Packaging Etcetera Podcast
The Packaging Etcetera Podcast is by and large a forum for discussing events and trends in the packaging industry. While packaging is the focus, Etcetera is a reference to an occasional wild card - maybe something serious and career focused, or something scientific or maybe even something fun and playful.
Packaging Etcetera Podcast
From Georgia to Jersey: The Professor Who Made Plastic Structural
The story of materials science innovation rarely makes headline news, yet it's responsible for transformative changes in how we package products, build infrastructure, and handle waste. Dr. Tom Nosker, a National Academy of Inventors Fellow and materials science pioneer, shares his remarkable journey from Georgia mechanic to ground-breaking Rutgers researcher whose work has generated an estimated million jobs in recycling.
Dr. Nosker's career began with a practical observation at a Volkswagen dealership – mechanics suffered debilitating physical issues by their 40s, with none reaching 50 without significant problems. This insight led him to engineering school and eventually to developing revolutionary technologies in plastic recycling and composite materials. His structural plastic lumber innovations have created railway bridges sturdy enough to support military tanks, while his recent work with graphene composites promises to transform packaging with superior barrier properties.
What makes Dr. Nosker's work particularly significant is how it combines environmental sustainability with practical application. His plastic recycling technologies don't just reduce waste – they create materials superior to traditional options. The graphene composites he's developing can match aircraft aluminum for strength while providing exceptional gas barrier properties in packaging applications. Though the resulting bottles would be black rather than clear, they represent a potential breakthrough for pharmaceuticals and beverages requiring enhanced protection.
Beyond his technical insights, Dr. Nosker provides fascinating context about materials science evolution, including how the U.S. shifted from oil to natural gas for plastics production, and Thomas Gold's controversial "Deep Hot Biosphere" theory about hydrocarbon formation. As he looks toward retirement, his legacy of innovation continues expanding through global licensing agreements generating millions in sales annually.
Ready to discover how materials science shapes our packaging world? Listen now to gain insights from one of the field's most influential innovators.
Hi folks, welcome back to another episode of the Packaging Etc podcast. This week, my special guest is a former professor of mine from Rutgers, phd in Material Science from Rutgers University, dr Tom Nosker. Tom, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Hi, thank you, Matt. Very nice to see you again. Well, sort of but, and yeah, I always enjoy having you as a student.
Speaker 1:You're a very good student listen, you already gave me my grade. I don't think you need to have. Yeah, there's no need to blow smoke okay cool, no smoke involved. Yeah, actually, yeah do me a favor, just kind of, you know, for the listeners. Just introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about who you are and where you've come from where I come from, who I am okay.
Speaker 2:So I grew up in georgia and, um, I went all the way through school, including college. I went to georgia tech. My parents had a place, it was 10 miles from georgia tech, so that was the local engineering school and I actually kind of, you know, uh, college wasn't my first choice but it became my first choice. I, I worked at a car dealership. Uh, you know, most many southern boys know how to work on cars almost instinctively and, uh, I was one of those. And, um, I saw the. I worked for the, for the biggest volkswagen dealer in atlanta, and I found, you know, they had maybe 50 mechanics about but uh, none of them were age 50. Uh, they all were complaining about physical problems and stuff in their 40s and I figured that that was not a good long-term thing for people who generally, I was told in high school, lived to their early 70s. I could not figure out what you would do to earn a living in your last 20 or 30 years. So I went to engineering school and I actually had an advantage, I think, over most of the engineering students because I already knew a lot about machines. Um, I, I really liked my, I really liked my classes in material science. They just seemed to make sense to me. You know, almost before I learned, before I read much about them and so I went to graduate school at Rutgers in in uh, in material science, and I saw that the biggest growth area among all materials was in plastics. I mean plastics basically grow. They've been growing for the last 50 years or so, maybe 10% a year on average. That's mostly replacing metals and ceramics in many different applications. Phd. I was offered to stay at Rutgers, partly because of my my interest in research and success at research and and partly because, you know, I I had already taught some classes as a grad student and I was, uh, the seemed that that my, my students were happy with the kind of job I did. So anyway, that's what got me started in my career. Actually, I'm near the end of it, I mean I'm beyond normal retirement years. I'm very happy.
