Sabic goes carbon neutral

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PITTSFIELD — Sabic Innovative Plastics and Motorola have combined to develop a new polycarbonate resin that the electronics company hasused to develop the world’s first certified carbon neutral device.

The product is a new mobile phone that is made from an eco-engineered resin developed by Sabic of which 25 percent contains material culled from discarded plastic water bottles. It is the first mobile phone to use post-consumer recycled (PCR) content.

The development of the new resin took place at a Sabic facility in Indiana, said Tom Stanley, the company’s vice president of technology. But the molding and testing of the new substance occurred in Pittsfield, where Sabic Innovative Plastic’s maintains its world headquarters. The entire process took a couple of years to complete, he said.

Sabic introduced the new resin technology, known as Lexan EXL 8414, at a national plastics exhibition in Chicago last month.

“It’s something that we’re very proud of,” Stanley said via conference call on Friday.

According to Stanley, the two companies have worked closely for nearly 20 years, with Sabic developing materials that fit Motorola’s needs.

100 percent recyclables

Sabic makes a lexan resin that is used to make large plastic water jugs, Stanley said. Instead of placing those used bottles in landfills, Sabic took those bottles back, ground them up, then combined them with a material to create a product that it sold to Motorola.

Motorola used the new resin to mold the front and back of the new mobile phone, known as the MOTO W233 Renew, Stanley said. The new phone’s housing is 100 percent recyclable. According to Stanley, the phone can be taken apart by hand and the material can be re-used again.

Bill Olson, the director of sustainability and stewardship for Motorola’s mobile phones, said in a statement that the two companies combined to create the resin for the phone housing to give eco-conscious consumers a carbon neutral, high performance solution.

Designed from the ground up

“Renew is a mobile phone designed from the ground up to be an environmentally responsible and very reliable device,” Olson said.

According to Sabic, one million Renew phones made with Sabic’s Lexan EXL 8414 resin will prevent discarded water bottles eight times the height of the Empire State Building from entering landfills. The production of the new resin also utilizes 20 percent less energy than the standard process.

In October, Sabic CEO Charles Crew told a group of local business leaders at a gathering in Pittsfield that there was a need for the plastic industry to utilize recyclable materials. Synthetic plastics have long been considered a particular waste problem because they do not decompose the way many natural products do.

“We have a major initiative going on right now,” Crew said then, “recovering that solid waste and converting it back into materials that we can bring to the marketplace.”

In November, a Japanese manufacturer announced that it was using a high performance resin developed by Sabc partially from recycled plastic containers to make recyclable chopsticks that could be used up to 1,000 times.

Stanley said Sabic developed a product line last year where a chemical process is used to recycle the material from grocery store style plastic water bottles so that it can be resold in a different form.

“We’re committed to the innovation of this industry,” Stanley said. “These are the kinds of things that you will see in the future.”