WastED - A Waste and Recycling Podcast by SWACO

Recycling Revolution: How Plastic Waste Becomes Stunning Countertops

• Hanna Greer-Brown

Share episode

Meet Joseph Klatt, the innovative founder of Marble Plastics who's turning trash into treasure right here in Central Ohio. As we mark Plastic Free July, this eye-opening conversation reveals how discarded plastics can be transformed into stunning countertops, furniture, and building materials that rival traditional options like Corian or natural marble.

What sets Marble Plastics apart is their commitment to showcasing recycling's potential through products that are both beautiful and educational. Unlike typical solid surface materials that hide their composition, Klatt's creations proudly display colorful flecks from various plastic waste streams – from electronic waste providing the black base colors to bread tags creating distinctive specks. These visual elements serve as conversation starters about recycling's true impact, helping consumers understand that their recycling efforts genuinely matter.

The sourcing stories behind each component are fascinating: refrigerator parts become the white base material, while bread tags collected by an Indianapolis nonprofit (which uses proceeds to fund wheelchairs for those in need) create colorful accents. Klatt's vision extends to "decentralized manufacturing" – creating regional hubs where communities can see their waste transformed into valuable products locally, similar to how the organic farm movement reconnected people with their food.

Joseph brings rich experience to this mission, having worked with Ohio EPA before joining a firm in the Netherlands, where he designed recycling machines for communities worldwide. His goal now? Making recycled plastic building materials commonplace in the architectural and design industry within five years, while changing perceptions about plastic waste. As he pointedly reminds listeners: your recycled plastics really do get transformed into useful, beautiful products. 

Ready to reduce plastic waste? Start by swapping disposable items for reusables and remember that in Central Ohio, plastic bottles, tubs, jugs and cups can all be recycled curbside. Follow Marble Plastics on Instagram or visit marbleplastics.com to learn more about this recycling revolution.


Speaker 1:

Welcome to Waste Ed a waste and recycling podcast by Swako.

Speaker 2:

Welcome to Episode 11 of Waste Ed. It's Plastic Free July, a global movement to encourage people to reduce reliance on single-use plastics. The challenge has engaged over 100 million participants in 190 countries. I'm Joe Lombardi, the Executive Director at SWACO.

Speaker 3:

And I'm Hannah Greer-Brown, director of Communications. Well, joe, locally there are lots of ways to get involved in Plastic-Free July. From shopping at refilleries like Reason in Grove City or Rewash in Clintonville, where you can bring your own reusable containers, to getting involved in the Columbus Zoo's Wild Zero Challenge. The month of July is full of opportunities to make sustainable swaps and move towards living plastic-free. Our guest today is a great example of the circularity of plastics in Central Ohio. He's the founder of Marble Plastics, joseph Klatt. Welcome to Wasted Thanks for having me on.

Speaker 3:

Well, tell our listeners about your company, how you guys got started and what sort of plastics you recycle.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so my company is Marble Plastics and what we do is we take plastic waste and we transform it into a building material and that building material can be used for countertop wall coverings or furniture and we source a wide variety of different recycled plastic streams. Primarily we focus on polystyrene plastic waste streams and we work with the recyclers to get that material. Primarily. We also do a little bit of sourcing material directly from producers of that waste. For example, last week a department at OSU that has a bunch of 3D printer spools that are made out of polystyrene. They dropped off a big load of that for us to recycle. But primarily we work with companies that they do that every day. They go and source material, they shred it, wash it and prepare it for companies like me where we transform it into a new product.

Speaker 3:

Wow, that's incredible.

Speaker 2:

Joseph, again, thank you for being here today and it's pretty neat that you have a Joseph and a Joe doing a podcast together. And I will ask this right out front, because anyone who knows me knows I'm going to ask this question. But are you familiar with National Joe Day on March 27th of every year? You know?

Speaker 1:

I'm not, but it sounds like a great holiday.