Speaker 2:I had a lot of fun and I got to work on what I wanted to work on, which is unusual. Most people get told what to work on unless they own their own company and it's been pretty good for a lot of people. I've created a lot of jobs and stuff too, jobs and stuff too. So, yeah, it's a it. It's been fun. I've mostly I've been.
Speaker 2:I took advantage of the fact that my that I know machines. You know I joke a little bit, but it's true that machines are easier to understand than people. People are complex, yeah, and I'm getting bored with that. So basically I've developed or made changes to lots of machines through the year. You know, there, uh, I, I got involved with uh, uh, packaging engineering. I taught packaging engineering classes at Rutgers for for eight years. You know I, my teaching load was getting heavier and heavier, but meanwhile people were. It was easy for me to raise money and have graduate students work on projects. The, the people that were loading me with classes seemed unrelenting. So eventually I just decided to most to just do research pretty much. I mean, I still taught some classes, but so, yeah, I didn.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I didn't realize that you only taught for eight years and I was lucky enough to be at Rutgers doing my undergrad during that time. So you know, that's how you and I came to know each other. Right, I do speak fondly of that class and again, you're not going to improve my grade, so blowing smoke may be pointless, but it was one of the most memorable classes that I had at Rutgers in the packaging program because I was the only student and, if I recall I think Rutgers and maybe other schools as well, have a requirement where if there are less than three students in the class, it's at the professor's discretion whether or not he or she would teach the class. And you came to me and said you know you need this class to graduate and I said, yes, sir, I do. And you said well, listen, I'm willing to teach it if you're willing to take it. And I said absolutely. So. It was just you and I for the entire semester in the old Army barracks on Bush campus and just a very memorable experience for me.
Speaker 2:Oh, thank you, yeah, me, oh, thank you. Yeah, I look, I always love teaching, uh, but the but the management at rutgers, you know, loaded me with more and more class, uh, um, classes and, um, different ones, and I and I would tell them, I'll be honest with you, I'll just go to them say, hey, you know, I've got an idea for a new class. I think that could really really help the fundamental understanding of the packaging students and I'm willing to teach it, and so then they would add that to my list of classes that I was going to teach and so there was more work. But you know, that was going to take time out from my research and I had graduate students at that point and, uh, that I was trying to support and and had to keep sponsors happy and stuff. And yeah, I could see that. No, I never. There was never a class that I started that they let me off of.
Speaker 2:That's the problem yeah, and so, uh, I tried to get that to happen, but it didn't work, work. And so then I said I think I'm just going to do my research, because I'm actually very good at that too Well and so it's I love teaching, I mean I.
Speaker 2:It's always fun to talk to students and to try, and you know, I always treated everybody as though they were more or less my equal and allowed them to ask questions and stuff. There's no stupid question and only stupid answers. It was a great experience on all sides, I think, but anyway, yeah, so I ended up raising many millions of dollars in R&D and having, you know, nearly 100 patents.
Speaker 1:That's amazing, absolutely amazing, well-deserved honor. So, speaking of honors, I know you were featured in an article recently and in my first episode of the podcast, when my wife interviewed me, I absolutely fumbled the mention of you because I didn't have specific notes and so I didn't get the verbiage just right. But I understand that you were nominated into the National Academy of Inventors. So you know, give us a little background on that. Where did that come from?
Speaker 2:So I'm actually already in the National Academy of Inventors, but now I'm going to become a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, and fellow has special meaning to academics. Especially In my early career I really focused on plastic recycling.
Speaker 1:And that's where the rutgers packaging program kind of got its start right.
Speaker 2:Was was through recycling no no it got its start as a packaging program before anybody was plastic recycling, and then, um, about 1985, basically people were okay. The long history is. I'll try and do it very quickly. World War II when it came about, we wanted to win the war and we went through a lot of special effort to try and win World War II. In order to do that, we had to target the materials that the military needed to win the war to them, and so there were a lot of things that the public stopped being able to get. You know there were no, for example, for kids, bicycles and, you know, for wagons that they would pull along and stuff like that. There was no more steel ball bearings available for the wheels, and so they had to figure out how they were going to.
