Plastics!

Entrepreneur starts business making mailbox posts, speed bumps, and picnic tables from recycled plastic.

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Alan Robbins is betting everything he owns that the world will pay more for picnic tables, mailbox posts, and speed bumps if they're made from recycled plastics

Yes, he's heard the career advice line from The Graduate. ("I just want to say one word to you: plastics.")

And yes, he's gotten used to the jokes about his business's name (The Plastic Lumber Co.?).

And no, he doesn't mind them at all.

You see, if you're Alan E. Robbins, 43, a sense of humor comes in handy.

You need one, given what he wants to do with the rest of his life. Robbins, a charming father of five, wants to make wood obsolete. Maybe concrete, too.

It's not quite as silly as it sounds.

Robbins is president of the Akron company, which takes recycled plastics -- milk jugs are a primary source of raw material -- and turns them into everything from mailbox posts, picnic tables, and speed bumps to retaining walls at Sea World.

And no doubt there's a desperate need for someone to do something with what the industry calls postconsumer (used) plastics.

With Americans producing 160 million tons of solid waste a year -- that's better than three pounds per person per day -- landfills are beginning to overflow. And while plastics account for only 7% of those garbage heaps by weight, they make up 13% of their volume. Anything, even a mailbox post, that can reduce that amount of trash is something to be wished for.

The problem is that a lot of people have been rubbing on the genie's lamp for a long time. The first reported use of recycled plastics dates back to the 1930s -- a Du Pont chemist with a sense of humor used some postindustrial plastics to make a length of fence -- so the idea is not exactly new.

And Robbins is not exactly without competition. The notepad holders, in-and-out-trays, and trash cans produced by Rubbermaid Inc. are made in large part of recycled plastics. Plus, companies such as Du Pont, Dow, Amoco, Mobil, and Occidental have all begun joint-venture projects aimed at making recycled plastics widely available.

But despite the growing interest, there are two major reasons why the idea of recycled plastics has not caught on -- and Robbins must deal with both.

First, there's no consistent source of raw materials. Recycling is still not mandatory nationally, and even those states or towns with recycling programs don't always require that plastics be left by the curb, believing -- mistakenly -- plastics can't be recycled. (They can. But since traditional recycling methods can't guarantee the purity of recycled resins, recycled plastics are not used in packaging that comes in direct contact with food.)

Cost is the second reason that everything from marina docks to highway dividers is not yet made from recycled plastic. If you use recycled plastics as a substitute for virgin ones, as the carpet industry is doing, you'll save money.

But if you use recycled plastics to replace materials such as wood and concrete, the economics change. Robbins's picnic tables and parking stops cost up to twice as much as those made from traditional materials.

While that's a problem, it's not a insurmountable one, says Robbins, who has worked as everything from a restaurant manager to a stockbroker (see "The Founder," page 4). His sales pitch stresses that since plastic lumber and plastic concrete last longer than their traditional counterparts, they're actually cheaper over the long haul.

Besides, as Robbins points out, the potential market is huge. In 1989, only 250 million pounds of plastics were recycled, yet the demand for materials that plastics could replace was thousands of times greater, according to Robert A. Bennett, associate dean of the college of engineering at the University of Toledo. For example, last year Americans used some 3 billion pounds of treated lumber, and roughly 7.4 billion board feet of wood just to build pallets.

Robbins is not looking to replace all that wood -- just a splinter of it.

And he's convinced his timing is right. Some 20 years after the first Earth Day, taking care of the environment is suddenly fashionable again. Everyone from McDonald's to Dayton Hudson department stores is using seedlings as a sales promotion tool. Time magazine made "Endangered Earth" its planet of the year, and George Bush will tell anyone willing to read his lips that he is "the environmental President."

Even the plastics industry has gotten into the act, creating impressive-sounding task forces (The Council for Solid Waste Solutions) and running commercials during the Sunday morning news shows explaining that it, too, wants a cleaner environment. When you have politicians and Fortune 500 CEOs tripping over themselves to be ecologically correct, it's relatively easy to get people to listen -- for a little while, anyway -- when you tell them you're selling products made out of recycled plastics.

Robbins is making the most of the opportunity. Early on he hired a public-relations firm that has made his company better known than his sales would justify, and the attention is beginning to pay off. "We're getting inquiries from businesses and governmental units we never knew existed."

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