Providing Management Consulting
and Internet Services
Under Florida Corporation
Comad Property Management LLC

Email: George Makrauer, President
Web: www.comad.com

Internet and Traditional
Management Consulting.
Founded 1972 in Ohio
as Comad Corporation.

1327 Beasley Terrace
Lady Lake, Florida 32162
Phone 352-753-9289
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Conventional wisdom these days seems to dictate that a plastic bag manufacturer must be, defacto, an environmental criminal and a debaucher of civilization. We know, or think we know, that plastics are dangerous, poisonous, threatening to social order and hostile to Mothers Earth and Ocean; we assume that to make a plastic bag is a hostile act.

It is against such attitudes that George A. Makrauer patiently slogs; he is, by trade and profession, the chief executive officer of the family business, Amko Plastics, a Cincinnati manufacturer of plastic shopping bags -- a dizzying variety of plastic shopping bags, for huge retailers (The Gap and Ann Taylor), tiny retailers (the Lake Washington Vocational-Technical College Bookstore, in Kirkland, Washington), small corporations (Hega, makers of bouillon cubes), big corporations (Chevron, makers of petroleum-based products), and everything in between. Thus, George Makrauer must be an environmental Attila the Hun.

Well, not quite. If conventional wisdom says that "environmentally conscious plastics manufacturer" is an oxymoron, then conventional wisdom has not yet been expanded to accommodate the likes of Makrauer , who has taken two rather unusual steps. First, he speaks out against conventional wisdom, raising an often original and often lonely voice. A voice often drowned, alas, not in plastic, but in plastic rhetoric: Write a letter, or a newspaper article, or an op-ed piece that professes the conventional wisdom about plastics and you're guaranteed to receive, usually by return mall, a " Makrauer ," the industry's sometimes affectionate, sometimes exasperated name for the long and breathless letters George Makrauer composes that describe the world of plastics according to Makrauer . Along about page four or five (about the time he apologizes for going on so long), he reaches the point where he manages to slip in the not inconsiderable environmental consciousness that has been raised in the last decade at Amko Plastics. This is the second step, and the step most confounding to the conventional wisdom. Say it: George Makrauer does. Environmentally conscious plastics manufacturing.

Makrauer recognized what he calls the "greening" issue long before it became fashionable, in the time when plastic was still in the throes of its old image problem, when the word connoted "cheap" and "artificial" and "junky." Makrauer is convinced (and has turned up some startling confirmatory evidence) that the paper industry had a lot to do with both the old image problem, as well as the new one, the one that makes "plastic" synonymous with "environmental terror." When Suffolk County in New York was debating a total ban on plastic packaging, a man, cunningly dressed head to toe in plastic packaging, ran through the meeting, shouting, "I'm drowning in plastic!" The ban passed; the drawner, it turns out, had been hired by a paper industry lobbying group, which has the luxury of seeing virtually all problems in terms of market share, and the plastics industry makes for a fat target. Paper, after all, comes from trees, but only a chemist can make polyethylene.

Whatever the source of the image, plastic has it, and if you're going to be an environmentally conscious plastics manufacturer, you have to recognize it. Amko is different because it is concerned with both style (fighting conventional wisdom) and substance (fighting pollution, fighting wasteful use of resources, fighting solid-waste disposal problems).

Show up, for example, at the railroad siding of Amko Plastics early some morning and you'll see a curious sight: After each delivery of the sand-like granules of polyethylene that is the raw material for Amko products, Amko workers, looking like displaced housekeepers, vacuum the railroad bed, the loading dock, the driveway. There is no requirement that they do so, although Makrauer expects that there should be: The tiny granules of plastic resin are chemically and environmentally inert, so they don't pose a toxic threat. But the particles can wash into the watershed, where they float on the surface of streams and ponds and lakes, and resemble, to fish and fowl, food. Fish and fowl gobble the plastic, and because it is indigestible, become, to use the gracious term, "impacted." Sometimes they just get sick. Often they die. So Amko Plastics vacuums the railroad bed.

This is not the only thing that Amko does that makes the company seem so environmentally wary. In 1979, a manufacturer of polyethylene granules asked Amko to run a test batch of a new formula. "One of the Union Carbide engineers called me up and started asking very strange questions about the manufacturing process," recalls Makrauer . "Unless the company actually makes plastic film themselves, they often have a very dim grasp of how the process works, and I had a hard time figuring out what the guy was after. We ended up running a sample batch, and it was absolutely off the scale on the stress tests -- it was stronger than anything we had ever run across. Now Union Carbide was interested in the formula primarily for wire insulation -- they didn't even consider it for plastic bags. I begged them to sell it to us; I went to Union Carbide headquarters and made a presentation, and they gave us a six-month supply. After six months, they said, "Well, you're right, it is good for plastic bags, isn't it?" The result was a plastic film that Amko trademarked as Superfilm, and it is environmentally noteworthy for this reason: If a film is 20 percent to 50 percent stronger, it can be manufactured 20 percent to 50 percent thinner. Those strange questions asked by a Union Carbide engineer had a net result of reducing the amount of plastic produced at Amko (and now, at virtually every other plastic manufacturer in the country as well) by 20 to 50 percent.