Speaker 2:Yeah right, that's right, that's right. So, and that went on for lots of materials and in a lot of different ways. Lots of materials and in a lot of different ways and people. As part of that, they recycled, you know, paper and metals and glass, and there was no plastics used for very much of anything during World War II. Meanwhile, plastic, you know being developed, continually, being developed, made in those days from oil, found uses as plastic bags. They started to take over, you know, glass bottles, first in the bathrooms, because of course, you know to have a glass bottle fall on a bathroom floor where you got no shoes on, you know, can be a bloody mess, no pun. So anyway, they gradually took over more and more applications and nobody had ever tried to figure out how to recycle them and that was becoming a big issue and people were saying, you know, we should ban these, we should go back to the old materials and that was going to cost more money to do and it would be less efficient. Plastics are lightweight, they're, you know, low temperature to process typically, I mean compared to glass and metals, and you know they make sense. In a lot of ways they actually do make sense.
Speaker 2:I mean I know there's been people talking about a lot of microplastics in our body, and stuff like that really doesn't get any traction among scientists because all they're doing is finding out that there are a lot of hydrocarbons in our bodies. Well, we're a hydrocarbon-based species, as are lots of other animals I mean most of all other animals. Really, you know you're going to find hydrocarbons that look like the plastics in our bodies and outside our bodies, but that doesn't mean that the plastics can easily be ingested by us and find itself, you know, in our brain or anything like that. In fact, you know there's a lot of things that can't make it through the blood-brain barrier A lot of small moleculed animals and things can't. Mm-hmm, a lot of small moleculed animals and things can't. So there's no germs in our cranial fluid, which is clear. Normally, if you break your blood-brain barrier, you can die, and that actually happened once to me during a botched operation.
Speaker 2:Anyway, I know about that and and, uh, you know, people are finding small hydrocarbon molecules in people's bodies, but they belong there actually and they're not. They didn't come from plastic that degraded somehow, um. So, anyway, that's a discussion. I could be happy to have that discussion technically with anybody, uh, reading the papers, uh, that talk about, about nanoparticles of plastic, that so that's what they call it. They say they're now particles of plastic and, yeah, they look similar. That's because we are hydrocarbon based species and those are made from hydrocarbons and we just make them into very big molecules.
Speaker 1:That makes sense. Okay, wow, we took a long detour there. Pardon, I said we took a little bit of a detour there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I did, I know.
Speaker 1:That's okay, that's okay.
Speaker 2:I don't know, yeah, but anyway. But it's relevant and there are constantly people you know that, I think, and sometimes they're well-grounded you know that we needed to figure out how to recycle plastics. So there's resin recovery processes. Rutgers began licensing in 1987 a resin recovery process that could be used for PET bottles, soda bottles and, nowadays, water bottles. People weren't selling water and plastic bottles back in those days, but in the 90s that started.
Speaker 1:So it's interesting. You made reference to World War II as kind of being an impetus towards the recycling program, modern day recycling initiatives. I want to say the genesis of the product. Nutella was also born out of a similar necessity. So it was a baker in Italy. During World War II, the Italians were rationing chocolate. During World War II, the Italians were rationing chocolate and the baker was not able to get his hands on enough chocolate to make his product, and so he supplanted some of his chocolate with hazelnut, and people fell in love with the flavor and boom, there's Nutella. And so the Nutella product was actually born out of World War II rationing.
Speaker 2:Wow, necessity is the mother of invention. Yeah, absolutely, that's how that really works. Yeah, so nobody had ever looked at plastic recycling until it became so popular that that was the one material that you know should be recycled. That wasn't being recycled, and so people had to focus on it. And then, uh, plastic lumber. I was the the lead guy behind all the plastic lumber stuff, and then we made, gradually, got around to figuring out how to turn high density polyethylene-based plastic lumber into a structural material and then eventually build bridges, including tank bridges, railway bridges and road bridges, and then railway ties, which are normally made out of oak, which has got very good mechanical properties, and we have YCCs.
Speaker 1:But my understanding is, with our lumber harvesting processes these days there's the slow growth old growth forest versus the fast. You know, grow it to harvest it. Type lumber and your structural properties between the two are vastly different.
