics they go to our compost facility, and the next speaker is going to talk about it more, but when we send these materials off to our compost facility they do end up as nutrient rich compost for agriculture and landscapes. And we think that’s certainly a much better use than burying it.
So that’s my presentation. Lastly, I show a couple links here. The top link, if you want information about our non-recyclable plastic food container band or the vendors that we recommend, or some of our other materials regarding that, you can go to that website on the top.
Next is my contact information, and then after that I put these organizations here, are the ones that I’m aware that are doing work on bioplastics and what the future will look like for them, including labeling them, collecting them, and all these kind of issues that we’re talking about, and that would be the Bioplastics Recycling Consortium which is a U.S. consortium, and then the Future 500 and the EPA, and then ASTM is looking at the standards.
So, thank you.
Laura Moreno: Thanks, Karl.
Dave's Bio
So, again, we’re going to skip questions and just to make sure that our third speaker has enough time, but we are anticipating that we will have time to ask some questions at the end.
Our final speaker today is Dave Baldwin. Dave is the Operations Manager of Community Recycling and Resource Recovery’s Lamont Facility. Community Recycling has operated a fully permitted compost facility in Lamont, California since 1995. The Facility is permitted to process 3,692 tons per day of green waste, wood waste, produce, food waste, and soiled biomass. The compost that is produced is sold to the agriculture market.
Dave?
Dave's Presentation
Dave Baldwin: Hello, can you hear me?
Laura Moreno: Yes, we can.
Dave Baldwin: Okay, great. My name is Dave Baldwin. I’m with Community Recycling, and we operate a fully integrated recycling company. Our parent company is based in the San Fernando Valley of California.
We operate a materials recovery facility, construction demolition recovery facility, green waste processing facility, food waste. We also operate two different biomass power plants for electrical production.
In addition to that, our composting facility is a large-scale facility. We farm about just a tad over 4,000 acres at this point in time. Currently growing grapes, almonds, cotton, corn, wheat, melons. We also farm 560 acres organically through the California certified organic farmers.
As I said earlier, we have a fully permitted facility for 3,692 tons per day. We process a substantial amount of food waste, both for private industry and public cities, much like Santa Monica, and we compost those and produce a very nice feedstock.
Plastics are prevalent in composting facilities, large and small. They provide a valuable service in the packaging of products. They not only help to ensure the product quality and provide an invaluable food safety protection, they ensure freshness and provide a high quality, lightweight, low cost medium in order to market products in.
In order to encourage further the recycling of plastics we certainly feel that to place a bounty on them, much like the California recycling value on bottles and cans in California would be certainly in order. And I think anyone from the western states knows how bottles and cans disappeared from the landscape when that ordinance was passed, putting a bounty on them. The California recycling value --
Justin Crane: Excuse me, Mr. Baldwin?
Dave Baldwin: Yes.
Justin Crane: We’re having a hard time hearing you. Would you mind scooting a little closer to the phone or just making sure the microphone is right in front of you?
Dave Baldwin: Yes, I’ve got the receiver right to my face, so.
Justin Crane: That sounds -- it sounds great right now. Go ahead. Thank you.
Dave Baldwin: Does it? I’ll speak-up a little bit.
Some of the problems that -- and opportunities that plastics and bioplastics offer to composting facilities, as the above slide indicates, the wind and plastic are always really good friends, and controlling of the plastic is always an issue on a compost facility.
The feedstocks that you get, as hard as it is to keep them clean, it’s a constant job for municipalities and even private industry to keep the feedstocks clean and keep plastics out and to keep glass out. Glass, as Karl said earlier, is a huge issue. One beer bottle, if it breaks it’s not one beer bottle any longer, it’s 850 pieces of glass that don’t go away. So we’ve got to be really careful about what type of incoming feedstocks we use and what gets in the compost pile.
We can deal with plastics. We’ve designed and engineered all of our equipment to handle plastics, to separate, remove, and our end product I think is going to be recognized as definitely some of the cleanest in the country. You won’t find a better quality compost than we ship out of here.
Some of the recent additions to the plastic line are bioplastics and, of course, they’re making their way into composting facilities and some of the opportunities that we’ve seen with them is how do you deal with these things?