"For some of our products, we were able to cut the amount of raw material in half," says Makrauer . "So by developing a use for the new formula, we reduced the amount of plastic that eventually ends up in the solid-waste stream: We can make the same number of bags out of half the raw materials." This is a point that Makrauer makes regularly in his Makrauers, what environmentalists call "source reduction," and what Makrauer calls sound business -- and environmental -- policy.

It was not sound business policy that led Amko into another environmentally conscious effort, an effort that has to do with printing -- a large part of plastic-bag manufacturing, in that everyone who's anyone wants personalized plastic bags: good advertising, good name recognition, good looks. Not so good, however, with alcohol and other solvent-based printing processes, processes that until recently were the standard in the industry. The solvents evaporate and pollute the air, and, eventually, the water as well. The environmentally sound solution is to use waterbased inks, but the conventional wisdom (it exists within the plastics industry, too, not just about it) was that waterbased inks wouldn't work with plastic film. In 1987, after four years of trying, Amko introduced a process for using water-based inks on plastic film that reduced air pollution by 80 percent. What was unbusinesslike was that Amko didn't keep the process secret; instead, they shared it with other manufacturers, so that everyone could use it. Today, most of them do. This is also a favorite subject of Makrauers, with Makrauer particularly proud that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency invited him to a conference of the Air Pollution Control Association to make a presentation on the process. Now, manufacturers from all over the world troop to Cincinnati to see how it works.

The latest subject of Makrauer 's , however, is the latest idea in plastic film, an idea around which the environmental waters are so roiled that Makrauer can be invited one week to testify before the U.S. Senate because they think the idea is an environmental (or, at least, an economic) godsend, and the next week have to write a particularly long and detailed Makrauer to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources in response to a demand that the new idea be restricted because it is environmentally harmful. The new idea has the additional distinction of being politically volatile on an entirely different level, the politics being embodied in the title of Senate Bill 2298, "The Agricultural Commodity-Based Plastics Development Act." The agricultural commodity in question is corn, corn that ends up as part of a plastic bag. If the word to The Graduate in the 1960s was "plastics," the word to the wise -- maybe -- in the 1990s is "biodegradable."

Makrauer is of several minds about "commodity-based" additives to plastic bags. On the one hand, Amko has been the most aggressive investigator and developer of the technology in the U.S., and was the first company to introduce nationally a cornstarch-added plastic bag in this country, which Amko calls "Polybioethylene." The initial investigations came about as a result of a conversation that Makrauer had with an Austrian engineer in 1985, who asked Makrauer what Amko's customers thought about the plastic bags after they were used; did they think of them in terms of the environment? The engineer went on to talk about the "Greens" movement in Europe; Italy had already banned non-biodegradable plastics, effective in 1992, and European manufacturers were highly attuned to the issue. Makrauer looked into this, and "I became convinced that it would be a big issue at some point," he says; "I just knew that the subject would come up here, and that it made sense to find out what the best process might be."

The technology for adding cornstarch to plastic film was developed in response to the oil embargo of the early 1970s, when petroleum products (from which polyethylene is made) were expensive and corn was cheap -- the original idea had nothing to do with environmental concerns at all. "The researchers were simply looking for a cheap alternative, and when the price of polyethylene dropped, so did the idea."

Now, Polybioethylene is a big, big product for Amko, having attracted the attention of environmentalists, elected officials from states that grow corn and, in the biggest way, consumers. That Polybio might not be any "better" environmentally for several reasons has not kept the idea from catching on as, finally, something that someone can do about the environment: The 6-percent cornstarch that is added to the polyethylene is a demand-oriented advantage. Amko's biggest customers for Polybioethylene are college bookstores, including the biggest college bookstore customer of all: Ohio State. Tiny Lake Washington VoTech has gone bio, too; all of Cornell's plastic bags are made from Polybioethylene now -- college campuses have vocal and active constituencies that are not shy about lobbying the bookstore manager to be environmentally "correct." And what happens on college campuses eventually happens everywhere else: grocery stores, conventions, corporations (Chevron buys Polybioethylene bags from Amko, even though it is one of the largest petroleum companies in the world). For Amko, of course, this is good in some ways, principally in terms of business sense. Makrauer now finds himself, however, questioning the conventional wisdom at the other end of the scale, raising questions about biodegradable plastic bags that aren't, well, "correct."

For example, Makrauer likes to point out that plastics --all plastics -- comprise only about 7 percent of the solid waste generated each year, and plastic bags less than 2 percent. "So, how significant will it be if we eliminate plastic bags, either through degradation or any other means?" asks Makrauer .