Speaker 2:

Well then, you and I will celebrate it in 2026. That's March 27th, 2026, national Joe Day. Joseph, let's start by telling our listeners about some of the products, like countertops and furniture, that you make at Marvel Plastics. I know here at SWACO we actually are using your product as a countertop in our Education Resource Center.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's right. Are using your product as a countertop in our education resource center? Yeah, that's right. Actually, one of our first initial projects that we did was with you guys, waco, at your education center, where you needed some shelving to house some of your display and products. Talking about the recycling in Central Ohio, so we made some of that shelving from recycled plastic plates. So if you imagine the plates that you have at like a cookout and those plates that are kind of hard and brittle, like you could snap them, we recycled those into a sheet material and then cut them into shelving that's used in your education center. And then later we did a project, also for your education center, where we made some bins that kids can use to play a sort of a sorting game to learn about sorting your materials for landfill or recycling.

Speaker 2:

So if I'm wanting to replace a kitchen counter and I reach out to Marble Plastics, tell our listeners what are some of the benefits of using your product versus a real marble product.

Speaker 1:

Yes, when you think about our product, I would put it in the same category as a solid surface material. And that is some of the big brand names for that are Corion or Formica, if you're familiar with those brands. So we fit in kind of that solid surface category. And the benefits of solid surface are basically non-porosity, so it can be cleaned very, very easily. It is water resistant actually, you know, waterproof. It's plastic, so those are some of the main benefits.

Speaker 1:

It's plastic, so those are some of the main benefits and in terms of functionality, but also in terms of the environmental benefit, most solid surface products are made from virgin materials.

Speaker 1:

It's a mix of a polymer product and then also some minerals that are used to make solid surface. Ours is 100% recycled material, keeping that out of the landfill. And then if you were to compare it to a product like marble, obviously you know marble is mined from the ground and marble is a fantastic product, should be, you know, used and but used wisely. And if you think about all the marble that you've seen, you know different buildings, all of that came from the ground and you know how long can we do that for. So when I, when we make our product, I kind of think about it as like kind of the marble of the future, because you know how long, how long can we pull marble out of the ground? You know, in maybe 20, 30 years. It's like plastic recycled plastic becomes the new marble because we have to sort of, mine it and use that to create new products.

Speaker 2:

So you're helping to reduce the use of a natural resource by basically making a recycled product that works just as well. That's right.

Speaker 1:

That's right.

Speaker 3:

Well, you mentioned that your products are functional and sustainable, but what I can attest to, they look good too. The countertops that I've seen you produce are colorful. They're just so interesting to look at. You can see the little flecks of colored plastic in there. So they really look good too. And I was reading up on your website about your company and I read this term decentralized manufacturing. It's a process that I think you use. Can you explain what that is?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, Well, to speak to your first point about the aesthetics of the materials. So what we try to do is tell the story of recycling because so many people they don't want to recycle, because they don't believe that the materials actually get reused. They think the truck comes around and then ends up at the landfill and dumps it into the ground, which is just not the case. But part of the reason it's a hard sell to people is they just don't. It's such a long supply chain that they don't know the companies that actually use that their recyclables that they put in their bin. They don't know the companies that actually turn it into a new product. They might have heard of Rumpke or you know Sueco. That is part of that process. But knowing the actual end manufacturer of the end product is what can help encourage them to do the recycling. So that's part of it. The other part of it is creating an aesthetic that looks recycled, because part of the reason that people don't believe in recycling is that even though many of the products around you have a recycled content in it, you don't realize it. Number one, because maybe it says really small. You know underneath the table that it says 20%. You know recycled content but it looks homogenous, so it's all one color and that speaks new. It speaks, you know, virgin. And we try to do the opposite. We try to incorporate the small shreds of material so that it looks recycled, so that helps make the connection in the user's mind.

