Breakthrough for Recycled Guardrails
Archive article about Amity Plastics - Taken from the October 12, 2000 issue of the:
Edmonton Journal - Technology Report Section
The day may come when the milking jug in your fridge ends up saving you from driving into a ditch.
A joint venture between an Alberta company and the Alberta Research Council (ARC) has created guardrail posts made from recycled plastic, which have recently been approved for use by an American Safety agency.
Amity Plastics Ltd., based in the town of Clyde, started producing the posts after approaching the ARC last year in an effort to salvage their recycling business. The Texas Transportation Institute (TTI), an affiliate of Texas A & M University, tested the posts last month and issued a report praising its design.
“We are one of the first recycling companies to pass the tests and they said this is one of the safest posts they’ve ever tested,” Amity Plastics owner Dwight Smith-Gander says.
The company must now submit TTI’s report to the U.S. Government, which will then decide whether the posts are suitable for use on interstate highways. Should the individual states follow suit for their own highways, the demand may prove to be overwhelming.
The news is encouraging to Bill Kay, the principal scientist at ARC who worked with Smith-Gander to perfect the posts design and production . Kay is currently a member of the industrial ecology department, which operates under the wing of ARC’s Industrial Processes ad Services Division.
About eight years ago, ARC developed the technology for the posts in joint ventures with two other companies that were ill suited for the program and the idea was languishing until Amity stepped forward.
“Amity has done very well in promoting it and developing it,” says Kay. In the past year we’ve developed it to the point where I think it’s going to be a real winner.”
The posts a use a plastic blend recovered from such things as herbicide containers and oil jugs, which are the baked in moulds. Amity took the development further by adding rebar to the post’s core as reinforcement, as well as perfecting the mixture of raw materials. As a result their method is more cost-effective compared to injection moulding, and the environmental benefit is enormous.
“If you were to take 1,050 oil jugs for instance and put them together you’d be surprised the volume they would take up,” Smith-Gander explains. “That volume is potentially going into a landfill, so something like this takes an awful lot of product out of there.”
Smith-Gander is a perfect example of an Alberta entrepreneur that has taken advantage of what ARC has to offer, says Kay. Smith-Gander has used the ARC technology in the past to help produce a silage bagging machine and curb ramps made from recycled rubber from tires.
Unfortunately, others have failed to see the benefits of working with the ARC, forcing the department to look beyond provincial borders for it economic security.
In some ways, the ARC has become as much an entrepreneur as Smith-Gander. “We were primarily a research establishment for a good many years, and we moved toward a more business like attitude,” Kay says. “Our survival is at stake. Government departments come and go, and we’ve been around for nearly 80 years and we want to continue to be around. We have to use our innovative abilities to be more like entrepreneurs.”
The effort made by the joint venture to perfect the posts for the TTI crash tests encouraged Albert infrastructure to also test the product on low risk routes around the province.
The next stop for the two partners is to construct a pilot plant capable of producing thousands of posts per day. Smith-Gander says they are ready to build an automated system, provided they can gather enough investment capital over the next few months.
Amity Plastics has plans to take the technology further by mass producing ornamental posts, parking curbs, planters and rig mats so there’s little doubt in Smith-Gander’s mind that the business will take off. The only surprising thing is that no one tried hard enough to make it work it the first place.
“Judging by all the negative things the two previous companies had to say, it would almost make you wonder why you would take it on,” he says. “But I like a challenge of taking something that someone else couldn’t do and making it work.”