Mike Hemman, senior vice president of the North America Division of Netafim, says he remembers being in a trade association meeting early in his career that discussed recycling and how those in attendance discussed how it would be a significant challenge to put recycled materials in finished irrigation products.
“I stood up and I said, ‘I completely disagree with you. It can be done, but it requires two things: a commitment and money — and so if you’re not willing to make the commitment and you’re not willing to make the investment, then it’s not going to get done,’” he said.
In this “Tip of the Iceberg” podcast episode, Hemman shares the innovative ways that Netafim incorporates recycled material into its drip irrigation products.
“We had already been in the recycling business, and we decided to ramp up our recycling business to be able to deal with this end-of-life drip tape,” he said. “What we now do is we work directly with the farmers, and when they’re done, we will schedule a pickup we’ll come and grab the material from them, and we take it into a recycling facility that we have built in the Central Valley of California and then we recycle that material. We extract the polyethylene resin from it and re-manufacture that into a sustainable product.”
Hemman said the material created has the same warranty and quality as Netafim’s other products and that using this recycled material helps growers reach more sustainability goals that both the consumer and the retailer seek.
“We are giving them one more thing that they can do to demonstrate that sustainability,” he said.
And to take sustainability a step further, Hemman said Netafim has a trial project with large growers to eliminate the cardboard and plastic wrap that the drip line comes in.
“We’re now shipping coils of drip line that don’t have all the outer packaging in it,” he said “So now we’re helping to not only recycle the drip line but recycle the packaging that comes along with it.”
As for the discussion around the use of plastics and recyclable material in the fresh produce industry, Hemman said the industry needs to act instead of waiting for regulations to force the industry’s hand.
“We have to be proactive in our approach,” he said. “I would say again as agriculturalists we should not wait until we have to do something and then react. We should be ahead of that and demonstrate that we are being sustainable and demonstrate that we are providing a solution before we’re asked to provide the solution.”