Speaker 2:So when they say they're not making them like they used to.
Speaker 1:That is a specific example of that. Is that correct?
Speaker 2:Well, so the stuff with the. So there's also different kinds of trees right Right.
Speaker 2:So you know, a two by four to be used in a house for a joist or something like that or for a wall, might be pine, and pine does not have anywhere near the mechanical properties of something that's a hardwood like oak.
Speaker 2:So the railway industry only makes bridges and railway ties out of oak and those aren't farmed because they take 100 years to grow. But pine trees are routinely grown like corn and turned into paper and combination of paper and you know pine boards for houses. The old grove forests are where the oak trees are and they tend not to be that straight. You know some of the pine trees, southern yellow pine for example, are straight and long and you can make telephone poles are made out of that too, not that strong, not that stiff, but straight and good enough mechanical property. And then they of course have to put. If they want to put it outside and not have it deteriorate in like three years, they have to put poisons in it so that the bugs that try and eat them die. And so for railway ties it's creosote, a black tar, chromated copper arsenate is still used for most pine applications, but also creosote is used for some some telephone pole type applications. Still okay, but they're, those are all.
Speaker 1:Those are all not pleasant for people to work with and it can kill them and so the plastic recycling technology that you've developed over the years that has led into this AMIP program, and I'm not going to remember the exact acronym, but I know there's miscible and immiscible polymer blends in there somewhere from our class, but that was all born out of plastic recycling technology, correct? So kind of walk us through, kind of where that's at. And I know that you're making structural lumber, but I would love to understand what type of packaging applications there could be, not just as a raw material stream for the recycling, but turning it around and then making packaging components potentially out of that material.
Speaker 2:So I don't know that you're going to use a standard, replace a standard packaging material with that that stuff. Generally, we figured out how to put like glass fibers in it and orient them, even from things like car bumpers, so they're discontinuous glass fibers and give properties that are good enough that they can be used for things like railway ties. You can use them for pallets, though, I think, which a kind of a packaging application, uh, or at least distribution package, distribution kind of a material, uh, but I think that. So the more recent stuff that we've been working with is, um, not necessarily, although it's possible to do it with a recycled material. We've been making, uh, graphene plastic composites, and combining graphene and a little bit of carbon fiber and stuff, we can get properties up so high that it's actually competitive with aircraft aluminum on a stiffness and strength and toughness per unit weight basis.
Speaker 1:Okay, and I guess technically an airplane is a package. I mean, if you really want to go by the old definition, right?
Speaker 2:Well, there we go. That's a reusable package. That's a reusable package. There you go.
Speaker 1:There you go, there's our hook.
Speaker 2:But we also. So the graphene has potential for some packaging applications where gas permeation is an issue. So the graphene. So we have a process where we take graphite, which is very common and it's mineable all over the world, which is very common and it's it's mineable all over the world. There are places that have gotten maybe 30% of the soil is graphite and of course that's what's used in pencils, right, and people write with pencils and so the what it's also used as a lock lubricant. So there are layers of covalently bound carbon where each layer is very stiff and strong. It's actually stiffer and stronger than diamond in that layer within the layer. But the layers themselves are very easy to shear relative to one another and that's why a five-year-old can write with a pencil.
Speaker 2:That's also how the lock lubricant thing works is the layers can be sheared relative to one another without very high shear stress I never, I never so what we do is we take graphite and we put it in molten plastic and we have it go through a process where we have alternating high and low shear on the slurry of material that we made and we can. We can separate the layers of graphene from one another and we can get also get really good bonding between the polymer and the graphene, which normally you can't do with, like carbon fiber or anything okay, or glass fiber and a plastic. We can get covalent bonding between the graphene and the plastic and we get way better properties than you might think. The other thing is that each layer of graphene is impermeable to just about any gas.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, you've got barrier properties now.
Speaker 2:We can orient them so that they are in the plane of the plastic. You know so if you make a bottle they'll be in the plane of the plastic that got blow molded and that can affect the permeation rate significantly. And so we could make a thin but relatively impermeable, you know, bottle for a variety of drugs or for sodas or whatever, out of this, and usually on a per-pound basis. Really there's no plastic that's cheaper than graphite. The downturn side is that it makes a black bottle.