Speaker 1:

The person sitting at the restaurant eating on one of our tables is this is a recycled product. And the more I put my material into the bin, the more that it's going to end up in a cool looking product like this. It's almost like education through product. We're trying to make a beautiful, functional product, but we also want to use products as a way to change behavior in people. There's many different strategies for trying to change behavior. You know there's education, you know there's financial incentives, and another one is education and behavior change through inspiration and product. And that's what we try to do. And, hannah, I just want to come back to your question about decentralized recycling. Yeah, we have that on our website because it's really part of our vision for the company, because we imagine plastic recycling sort of, as I like to make the comparison to the local organic farm movement. So what that movement has done for people is it has reconnected people to their food.

Speaker 1:

You know most people eat food that was grown thousands of miles away, that has been shipped a long way to get to your plate and through that process has it developed in the post-war era was it kind of separated people from their food, and the problem was that is you kind of lose the relationship with the farmer and you lose the knowledge about how food is grown, and we make that same comparison to the way goods are produced, and especially plastic.

Speaker 1:

So what we're trying to do is create small facilities that can be in the same communities that people are producing the materials that plastic waste can be in the same communities that people are producing the materials that plastic waste can be transformed into a new product, also in the same local, regional area. And what we hope that does is help make that connection between the producer of the waste and then the end user of the new product that's made from that waste. And that's what we hope can drive again that behavior change conversation that we were describing earlier. And today we just have our first facility here in Columbus. But our vision is about creating regional hubs around the US where we can roll out a similar model where we're taking in waste regionally and then processing that intoa new product that can be used also in buildings and homes regionally.

Speaker 3:

So you gave the example of the plastic plates that you're recycling into your products. When I see those little flecks of colored plastic in your countertop, what other plastics are in there?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, we use a wide variety of different products end up recycled in our material. I'll give you some other examples. So a lot of our materials have black as the base color and that comes from electronic waste. So your computer monitors, keyboards, housings for electronics, a lot of that is highact polystyrene, which is a lot of what we use. And all of that that we use is post-consumer.

Speaker 1:

We work with a recycler that does the collection and processing for that, so that's a big piece. Another one is refrigerators. We work also with another recycler that recycles white goods and those end up as the primary white base for our material and then a lot of the flex that you see, those little sprinkles of color that you see in our products. We work with a nonprofit in Indianapolis and it's a really fantastic woman who started it. It's called Danielle Cares for Chairs and she collects bread tags from people all around the country. They send them to her. That's that little piece of plastic that you tie a loaf of bread off with. She collects those and then she sells them to us and what she does with that money is that she turns around and buys people wheelchairs who can't afford them. So she has a nonprofit based around, kind of recycling bread tags into buying people wheelchairs, and those bread tags end up in our product.

Speaker 2:

Do you do bottle caps and solo cups?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, we do do solo cups. Solo cups are primarily polystyrene waste. The thing with bottle caps styrene waste. The thing with bottle caps usually those are HTBE, which we have worked with a little bit recently, but not a huge amount. The thing about plastics in general is they're very, very specific in terms of their chemical composition and then how you reprocess them. So there's, first of all, there's thousands of different types of plastics. You're probably familiar with the one through seven number code. We try to stick with number six as our primary plastic source. Number one because in your residential stream it's non-recycled those materials. It's a smaller amount of the total plastic waste stream. It doesn't make it that economically viable for recyclers to pull that out usually, so it doesn't get widely recycled. That's part of the reason we try to focus on that. The second part is really just the functional characteristics of that type of polymer make it very good for furniture countertop hard plastic goods.

Speaker 2:

To me it's fascinating what you're doing at Marble Plastics and, you know, at Swago we believe that all materials have some value, which is why we work so hard to keep them from coming into our landfill. In fact, as you probably know, our company tagline is from waste to resources, meaning that we strive to help residents and families and businesses think differently about what they might throw in their trash and most likely is a valuable resource. So at Marble Plastics, you say the same about plastics, right, and so plastic isn't a waste, it's actually a resource. But tell our listeners, why has plastic got such a bad rap?

