Month: February 2025

OmahaNebraska.com Interview with Dale Gubbels, Director of Business Development for Firstar Fiber

OmahaNebraska.com is here today with …

Dale Gubbels and I am the business development director at Firstar Fiber.

How long have you been here?

Firstar was formed in 1998 and we moved into this property in 2005 and we’ve been here ever since.

What part of town were you in before?

Actually, we started out in Fremont. We went through a couple growth spurts. So when we moved to … grew out of Omaha. That was actually pretty quickly because we had a customer based here in Omaha and they asked if we would move in and share a building with them. They were a document destruction company and it was a pretty good fit.

And then we outgrew that building, then we outgrew another building.

And then this building is just right.

What did you do before?

I have been involved in recycling since the early 1980s and I worked at one point for the Nebraska Department of Environmental Control, which has also gone through several name changes.

I was the public information officer and one of my assignments when I worked for the agency was to help the division that was just starting up in recycling to help with their education programs and so forth.

So I got involved more and more in recycling. And then in 1982? …  I think it was … the Nebraska Recycling Association was formed. It was a non-profit group to advocate for recycling. I became its first executive director and ran that for probably about eight years or so.

Then I was recruited by a Canadian company that was opening an office for a consulting operation back East. I took a job with them, moved the family to Connecticut and we lived in Connecticut for about 10 years.

Then the group that I ran in Nebraska, the Nebraska Recycling Association, got a grant. They asked if I would be willing to do a study on how to bring about an in-state recycling market. And long story short, that the idea was to try to build a paper mill.

We found a Italian company that claimed that they could sell us a paper mill and it would only be about $10 to $15 million, which  is a lot of money. It would turn out 10 to 15 tons a day of toilet paper.

We said that’s what we’ll bring to Nebraska. And long story short, by the time we got through the last engineering study, the last marketing study (where you look at, okay, you have to make enough in order to justify your investment) you have to meet environmental standards that apparently that operation wasn’t having to meet in selling into Africa and other developing countries.

The last quote was for a much larger facility. It was going to be, I want to say, about 100 tons a day, but it ramped up to about $90 million. So we pivoted it to just concentrate on the initial stage of collecting it and processing it. And by that I meant we would sort it, bale it, and ship it off to paper mills.

So Firstar has kind of grown from those early days.

Glass recycling, I know, is been a difficult thing and I wish there’d be some great new technology that came up, but I don’t know, has there been? I haven’t researched it in several years.

Yeah, the biggest challenge with glass is that it’s made from sand. So you’re always using the lowest, you know, it’s sand.

So you’re always going to be fighting that cost issue between you and …

Exactly.

Okay, I was really hoping like some thing would have appeared to solve this.

The closest that I ever came across and unfortunately it’s never really panned out because again, sand. They were using it in some forms of drywall as a way to mitigate against mold. It didn’t really go anywhere either.

Tell me a little bit about what you do here.

Well, I turned over my responsibilities as CEO to Patrick about – well, he started October two years ago this past year, and I stayed on to hand off more and more of my responsibilities. But he actually learned them pretty quickly. And we started this plastic operation. And so my role as business development director is to try to find new ways to market the plastics like the sheeting. I found that company out in Wyoming that is making plastic sheeting and boats … I managed to get an organization that is funded by the various brands who want to see their packaging recycled.

I got Firstar a grant to trial the use of these pellets that you saw tonight.

Is this the initiatives they have at the different schools for some of the materials project?

Project School Board was one that I started … we got a donation from Reynolds and we gave the high schools that have shop classes some boards and they made a variety of things.

So the school sent you materials, you turn them into boards and gave them back to the schools.

That is really cool.

Yeah. So that’s pretty much what I do. So let’s try to find those connections.

That’s pretty amazing. How did you end up with the Hawaiian fishnets?

They learned of us through an industry group that we had worked with to develop a lot of this out here.

They were looking for ideas and how to do something with the nets other than to send it to a waste to energy plant, a burn plant.

They didn’t like that. So they’ve been looking for some time to try to find what’s an alternative that could be actually turned into something that the Hawaiians could use as well. They’d rather keep everything in Hawaii rather than add the extra cost and the carbon footprint shipping it.

This effort is not a long term effort to do in Nebraska by any stretch … Well, they reached out to us because they wanted to learn more about the lumber and they hired me to do some consulting for them.

I’ve been advising Dr. [Jennifer] Lynch and Mafalda [Gentil Martins Seiz de Freitas] , … She was doing some of the fishnet recovery in Portugal and the Hawaiians managed to snap her up. She’s running that program for Dr. Lynch. I’m not sure if it’s going to be plastic lumber, plastic sheeting … But the idea that they need more than anything is just to get the Hawaiians excited about doing this.

