As for fund-raising, Murphy does that, too. In the past two years he and other Luna execs have been meeting with venture capitalists and potential corporate partners and lawyers. So far they've brought in $70 million in outside funding, including contracts with the likes of Northrop Grumman Corp., Boeing, and the Mayo Clinic. You might think the CEO is ready for a breather. But no, he's now talking up plans for two more new launches -- in the biotech and telecom arenas -- in the months ahead. Call him a compulsive company builder. "I think I have some obsessive behaviors," says Murphy. "I definitely do."
The Green Giant
By Emily Barker
Mike Biddle's plant in Richmond, Calif., is overflowing with ground-up old computers -- thousands of 'em, all piled up in towering stacks, waiting to be recycled.
The mission: keep those PCs (and the lead, mercury, cadmium, and other toxic substances they contain) out of local landfills. It's a job that used to be considered undoable because the recycling technology just wasn't there. So Biddle, a chemical engineer who cofounded MBA Polymers Inc. eight years ago, invented it. Specifically, he figured out how to repurpose the plastics in durable goods -- computers, appliances, even automobiles. Now his company has won a reputation as the most versatile plastics repurposer around. "They're unique in their ability to take a very broad mix of recyclable materials, a mishmash of things, and turn it into high-value product," says Tony Kingsbury, an industry-affairs manager at Dow Chemical Co.
Biddle, 46, used to be in the plastics-producing business himself. In the 1980s he did a stint at Dow Chemical, where he worked on high-tech plastics for the aerospace industry. But as a guy who biked to work and considered himself an environmentalist, Biddle hated the idea of creating millions of tons of plastics that would never degrade or be reused. "I wanted to do something with my technical training that I could get excited about and feel good about," he says.
After leaving Dow Chemical in 1992, Biddle set out to do just that. He started his own research-and-development consulting company, focusing on plastics recycling. From the start, he aimed to go far beyond soda bottles, which contain only a few kinds of plastics and are relatively easy to reprocess. He took on the much trickier problem of recycling durable goods. "There are literally tens of thousands of grades of plastics that go into the stuff we use to make durable goods," says Biddle, who got early grant funding from the American Plastics Council.
But those different grades of plastics have to be separated -- or at least sorted into similar types -- before they can be recycled. And other components, such as metal, glass, and even inks and paper labels, must somehow be removed.
Biddle's solution was to look hard at such industries as mining, agriculture, and food processing, where sorting and separating materials is crucial. During the 1990s, he journeyed throughout the United States and Europe to study separation and recycling techniques in various industries. Then, with new grants from plastics makers and the auto industry, he and a newly hired associate -- Trip Allen, a former Dow Chemical colleague -- figured out how to apply those techniques to recycling durable goods.
What they came up with was a whole arsenal of tactics. For instance, traditional plastics-recycling equipment would be destroyed by any metal in the feed. So they adapted a machine that was normally used to shred nail-filled wooden pallets. They modified farm equipment designed to separate chaff from wheat and used it to remove paper labels from the mix. From the mining industry they borrowed a method of extracting minerals from rock and applied it to separating different grades of plastics. "We had to do it much more accurately, about 10 times finer," says Biddle.
Eight years ago Biddle decided to morph his R&D company into a business that recycles durable goods and sells the reprocessed plastics. He raised $6 million from investors, including Silicon Valley's Band of Angels, and used the money to launch a recycling operation that now turns out about 500,000 pounds of different grades of plastics a month.
For now, Biddle's customers are mostly small manufacturers in the West. In the future he hopes to scale up by building more recycling plants -- and thus producing the megasupply of processed plastics needed to attract bigger customers. One major selling point: MBA Polymers' recycled plastic, says Biddle, can be as much as 20% to 25% cheaper than virgin plastic.
Biddle likes to compare MBA Polymers to Nucor Corp., which pioneered a process for reusing scrap steel. "They're now the largest steel producer in the United States, and it's all based on recycled steel," says Biddle. "That's the story I think is going to happen with us."
Inc's The Innovation Factor Series concludes with:
October: A survey of national trends affecting America's gross creative output, including the work that the Fortune 500 and the government are doing with innovative small companies.
Plus: The August installment of the series -- assessing the best practices of the 50 most innovative private companies in America -- is now on-line at www.inc.com/keyword/50best.
The Innovation Factor: Part II
Inside Innovative Minds
Innovative Minds
Your Brain on Innovation
What's Your Innovation Quotient?
Plus: The Innovation Factor: Part I
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