Another irony: Plastic resin manufacturers add stabilizers to polyethylene so that it won't degrade; polyethylene is sensitive to oxidation (the process by which newspaper, for example, yellows and decays) and photo-degradation -- degradation from sun and ultra- violet light -- so, in a sort of left plastic hand not knowing what the right plastic hand is doing, the cornstarch additives in large part counteract additives put in to prevent degradation in the first place.

More ironies? Plastics manufacturers are (and this also flies in the face of conventional wisdom, of what we think we "know") are the original recyclers of their own scrap: The manufacturing process has recycling built in, so that virtually all of the raw material ends up as product, not waste. What can't be recycled by, say, Amko, is sold to plastic-bag manufacturers who make bags from the scraps, principally trash bags (trash bags are dark colors because they are made of the detritus of other plastic bags); but trash bag manufacturers aren't interested in plastic bags -- or plastic scraps -- that are prone to degradation: Who wants to own a warehouse full of decaying plastic trash bags? So, the scrap from Polybioethylene is not recycled. Makrauer pays the garbageman to haul it to the landfill, where it contributes, well, to the solid-waste stream. This was the point raised in the Iowa complaint.

Finally, what actually happens to things buried in landfills is the subject of intense interest. Conventional wisdom assumes that "natural" things -- food, say, or paper --sort of vanish in short order, leaving "artificial" things like plastic for future generations. As it turns out, however, not a great deal happens in landfills; core samples from landfills twenty and thirty years old unearth baffling things: readable newspapers, ham sandwiches, chicken on the bone, carrots, their bushy green tops intact -- Makrauer has a photograph of an ear of corn on the cob that had been buried for ten years in a landfill near Cincinnati, a monument to the tenacity of the very source of the additive he is making plastic bags out of in order to make them more degradable. Of course, there is plenty of plastic and tin cans and old clothing in a typical landfill, but none of the natural things look much worse for wear than the supposedly indestructible man-made products. It's a sobering conundrum. And on top of this, Makrauer asks, thoughtfully, about how sure we are that we want landfills to degrade promptly anyway. "There are a lot of buildings -- whole suburbs -- built on top of landfills," he points out. "When did we decide tliat the best thing to happen to landfills was to have everything degrade as quickly as possible?"

His point, of course, is that we didn't "decide" that, actively anyway, anymore than we decided that we had a thoughtful and reasonable plan for solid waste disposal in the first place, or that recycling is always automatically good -- newsprint manufacturers hide under their desks when the subject of recycling comes up: Paper drives and newspaper recycling programs have been so dramatically "successful" that a lot of newspaper is hauled right to the, um, landfill, because there is such a glut of newsprint that no one knows what to do with it all.

The issues mount. "Poison leachate" from degrading plastics. "You know," Makrauer says, "we've been hearing about this for years, and I've yet to see any evidence of it -- we've looked, too, asked to see what sort of leachate they're finding, if they're finding any in the first place: Polyethylene by definition is chemically inert, and when it degrades, there's no residue; if there is any toxic leachate, it is probably coming from the heavy metals in the printing inks -- but those are the same inks that they use to print paper products." Makrauer smiles. "This can get silly; I could argue on the same basis that if the inks are toxic, and paper degrades so much better than plastic, then the toxic leachates are produced much more from paper."

But such an argument goes against the conventional wisdom, the conventional wisdom Makrauer fights against, using paper and ink. Why, finally, if the jury is still out -- so far out -- on biodegradable plastics, is Amko making them?

Makrauer pauses: One can almost see another Makrauer in the making. "Four reasons, I suppose. First, we're convinced that they're safe -- it's not a product that is going to boomerang and turn out to be dangerous; second, we saw that the technology worked, that it provides another option or set of options for manufacturing -- there are outgrowths already from the technology, a whole new range of products that might come out of this that no one had thought of before; third, frankly, we saw the regulations coming; we've seen how legislation comes about, and we're ready for it -- legislators from states that produce corn are very interested in the process, for obvious reasons; and finally, because we see a demand in the marketplace; there's a consumer demand for products that fit within a certain framework, and we're committed to products -- safe products -- that meet the needs of consumers. And right now, this is a very prominent topic."

Makrauer pulls out a prop of sorts, a Polybioethylene bag produced for a customer in the early days of Polybio, before Amko learned a rueful lesson in proofing their clients' copy before printing it on the bag. "This will show you how prominent an issue this whole biodegradablity business is," he says. "When we first started selling Polybioethylene, we thought to print a note on it to that effect -- that it was a 100-percent biodegradable product with an additive made from corn. Remember, the corn makes up about 6 percent of the product." The legend on this bag, however, was supplied by the customer, and proclaims proudly in large letters, This bag is BIODEGRADABLE/Made from 100% CORN. Makrauer winces when he reads it. "Good intentions, of course," he says, shaking his head, "but it shows you what we're up against in terms of educated choices; the desire is there, the demand to do good deeds. So now we specify what they can and can't say. We need information, not misinformation."

Clearly, it is hard, sometimes, to be an environmentally conscious plastics manufacturer: So many Makrauers to send, and so little time.

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