So the idea behind the boards, I said, let’s make some boards for you. You can take those around dog and pony show. And you can tell this is one thing that’s been done with it.

But Hawaii has some huge problems in terms of it’s an island state. “Islands” state is a better way to say it because there’s seven islands. When you get right down to it, transportation between them is tough. It’s no more populated than Nebraska. In fact, it’s harder in many ways because they’re stretched out. It makes it very difficult for any economic answer to any of their problems.

And tourism is their lifeblood, that and the Navy and Army. But with the tourism industry you’re bringing in, and I have no idea, but I’m just going to venture, probably millions of people a year. And that’s waste. That’s waste. That’s waste as well.

So the tourists come in and now we have a new source of waste.

Not just everyday waste, because people don’t take it home with them.

What do you think will be in the direction of solutions for Hawaii and other places? Because your facility is amazing and it’s huge.

But it’s a drop in the bucket. It can’t be everywhere. No, no. And I believe the solution is anything that’s made from plastic, like this table, that table, probably parts of your chair, all these things should be utilizing some form of recycled plastics.

I know there are a lot of people who rather see it go back into a bottle or into a sandwich bag or into potato bag, all those things. Wonderful. That’d be great, but people don’t realize just how problematic that is because we can never get it clean enough. On top of that, you’re introducing so many different types of resin and all the…

Yes, the toxicity would be hard to…

That’s why it’s – There is legislation that they’re trying to force the brands to make packaging with at least 30% recycled plastic in it and they’re struggling. Struggling mightily because it is such a challenge.

How did they come up with 30%? Even knowing nothing- it’s a big number.

Oh, it’s a huge number.

And so there needs to be technological solutions on the horizon or an incentive for a technological solution…

… Why they came up with 30%, I couldn’t tell you … It’s state by state. California, Washington state, New York. A lot of places have it.

What do you think would be good legislation here [ in Nebraska] ?

Well, I believe we have to get the brands excited about helping Nebraskans solve their problem. Instead of mandating that, you got to put it back in your package.

No, we’re okay with that [not requiring it go into packages]. Anything that it isn’t going to cause a problem for you, such as, maybe a pallet, or maybe boards, or things that can tolerate a lot of different levels of contamination and heterogeneous mixes and all that, that’s what we want you to do.

 What would you like to see anything more for the legislation and then going forward for your company for legislation?

These other states, Colorado, now Minnesota, have passed what’s called extended producer responsibility. The producers that they’re referring to are the brands themselves. And the responsibility is help us develop the infrastructure to collect, process and turn this material back into a product that we can have a sustainable program. So, that’s my aim right now.

Right now there is legislation that has got four parts to it. It’s just a beginning part where the expectation would be. Colorado and Minnesota and California, Portland, they have required that the brands form non-profit organizations that take responsibility.

If you’re General Mills, if you’re Nestle, if you’re Heinz, whomever, if you’re selling into that state packaging, you pay into this nonprofit. That nonprofit will help the municipalities develop a coherent program to get it collected.

That nonprofit will also invest in businesses to process it into new materials and that is something that is going to take a while for Nebraska to do. This bill that’s down there right now is requiring the battery industry to take the first leap into this because batteries are such a safety issue, for not just us, but for everyone. I mean, if your cell phone was attacked by a dog and start chewing on it. It could start a fire. Just about everything that is electronic anymore has a battery in it, a lithium battery.

And I’m sure you sitting on one right now.

So if it passes in the Legislature, they will be required to develop a recovery system here in Nebraska for our lithium batteries. But because people can’t tell the difference between lithium batteries and any other batteries, they’re to be responsible for collecting and disposing of, or recycling, all forms of batteries.

So, the batteries would be separated at some point because …

… the onus will fall off on the industry itself to figure out how to make it convenient for people. You can’t put a battery in your recycling bin because we have no way of getting it out. They’re going to have to come up with some pretty ingenious ways to incentivize people.

This bill is one element that hopefully will come about first, and as people learn more about it. Why should we, as the consumer, be responsible for everything? The people selling it – we need them to be thinking, you know, from …

… cradle to grave, so to speak and that would hopefully spur some innovation on the front side of things. So there’s less left on the waste side …

Exactly, yeah. And to answer the second part of your question, my hope is that innovation companies like Firstar can be part of the solution, too, but someone else has to help us with that because they have far more R and D available to them than what we do.

Thank you.