By Nathan Peck | MiBiz
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GRAND RAPIDS — Lee Hammond likes to say that as much as he talks the talk about sustainability and recycling, he walks the walk as well.

As president and CEO of Bata Plastics Inc., a full service plastic recycling facility, Hammond has helped the company grow through a commitment to doing right by customers, employees and the environment. Hammond and his son, Matt Hammond, the company’s VP of operations, sat down with MiBiz for an exclusive interview on the company’s growth strategies.

In 2000, Hammond purchased Bata, which has been in business since 1985, and the company has grown to 90 employees since moving four years ago into a 120,000-square-foot building in the former Steelcase campus at 1001 40th St. in Grand Rapids.

At age 50, Lee Hammond purchased the company after working in sales for suppliers in the heavy truck and automotive industries in West Michigan. Hammond worked with a broker and found Bata appealing because it was a high-touch, hands-on business working within the auto industry.

“I wanted to do for myself what I had been doing for everyone else,” Hammond said. “We are not your typical scrap recycler. We offer a lot more in the way of service and engineering than other recyclers. We built the business on being service driven. We can educate customers on recycling, set up a program in their plant, and train their people.”

Post-industrial waste coming from manufacturers in the automotive, office furniture and toy industries supplies roughly 90 percent of the raw material for Bata. The company is focused on educating the public, developing strategies to drive increased recycling in the community, and working with legislators to divert materials away from landfills, in the hopes of ensuring a stable source of recycled materials to feed their industry.

“Because the recycling market is so much more competitive than it was before, the margins stay pretty much the same, but the prices yo-yo up and down,” Matt Hammond said. “We’re a little concerned. We don’t want the prices to get so high they hit the ceiling and crash like they did in 2008. Prices fell by more than half in October and November in 2008.”

Adding value

The company has garnered market share and pricing control by adopting a cradle-to-cradle philosophy, and as part of the back end of that design paradigm, it works to increase the amount of material that is recycled. Bata has worked with Grand Rapids-based IRT (Innovative Resin Technologies), a division of Davidson Plyforms Inc., to take a look at materials that were previously not recyclable and sent to landfills. They then developed a proprietary method and turned the plastics into a resin that is now being used for stadium seating.

“We really try to take a cradle-to-cradle philosophy with our business,” Matt Hammond told MiBiz. “This is material that otherwise would have ended up in a landfill. Now it’s seating in Yankee Stadium and (CITI Field, home of the New York Mets).”

The partnership with IRT is an example of how the recycling industry has changed. Bata has a chemical engineer on staff, both to diligently maintain quality standards, but also to bring expertise to bear on design challenges. IRT was able to provide the manufacturing know-how on the seating design, and Bata in turn was able to provide the chemical engineering to ensure that the new material could stand up to the rigors of outdoor stadium seating.

“We try as much as possible to work with local manufacturers,” Matt Hammond said.

Going lean

As manufacturers have worked to drive lean practices into their processes, Bata has worked to partner with companies to help reduce waste and maximize their profits.

“There’s not a big difference between paper, steel or plastic (recycling). At the end of the day, we’re working to recover as much of the material as possible,” Matt Hammond told MiBiz. “We’re helping them do dumpster dives — we follow dumpsters to the landfill — to get in and see what’s in the material that could be recycled. We’ve got good management systems in place to stay right with the manufacturers so we know what scrap they’re generating and how we can manipulate that. Even when there’s stuff that nobody else wants, we’ll figure out ways to reuse it.”

The company is working on its ISO 9001 quality control and ISO 14001 environmental certifications to be able to bring additional value to manufacturers. The focus on consistently improving quality is paying off. The side-view mirrors in the Ford F-150 truck program are made out of a resin blend made from materials that otherwise would have been landfilled.

“We run our facility like a lot of the manufacturers we work with,” Matt Hammond said. “We want to be a part of the product development cycle. We want to develop materials and get products spec’d in as a partner.”

Living green

When Bata began to outgrow it’s previous home on 100th Street in Byron Center, it saw an opportunity in the facility on 40th Street in Grand Rapids. Bata was looking to construct 3,000 square feet of office space and planned on building it to the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED standard. Rather than stop there, Bata brought the rest of the manufacturing space up to LEED Silver status.

“If our customers were going through this, we figured we should understand the program as well,” Lee Hammond said. “If we’re going to talk the talk, we’d better walk the walk.”