Speaker 1:Okay. So yeah, we, we just, we just, uh, you know, backed our way out of probably 90% of the world's markets. Um, but you know, theoretically, I'm not necessarily, I mean.
Speaker 2:After all, do they not sell soda in cans and clear bottles?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 2:So I'm not sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that's true, so I'm not sure. Yeah, you may have completely blocked. You know, 360 degree label around a bottle or a shrink sleeve or something like that. You know, I would assume from an adhesion perspective those would be options as well. You know, from a decorating Sure.
Speaker 2:At the end of the day it's still a black bottle. It doesn't have to be. It doesn't have to be black, but uh, yeah, you can make it any other dark color easily.
Speaker 2:Okay, you just can't make it clear again yeah yet, yeah, oh yeah, yeah, I'm a glass half full kind of guy so you know there's, there are uh, I think there's still a lot, there's, there's a lot to be done in all these things. But we can also get you know extremely good properties at a lightweight and low cost and probably take over a lot of thermoset plastic composite applications. With thermoplastic with graphene.
Speaker 1:From an equipment compatibility perspective, would these materials require new types of machinery for processing, or it runs on existing technology?
Speaker 2:No, it requires special machines to make the composite right, To have the high flow shear alternating and get the exfoliation to happen. But once you've made it, you can run it through an extruder or an injection molding machine or what have you and you can blow mold things. Whatever you want to do, that you can do with plastic, you can do with that. So there's a lot of possibilities.
Speaker 2:You may be limited by how much graphene you have in on a percentage basis, because it won't stretch as easily, Okay. Okay, but you know if you put a low loading in you might actually significantly influence the permeation and be able to get good elongation when you produce your, you know, at lower loading, at a lower loading, At a higher loading, you know you can compete with any loading that you can make with carbon fiber and thermosets.
Speaker 1:Okay, I'll tell you it's some interesting stuff. It would be really exciting to see who grabs onto this type of technology and this material first for a traditional packaging application.
Speaker 2:This is why I'm still here.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm beyond the normal retirement age right now and I want to get to the point where, um, it's running on its own. You know the, the railway tie stuff, the people that are licensing that. They're doubling in size every year.
Speaker 1:That's great $88 million in sales last year, 88 million dollars in sales last year, so 44 the year before, and I understand that the I mean how many? How many continents are you on now with that plastic lumber?
Speaker 2:I'm not on anything, okay, I'm just a inventor.
Speaker 2:Fair enough, then rutgers owns the patents okay but, um, but the company that's licensing that you know. So at one point there were two companies, one in America and one in the UK, that split up the whole world with this kind of technology with the plastic lumber technology okay, structural plastic lumber and the Americans got in a fight with Rutgers. They didn't want to pay any more royalties to Rutgers and so Rutgers took the license back from them and they went out of business. The people in the UK that had the license for Europe and other places, they kept it and they eventually, after everything settled with the American company, they went to Rutgers and said you know, we would like to get the whole world now, otherwise America is not going to have this stuff easily or quickly. And rutgers said yeah, sure, why not? You already know how to make it. And uh, blah, blah, and so they're, they have.
Speaker 2:They built a factory in uh kansas somewhere okay and uh, now they're building, I think, four new factories in other countries, all other countries, yeah. So they've got one in the UK, they've got one in Kansas and they're going to Eastern Europe and to Australia and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean it would make sense from a distribution perspective, taking advantage of the local uh, you know raw material stream.
