Ryan Dezember

Yeah, so that changes over time.

The market for aluminum is really high.

When President Trump put a 50% tariff on imported aluminum, that put a premium on the aluminum we already have in the country.

Think beer cans, construction debris.

So grabbing that stuff that we already have, and aluminum is one of these things that's infinitely recyclable.

Once you make it, you have it forever as long as you don't.

bury it in a landfill.

So that's a product that's got an improved market.

You also have cardboard boxes.

More and more paper mills that produce the cardboard material, a lot of the virgin mills, which use tree pulp, pine mostly in the south, they've been shutting down.

And that's put box makers more reliant on everything and getting that old cardboard back to make new boxes.

So that's a market that's pretty robust.

We all have questions about plastics recycling and the track record's pretty poor and we've all heard these stories about, well, your stuff really just ends up in the landfill or we send it to some other country.

And with the advent of what are called extended producer responsibility laws,

Big companies like companies that make soft drinks or like shampoo bottles and detergent bottles have incentive to get their products back, to get ahead of these laws that are meant to curb plastic pollution.

So there's a lot of push into better sorting plastics.

And this technology is being put to use to that end so that we can be better at sending the Tide detergent bottles back to become new Tide bottles.