Ken Boersma, president of recycler Plastics-R-Unique in Wadsworth, Ohio, didn't start out in recycling - or even in plastics. Instead, he worked a 900-acre farm in Indiana, where Boersma learned that he liked working for himself and was "blessed with an ability to design equipment in my head and then build it." This untutored skill has led him to invent machines and processes that make trained engineers shake their heads. Like the bumble bee that supposedly cannot fly, his recycling systems shouldn't work - but they do.

He left the farm in 1973 and started a trucking business. He got into recycling inadvertently when he drove a truckload of ground-up polypropylene battery cases from Cleveland to Tampa, Fla. When he got there, the processor rejected it for contamination. That got Boersma thinking that if he could find a way to clean it up, this reclaimed plastic was great raw material. He then bought an old extruder, built a float/sink wash tank, got an EPA permit, and before long was reprocessing two truckloads a week, 4 million lb a year, of battery cases.

Source: thefreelibrary.com