Speaker 2:Um, everybody's event, all manufacturers for everything. That's all eventually going to come because the U? S is going to stop policing the oceans for everybody's uh, you know, uh, shipping worldwide and protecting everything Even when the United States isn't involved. They've done that since World War II, but that's ending. They've already begun to make changes to the military to make it so that that will end, and so everybody knows it's going to end, yeah, and that's going to have a huge impact on global commerce.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, I guess, to your point, this UK-based company having I guess we could call it exclusive rights to that technology building facilities regionally throughout the globe kind of takes the impetus away from having to protect those shipping channels. Right, they wouldn't really be subject to those types of issues because they have complete control over their specific regions.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, it makes a lot of sense happened already with plastics is that we've now got close to a thousand years supply of natural gas in the United States, and everything you can make from oil you can make from natural gas, but you can't ship natural gas that easily, okay, everywhere, and so we switched from making every all the plastics from oil to natural gas and, and the price of the natural gas is extremely low. So we've got basically the cheapest way to make plastics, but the plastics can be sent everywhere. But that's a huge change in the plastics industry. That's a direct result of Thomas Gold's. First he wrote a paper that was in a major publication called the Deep Hot Biosphere, and then he wrote a book with the same title and he predicted that there's actually natural gas underneath everybody's property, everywhere the oceans, all the land and it's not coming from dead plants and animals, and so, I don't know, around 2007, 2008, his, his book came out, uh, which explained what his paper had alluded to, but with way more detail, and you can buy that book, by the way, for like 30, 32 or something on on amazon.
Speaker 2:Okay, the d pot biosphere and anyway. So once people who know how to drill wells read that, they recognize that in the united states, uh, on anybody who had, let's say, a, a 40-acre farm or more, they could get the rights. If they could get the rights to drill on that property and that property happened to have a natural gas pipeline, they could get paid to pump the natural gas into the pipeline. They don't have to buy tanks. They don't have to buy trucks, they don't have to buy anything. Yeah, there's to buy trucks, they don't have to buy anything.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's no distribution.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so that's what happened. We went from a 30-year supply of natural gas to a 1,000-year supply in a very short amount of time and most people focused on fracking, which is a method that's being used. Not everybody did it, you know, in the safest way, but you can do it in a safe way and where you don't you know, damage the land and everything, and 95% of the wells that were drilled hit kind of bearing and making the point that it's actually under everybody's land.
Speaker 1:There's a natural process that occurs in the Earth's core that generates methane. That's interesting no-transcript.
Speaker 2:It's made from the same process. It's just that if you have two methane molecules in the presence of iron, at a little bit elevated pressure it can grow into a longer chain hydrocarbon molecule which is like oil and thick, heavier. I mean the microwave could be all over the map, right, it could be very thick oil, it could be light oil, but you know, basically that's also not coming from dead plants and animals.
Speaker 1:You mean it's all coming from the dinosaurs.
Speaker 2:It's not coming from the dinosaurs, it's not coming from the. It's not a little bit came from the dinosaurs, but a huge amount is being generated every day. I know this is a new idea. It also kind of makes all the arguments, you know about the greenhouse gases and and, uh, us, you know breathing out, uh, uh, the gases that we generate by living. You know, uh, that's, that's just complete baloney really. Um, all the civil engineers are being taught you know, thomas gold, stuff are not civil. All the chemical engineers are being taught the origin of of uh oil and natural gas, and in that chapter thomas gold's work is featured I'm gonna have to check that out.
Speaker 1:It's a book.
Speaker 2:Yeah, everybody, everybody on amazon and it's being, it's not getting a lot of press yeah but I looked into it because of course I'm a plastic guy and if, if you know, the end of plastics is coming, I want to know about it. Yeah, yeah I looked into it, so I started teaching about that too, and some of my classes so you've mentioned a couple of times so far that you're you're already past the normal retirement age.
Speaker 1:So you know, uh, assuming the stars align and you're able to retire in the not-so-distant future, what plans do you have? Bucket list type stuff, what's on the horizon?
Speaker 2:I've got a granddaughter. I'm hoping I'm going to have more grandchildren. Congratulations for that, by the way, and I have some money and stuff, stuff so I can teach them things and spoil them a little. Spoil the hell out of them absolutely.
Speaker 1:I'm looking forward to the same thing yeah, life is good.
Speaker 2:I think that I mean not that I don't like my job, I love my job but the commute has gotten longer and longer for me. Not that I don't like my job, I love my job but the commute has gotten longer and longer for me. Not that I've moved, but that there are more people in between where I live and where I work.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Every year.
Speaker 1:Well, I think that's the case pretty much anywhere in New Jersey that you live. The commute's not getting better, it's only getting worse.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right, that's right.
