Recycling comes full circle

WASTE NOT: Michael Brown, CEO and president of Packaging 2.0, holds the meat-packaging tray that his company produces from 100 percent recycled materials and which itself can be recycled. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO
WASTE NOT: Michael Brown, CEO and president of Packaging 2.0, holds the meat-packaging tray that his company produces from 100 percent recycled materials and which itself can be recycled. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO

In 2012, Michael Brown sailed into the Pacific to see for himself what decades of ocean-tossed trash piles contained. The debris field, he said, was filled with plastics.

“I went out to see it,” he said. “Let me run my fingers through the stuff and see what’s out there.”

As founder and president of Providence-based Packaging 2.0 Inc., he was in the business of recycling discarded plastics into recyclable plastic food containers.

But for decades previously, Brown had helped to run a family business that produced nonrecyclable plastic packaging, for everything from disposable razors to Silly Putty.

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“I thought, ‘Wow, we were a part of this problem,’ ” he said of the trip to the Pacific trash field. “And we never really thought about where they went. We had a one-way business. My new business is more of a circular economy. It’s made from stuff coming out of the garbage, and it’s made to go back around again.”

In Rhode Island, Packaging 2.0, which Brown founded in 2002, last year became the state’s first registered benefit corporation. He reincorporated the company under a new state law that in 2013 created the new classification. The stature as a benefit corporation does not change the tax status of companies but allows them to create a financial structure intended to serve a public benefit.

Brown said the decision to register as a benefit corporation was an evolution in thinking. He initially learned about the process and benefits of benefit corporations while on a long-distance sailing trip with an executive at Klean Kantene, a nontoxic bottle maker.

“He just explained how they did it, why they did it, how the process itself … had really changed the way they operated, how they look at themselves, how they present themselves to customers.”

Packaging 2.0, up until that point, hadn’t really formalized its mission to reduce the amount of ocean plastic debris, Brown said. “We make plastics from recycled materials, but what are we really solving there?” he said.

Now, as a benefit corporation, Packaging 2.0 has two bottom lines.

“Instead of having a single bottom line, where you’re accountable only to shareholder value, and increasing shareholder value, now I have a social mission,” he said. “And I can make decisions that are not necessarily in the best financial interests of the company. I have dual fiduciary duties. Now you have to balance that; you can’t put the company out of business.”

Customers of Whole Foods Market who purchase prepackaged meat in the Northeast have seen the design handiwork of Packaging 2.0 as well as its mission.

The product line, launched in May, is an example of where Brown sees the company heading.

“You’re going to go home, you’re going to rinse off that tray in the sink, and you’re going to look at it and say: Wow, this is recyclable!” •

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