Speaker 1:

I think it's a great question and a great point about. Today. Plastic does come off as there's a negative connotation kind of around plastics, and part of that, I think, is bounded in reality and part of it, I think, is misguided. But what's driving it, I think, is that plastics have been kind of misused as a material, where it's been overused as a single-use item, and that's what, at least in my view, plastic should not be used for.

Speaker 1:

Plastics are a fantastic really amazing material developed during the war era really expanded during that because we needed use cases. We had so many use cases for, you know, highly engineered products and now we have the benefit from all those different types of products, but it's kind of overused again in that single use category when it should be reserved for long lasting, durable goods. So I think that's how to make the distinction between where plastic should be used versus where it should be used. Less is single-use items, where it's just barely used and then needs to be either recycled or people landfill it, when it should be reserved for long-lasting, durable goods.

Speaker 3:

That's a great explanation it really is, and when I listen to you talk about plastics, I'm reminded that there's really no such thing as throwing something away. It doesn't actually go away, it comes to the landfill, where you know it's safely managed. But what you're offering the community is an opportunity to keep those valuable materials moving through a circular economy, and so that's just so important. And you know, I recently had the opportunity to hear you speak at the Central Ohio Circular Economy Roundtable meeting, and afterwards we connected on LinkedIn and I had a chance to look at your profile there and just really was impressed with the amount of work you've been doing in the environmental space. Can you share with our listeners a little bit about your experience, including your time at the Ohio EPA and then afterwards in the Netherlands? Sure?

Speaker 1:

So I think I initially got into environmental issues and opportunities was during graduate school when I was in Indiana University and I just started kind of learning about, you know, the fact that we do have a big environmental issue domestically and internationally especially and actually I have some waste in my family, I like to say my grandfather. He owned a waste company in Dayton Ohio, so it was a garbage hauler and he ended up selling that company to waste management 30 years ago maybe. But you know, I grew up hearing stories from my mom and my uncles about, you know, riding in the trucks with the waste company and just all the different things about they had a landfill down there, and so I kind of as a concept, I really stuck with waste because I saw waste and circularity as kind of the missing piece of sustainability. You know, it's really how do you tie the end of the loop back into the beginning. So that's how I got into waste initially. Then, after graduate school, I started at Ohio EPA in sustainable materials management and really my first project was about how do we create an industrial symbiosis amongst Ohio companies, so how can we support companies that have waste streams and get those waste streams into the production inputs of other companies so that we can keep materials locally, local to ohio, and really help the economy here in ohio. And that turned into the ohio materials marketplace, which is an online marketplace to facilitate industrial reuse and recycling amongst ohio companies, and that really got me excited about. Okay, we can really make a difference. We can really increase the amount of materials that are being kept out of landfill and recycled. And part of my job for that online marketplace was to be the matchmaker behind the scenes, so working with a company that has a waste stream and then calling around to other companies to try to get them to take that as a reuse or recycling solution.

Speaker 1:

And one thing that I ran into as a sort of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed 25-year-old, was that there are many barriers to reuse and recycling, whether it's regulatory, volume issues, chemical composition, hazardous waste. There's tons of reasons why materials do not get reused or recycled and that frustrated me because I could see a valuable resource, especially plastics. You know I would see a ton of plastics going to landfill that were not being recycled for one of those reasons I listed earlier and that bothered me. I really felt like I don't want to be the person trying to facilitate this when you know the companies would say you know, our hands are tied, we can't make this happen. I wanted to be on the side of actually doing the recycling myself because I felt like there's a waste here I can make this happen.

Speaker 1:

So that led me to join another organization called Precious Plastic, who are based in the Netherlands, who are based in the Netherlands, and I went there about five years ago to help them develop some small scale recycling machines to turn plastic waste into new products. And that was a whole long journey over there. But basically we were designing machines to recycle plastic waste, like injection molders, extrusion machines, compression molding machines, and then working with small communities around the world to implement those machines to turn plastic waste into new products. And that brought me to several different regions.