Speaker 2:So All right, not getting better, it's only getting worse. Yeah, that's right, that's right. So, um, all right, you know I'm gonna, I've got there are several companies that are licensing technologies. You know I develop fire retardant coatings and um the time and say we'll need my help and, um, I'm happy to help train the people that are going to be alive a lot longer than I will be, you know to, so they can deal with that kind of stuff. And uh, uh, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm grateful. I mean, at one point, rutgers uh estimated that just the plastic recycling stuff that we did alone, uh, was accountable for a million jobs in the United States. A million, wow.
Speaker 1:Okay, that's a directly and indirectly.
Speaker 2:Well, you think about it. I mean, you know every city has got recycling, you know people separate the plastics from the metals, et cetera, et cetera, and you start adding it up.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah, I guess so which somebody did I never thought about it like?
Speaker 2:that those are all new jobs. Those are jobs that didn't used to exist. That's great and, yeah, I'm very grateful. God gave me a lot of opportunity and I seized some of it.
Speaker 1:Well, listen, your work has given a lot of other people opportunity. So you know, I guess, pay it forward, pay it backward, but I guess, on behalf of all of them, thank you. Thank you, I do have. I'm going to put you on the spot here. So you did your undergrad at Georgia Tech, you did your grad work at Rutgers. So Scarlet Knights or Yellow Jackets, I mean you know what? Never mind, don't answer that it's okay.
Speaker 2:I mean, you know what? Never mind, Don't answer that it's okay. No, I don't Look. I go to all the home football games at Rutgers. I went to all the home football games at Georgia Tech when I was there. It's an interesting sport. I was a little dissuaded with some of the games this year that looked like maybe the officials got got more involved than they would normally be, uh, in the outcome of the game. Uh, I've not seen that consistently with any college games. Yeah, one of my sons uh goes to the games with me uh, every, every time and, um, it's a lot of fun and and it's good, clean fun.
Speaker 2:So my granddaughter has got a bunch of rutgers uniforms. You know she wears and and uh, and you know she's. She could be a who knows. Yeah, I don't know. Uh, hopefully she'll. I would like her to go to rutgers but her parents might have other, higher ideas. But I'm perfectly okay. I mean Georgia Tech's a public university and so is Rutgers, so I think Rutgers is a good school. Among the tiers of public universities, georgia Tech and Rutgers are up there. They're not at the bottom, they're not in the middle.
Speaker 1:Well, listen, I'll be honest. When I was in high school and I was looking at colleges, I was like every other kid growing up in New Jersey right, rutgers was my fallback plan. That was a hey. You know. Here's my top five. Rutgers is number five and I didn't realize just how widely regarded Rutgers as an institution of higher learning was until I got there and I started speaking to people that were from out of state and people that lived on my floor freshman year in the dorm that were from other countries, and when they started explaining to me because it's the local school I grew up 45 minutes away and so it was the yeah, no, I know, I took it for granted.
Speaker 1:And and. But now, looking back on it now I kind of laugh at myself because I, you know, you say, hey, I have an engineering degree from Rutgers. I, I, I take a lot of pride in that. So but yeah, I guess a rough, a rough day for you would be when a Rutgers football is playing Georgia. Tech football, tech football who are you rooting for in that game? That's a tough one, right? Are you going to be like Donna Kelsey?
Speaker 2:That's a contrived situation.
Speaker 1:It hasn't happened yet. If the NCAA is listening.
Speaker 2:you never know it might depend on the players and stuff. At that point the details will be important.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I hope both teams would do well. It would be a well-fought game.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so basically you're not willing to answer that I got it. That's the most you can hope for. No, no, no, I'm always interested in a good game. I don't like one-sided games there. I hear you Well, listen, tom.
Speaker 1:We're about up on our time here, so again, I just wanted to say thank you so much for joining us today and sharing with us some of your experiences and what you're working on, and hopefully in the not so distant future, we're reading some additional articles about huge advancements in the packaging industry and your name plastered all over it. You never know. We'll see.
Speaker 2:Okay, great. Thank you very much, matt. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk. Yeah, no, thank you, and we need to go have a beer sometime. Sold, sold, we'll talk.
Speaker 1:Thank you, sir.
Speaker 2:All right, take care Thanks, bye-bye.