And separation, say for instance if you’ve got a pick line and you want your employees to pick plastics off a line and not bioplastics, how do they tell the difference? It’s tough to do at a belt that’s moving 300 feet a minute. Optical equipment is helpful, true, and even after the fact the equipment with air systems have trouble distinguishing on a fast pace.
We’ve tested plastics for several different companies, and these are some of the ones I’m doing right now. This is a plastic trash bag, a biodegradable plastic trash bag that’s been two weeks in a windrow, temperatures exceeding 150, 152 degrees, right in there. And this bag other than being a little soiled looks like the day I put it in there. You can open it up and put your trash in it today and not see a difference.
And these are some water bottles that a company makes. This is one week in a composting windrow at the same temperatures, just 10 feet away from the other material is, and at two weeks that’s all that’s left. And that’s a very fine, almost a powder. You could crush it between your fingers and it’s gone.
And some of the things that come to mind about plastics is bioplastics, in particular, they need to have a uniform break-down time. I’ve heard some talks about some people who have got bioplastics talking about their stuff breaks down in six months, too long, it’ll never work. Six months is entirely too long at a composting site.
And then the big question is what are the residuals that are left behind from this? We referred to the Organic Material Review Institute, which is an organization, a private organization which certifies the organic, your material for organic production.
In talking to Miguel Guerra, who is their Coordinator there, they don’t allow bioplastics to be used as a feedstock in composting. And Miguel says, “Don’t kill the messenger, it’s not us that’s the problem, we’re carrying forth what the United States Department of Agriculture, the National Organic Program prohibits the use of bioplastics as a feedstock”. The plastic manufacturers need to probably get together with these people and see if they can educate them as to the benefits of the bioplastics and get this allowed.
And I say that because if you can’t serve the organic industry that’s a huge industry and growing. We’re within 50 miles of us there’s 20,000 acres of organic production, right here from where I’m sitting, so that’s a huge market that we can’t really serve with material that has plastic, bioplastics in it.
And that’s all I have.
Laura Moreno: Thanks, Dave.
Questions
So it looks like we are going to have some time for questions, and I’m to let you know we can go 15 to 20 minutes over the anticipated end time. So if anybody is able to stay, you should do that.
So our first question, which came up many times, is -- one second -- is in the lifecycle analysis or eco profile for NatureWorks were the inputs from the fertilizer and machinery from growing the corn considered?
Daniel Sawyer: Thanks, this is Dan. Yes, those -- every input was considered from absolute, from the moment the farm is tilled, all the way through and in the eco profile, all the way through to the factory gate, in the LCA, all the way through to end disposal. But, yes, absolutely the fertilizer, every input was considered that we could possibly track through organizations that deal with the farming practices and everything.
I wanted to mention one thing that might help with some of the compost related questions. There’s going to be an article, or there is an article on the cover, article of Bio Cycle Magazine for July. I wanted to mention that. I think that could help shed light that I may not have had time to cover, and I know I’ve ran over.
Laura Moreno: Okay, another question for you, Dan, is when you’re recycling the PLA how many times can the polymer be recycled? And can the polymers from different companies be recycled together?
Daniel Sawyer: Yes, you know, the benefit of the chemical recycle or feedstock recovery as we’re calling it, is that it gives you the ability to recycle and produce virgin quality the next time through. It’s not limited like a traditional mechanical recycle, where you see pretty significant degradation each pass through with traditional polymers. And that’s really today why you see so much of the PET bottles that are recycled going into mostly fiber applications because it just doesn’t have quite the properties needed to go into that same value application. That’s the beauty of that feedstock recovery.
And right now we only know of a few potential competitors out there, nobody producing it large scale, in the second question there. At this point, we haven’t seen anything that would indicate they couldn’t be recycled together. We would hope that those future manufacturers, and we know they’ll come, would do things on the up and up and not put in things that would jeopardize the recyclability or the compostability, including things like adding heavy metals or other materials that would jeopardize that compostability or recyclability.
Laura Moreno: Okay, next month’s RCC Web Academy Session will be “Sustainable Product Outlook,” so please sign-up for the Thursday, August 20th, 2009 RCC Web Academy Program that starts at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Thank you very much.