Speaker 1:

I spent a good amount of time in Africa, southeast Asia, south America implementing those solutions, and during that time I would think back to my days at Ohio EPA and also growing up in Columbus and Ohio about all those different waste streams that I would see, and so I decided to take what I was learning and helping to develop in terms of technology over there in Europe and bring it back here to Columbus and to the nation, really bring it back here to Columbus and to the nation really, because, even though there's many, we have tons of innovation here in the US, but also Ohio we are a little bit behind, I feel like, in sustainability and in recycling as opposed to different countries around the world. So I wanted to take the opportunity and the technology that I learned over there, implement it here to try to push the envelope in terms of what we can keep out of the landfill.

Speaker 2:

First of all, fascinating journey. I had an opportunity to spend a week in Denmark.

Speaker 3:

You're right.

Speaker 2:

They are so far ahead of us when it comes to sustainability and the work that they're doing in the Netherlands and Switzerland and Sweden. I mean, it's an interesting, just different dynamic over there. Did you visit Copen Hill? I sure did. I did not ski down the hill, but I was a little nervous at the top. I was like this is interesting, but it was a cool place. You know, as we mentioned at the onset of this podcast, it is Plastic Free July and Hannah, I know here at SWACO we've been very busy sharing tips on our social media accounts and e-newsletter about what people can do to reduce their reliance on single-use plastics that Joseph talked about earlier. But I'm going to ask you, hannah, what do you think is the single easiest way to get started?

Speaker 3:

Well, joe, thanks for that question. Let me first start by saying that there are hundreds of companies here in Central Ohio that rely on our recyclables, including our plastics. So if you have plastics at home and you want to recycle them, remember plastic bottles, tubs, jugs and cups are all accepted at the curb. But if you're looking for ways to go plastic free, my probably single best piece of advice is to look for ways to swap out those single use, disposable paper and plastic items, like those cookout and party plates. You can always opt for washable, reusable ones. Save you a little money too. And then the other thing I would just encourage people to do is you know, take your own refillable travel mug to your favorite coffee shop.

Speaker 3:

You don't have to accept the paper or plastic coffee cup there, you can take your own, and sometimes you even get offered a little discount if you bring your own reusable cup. So that'd be my advice All right?

Speaker 2:

Well, I'm going to, I'm going to at least listen to your advice and try it. And but, Joseph, any additional thoughts on how to go plastic free?

Speaker 1:

Well, my thought would be know that your plastic that you put in your bin really does get recycled.

Speaker 3:

I know, I know people are skeptical.

Speaker 1:

Sweco is doing an amazing job. Rumpke is doing an amazing, amazing job here in central Ohio. It is being recycled, don't worry, and it's being turned into useful products, some that you use every day and you just don't know it.

Speaker 2:

Thank, you for trying to demythify the fact that things are being recycled. And you're right, rumpke and does a great job, and I know SWACO is a great partner of them. Finally, joseph, I have to ask the crystal ball question when do you see marble plastics in the next five years?

Speaker 1:

What I hope to see is number one recycled plastics as a building material being a commonplace in the architectural and design industry here in the United States, and right now we are the only real producer of this type of product. That's domestic, and I hope we can be the leader in that field. In five years, if you're using a recycled plastic you know, countertop or tabletop, something like that that it almost won't will be commonplace and not even that innovative or have to be really cutting edge. It should just be normalized and I hope that we can be at the forefront of making that a reality.

Speaker 3:

Well, thank you for the work you're doing. It's so important to Central Ohio's economy, but also our environment, and thank you for joining us today and sharing your stories. If people want to learn more about your company, where can they go online?

Speaker 1:

I think the best place would be to follow us on Instagram and then also check out our website at marmalplasticscom.

Speaker 3:

Great Well, thank you and to our listeners. If you'd like to know more about what we do, visit SWACO's website anytime at SWACOorg.

Speaker 2:

And we also want to hear from you. If you have ideas for future podcast episodes, connect with us on any of our social channels or you can always drop us an email. Until next time, this is Waste Ed a waste and recycling podcast by SWACO. Thank you.