Companies Spot Gold in ‘Green’ Movement

SAN FRANCISCO —  A year after Earth Day, 1990, helped raise our collective eco-consciousness, environmentalism is heading into a more fundamental phase that goes beyond consumers’clamor for recycled toilet paper, unbleached coffee filters and reusable canvas grocery bags.

Spurred by curbside recycling programs and laws restricting what can be tossed into the nation’s overcrowded landfills, a small but growing number of manufacturers are spotting golden opportunities in the further “greening of America.”

Companies are bringing out a dizzying array of bins, can crushers, mulching machines and composters that make recycling less of a chore. Appliance and auto makers, whose sturdy goods remain rusting eyesores in dumps nationwide, are scrambling to design products that can be recycled piece by piece after their useful lives are over.

A Boston company next month will introduce a $60 electric teakettle that can be broken down into recyclable plastic parts once it has boiled its last. BMW has developed a slick, $55,000 two-seater car with an all-plastic skin that can be disassembled in 20 minutes.

In the Silicon Valley, a recycling- minded homemaker, tired of squashing soda cans with her Jeep in the driveway, helped devise an attractive countertop appliance that automatically crushes and stores cans.

So far, the developments amount to a trickle, but environmental experts expect it to turn into a tsunami over the next decade.

“We’re on the cutting edge here,” said Matthew F. Napoleon, senior vice president of Fitch Richardson Smith, a Boston consulting firm that designed the recyclable UKettle electric teakettle. “Those manufacturers that are smart enough are scurrying to change things as quickly as they can.”

When William H. Smith, president of Great British Kettles Ltd. in Boston, brought his idea for an electric teakettle to Fitch Richardson Smith 18 months ago, he had in mind a sleekly designed appliance that would bring to Americans the convenience known by tea drinkers in Europe.

In focus groups, the design firm queried consumers about their interest in recyclable appliances.

“They were intrigued,” Napoleon said. “They had been recycling bottles, cans and newspapers but had never thought of recycling an appliance.”

Through a joint venture with GE Plastics, a division of General Electric Co., the design firm figured that it could break some ground by creating a “design for disassembly,” with a product made of recyclable plastic parts. (Design for disassembly, now a catch phrase among industrial designers, is not meant to imply that items are made to fall apart, but that the components can be coded and recycled by a professional recycler.)

As Napoleon sees it, the idea is to keep such goods out of landfills by continually recycling the parts.

“It may start as a teapot but come back as a toy, a park bench, a piece of office furniture,” he said. “Twenty-five to 50 years down the road, it might reinforce plywood in a building.”

Few companies have invested as much in “design for disassembly” as BMW, the German auto manufacturer. In June, 1990, the company opened a pilot plant in Munich where engineers have taken cars apart to study ways to reduce the confusing array of materials used and to make the components recyclable.

Since 1988, the company has made a limited number of the BMW Z1, a jazzy sports car with a metal frame covered with all-plastic bumpers, doors and side, rear and front panels, coded so that a professional recycler can break them down for recycling.

Nearly 9,000 of the cars--made at the rate of 10 to 14 a day--will have been sold by the time production ceases in mid-summer, according to Christoph Huss, a BMW product information manager in Woodcliff Lake, N.J.

For most U.S. makers of durables such as autos and big appliances, the notion of recyclability is still “in its infancy,” said Carol Sizer, a spokeswoman for Whirlpool Corp. in Benton Harbor, Mich.

Whirlpool recently formed a task force to look into designing appliances and packaging that can be safely recycled. Thorny problems persist. For one, refrigerators and other big appliances contain chlorofluorocarbons and other hazardous or toxic substances that must be carefully removed, a process that vastly increases the recycling tab.

On a less-complicated front, established manufacturers and start-ups by the score are finding a growing market for goods that help consumers recycle.

Motivated to make recycling easier for herself and her three children, homemaker Joyce Sjoberg dreamed up an appliance that would crush and store aluminum cans. She was lucky to have a technology expert close at hand. Her husband, Donald J. Massaro, a former employee at IBM and Xerox, was a co-founder of Shugart Associates, a leading maker of computer disk drives.

With $2 million, they opened Sjoberg Industries Inc. in the Silicon Valley town of Mountain View, hiring engineers on a product-by-product basis. Sharper Image, a San Francisco mail-order and retail business with exclusive introduction rights for the Sjoberg Recyclor, has sold more than 240 at $99.95. This summer, the product will be available in other stores and catalogues.

William C. Jackson, president and chief operating officer, sees the home and office recycling market as untapped and poised for a boom.

“We are business people; we are not environmentalists,” Jackson said. “This is not a philanthropic venture, but it is a rare opportunity to marry the two.”

At Rubbermaid Inc. in Wooster, Ohio, quality problems delayed until recently the planned Earth Day, April 22, 1990, introduction of a line of stackable recycling containers for bottles, cans and paper, made partly of recycled plastic.

“We feel pretty confident this is going to be a winner for us,” said Pat Harshbarger, group product manager. Rubbermaid is also exploring the idea of making composters and other products.

Rubbermaid is also planning to increase the amount of recycled plastic it uses in their manufacture, to 20% from 10%.

With many communities imposing bans on the dumping of grass clippings, even the usually stodgy lawn-mower market is experiencing a revolution. After years of selling mowers with rear bags that collected grass clippings for easy disposal, Toro Co. in Minneapolis is one of several manufacturers now doing a brisk trade in mulchers. Its Recycler brand chops up the grass into fine pieces that are then spewed back onto the lawn, ready to decompose and act as fertilizer.

At $360 to $700, comparable to a regular mower, the Toro mulchers are hot commodities. Such machines now represent 15% of all industry shipments, up from 1% a year ago, according to Chad Kelly, marketing manager of Toro’s consumer products division.

The environmental movement “is driving how we view our products,” Kelly said. “We no longer just call it ‘outdoors beautifying equipment.’ Now we add ‘in an environmentally sound manner.’ ”