260 - From Crates to Corrugated: The Future of Eco-Friendly Shipping Solutions with Packaging and Crating Technologies' Rodger Mort

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show, and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started. Roger Mort, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the Chief Operating Officer of a company called Packaging and Crating Technologies. And I take it that's a company that's involved in pretty much state-of-the-art logistics stuff, providing all kinds of different packaging materials at the industrial level. Do I have that right?

Yeah. Back in around 2005, they started out as a company called Wood Free Crating.

Oh, okay.

And the whole idea was everybody was going green. Everybody wanted to be more sustainable. We started developing crates out of corrugated. That would save you a lot of weight on the air freight, save you a lot of fuel transporting, but also protect the product because wood is a reverberator. And most of the time, if you package something in a wooden crate, you actually have to protect the item from the crate, right?

You got to put in all kinds of stuffing around it. Yeah.

So with the corrugated, it doesn't— you can take a 100G hit and it will never transfer energy. Wow. It, it'll start to absorb energy until it gets to a crushing point. So we eliminate like the foams that are not recyclable, the things that are very hard to get rid of and they end up in landfills and they never biodegrade by using, uh, airbags and actually corrugated with a little bit of foam on it instead of big blocks of stuff so that when you're done with our crating, you basically can put everything into a recycle dumpster and send it on its way.

Is it compostable?

Yep. Yep. Corrugated, you can easily just put it into your corrugated dumpster and they'll take it right back to the mill where they make the paper. Wow. Throw it into a big, it looks like a boiling pot of molten paper. They drop it in there and it disappears and it goes right back to being another roll of paper and on its way.

Wow. That's amazing. How did you become the CEO of Packaging and Crating Technologies?

So I spent a lot of years in the corrugated business as a production person going around and fixing plants and getting them back up to making money and all. And my company was moving around and making a bunch of changes. So I ended up being a sales guy for a year, which was not my most happy time. I did land a lot of new customers because my approach was I'm not here to sell you boxes. Let me just hang around your facility, tell you how to use what you're already buying better. Let me fix your production issues and your machine issues. And after I do that and your production's up, hey, how about buying a truckload of boxes so my boss doesn't get mad? And, uh, it really worked. Like, I closed probably 14 plants in the first— or 14 new customers in the first year. And the salespeople were like, wow, how do you even do that? And I'm like, I just go in with the approach of I'm here to help. Let me help. So one day I get a call and the guy's name, Mike, it says, hey Roger, this is Michael Jackson. I'm like, hey, listen, love your moonwalk, love your songs. You've been dead for 5 years. And he's no, the white Jewish Michael Jackson. I'm like, how do I know you? He says, you keep coming into this company called Woodfree Crating in Waterbury, Connecticut and making suggestions. And he said, let me tell you, I've been losing a lot of money as a company, but the 3 months that you've come in and made suggestions, we're all of a sudden starting to get close to making a lot of money. And I want to have dinner with you and talk about you working with us. So went in, had dinner with him. And after about 2 hours, he was like, let's get together for 6 meals. He said, 'Cause before I want to hire you, I want to know that we could be friends, not just business partners.' And I'm like, 'Business partners?' Because I had always been working for somebody. He says, 'I'm going to tell you, you make me money, you make me profitable, you'll be my partner.' So nobody's ever— people offer that stuff, people talk about that stuff, but nobody ever follows through with their words. It's business, everybody's out to make a buck, and they could give it crap, whether you're happy or not. But Michael was the first human being I've ever met who shook my hand, made the deal. And when we were profitable, I was at his house for a Christmas party. He says, hey, here's a contract. You know, if you like it, you're my partner. And I was like, wow. Okay. But the different thing about Pact and what we do is Everybody has this like tunnel vision. This is what we do and we're not varying. Where I am just open to anything. I never know where the next idea is gonna come from. So we had the crating going really well. We make a, a pleat wrap, which is like a 3-layered wrap that if you looked at the end, it looks like corrugated, but it comes to a point in the center. You can wrap the thing in every direction and it's 100% recyclable at the end of life. And a lot of our moving customers are into it because they can brand their name all over the outside, tell their bigger customers who are really trying to be green that, hey, we don't use bubble wrap, which you can't recycle. We use this wrap. And when we're done with it, it goes right back into the paper process and everything. We were very successful doing all that. And people just come up with movers. Hey, what about a sofa crate? What's your issue with the sofas? We got so many in racks and they get dusty and I develop them a crate that they can use hundreds and hundreds of times. Yeah. Like I have customers that are using crates that I developed in 2011 when I came into the company.

Wow.

And every now and then they'll call me up for a part of one of them and say, one of my guys hit it with a forklift and damaged it. Can I buy one piece? I'm like, yeah, here you go. Here's your one piece, you know. And then at the end of the life, when they finally are done with the things, they just take them and recycle them, send them on their way to the recycling mill and get them remade into paper and buy a new one. Yeah, I know. My sales guys always tell me, can we just like dumb it down a little, make it a little flimsier so that they can buy them every year, 2 years instead of every 7 to 8 years? I'm like, no, we're not changing our quality. Exactly. Wow. Yeah, we have one customer who— when was it I met them? 2013. They were— they make laser heads and every laser head's like $95,000 and they put 3 of them in a wooden crate, ship them out of New Jersey over to Germany and they would lose like 8 to 10 of them a year, but $95,000 apiece.

A lot of money.

Yeah, so we developed them a crate that basically was all corrugated, except for we had the air wall in there, which are these tubes of air that come in a big blanket, basically. When you blow them up, if you walk along and you were to pop one, the other 35 that are in there stay inflated. And they were like, wow, these things are so expensive. And we use all this wood and that. I'm like, listen, I'll tell you what, just start purchasing them. And when you have an issue, we'll talk. So it was about 2 years later, guy calls up and he's, Roger, your crate's destroyed. I'm like, Hans, send me pictures. Sends me a picture of the crate, looks like a football. The guy took it off a truck and turned and ran right into a steel pole. So on one side of the crate, you got an inch dent from the pole. On the other side of the crate, You got two dents from the mass of the forklift hitting it, and it looked like a football. And I said to him, I said, Hans, take the heads out and test them. There's nothing wrong with those heads. He's like, ah, we gotta bring them back to America. I'm like, okay, where are you bringing them to? He's like, New Jersey. I said, can I come the day you get them and see what's wrong? So I get there, he opens up the crate, the first one he takes the plate off of, looks inside, and one of the mirrors is missing like a size of a pencil eraser spot on the side, right in the one corner of the mirror. And he's, oh, and he starts looking through it and he says, let's put this one aside. So he puts it aside. He takes the other one out, looks through it, puts it on the bench. They plug it in. It is doing this burn test. And then he pulls another one out, checks it, does the burn test. And he says, I'll be back. Comes back with these tank binoculars. With a little like light on him and he's looking all through the fricking laser head and I'm like, what you looking for? And he's like, glass. If that broke during the impact, there should be powdered glass and shards of glass all inside this head. I'm like, oh, so he looks for 5 minutes. He goes, Roger. Somebody put that mirror in there. It was already broken, but they knew the laser only hits the dead center of the mirror. So it's never going to affect anything. He says your crate took a hit, crushed itself by an inch on each side. And everything inside was still good. And I'm like, that's what the crate's job is. Its job is to take the hardest hit you can give it, self-destruct in the end, in some cases, because it's imploding on itself. But everything inside doesn't even know because there's no G-force getting to the item that's in the crate. So it doesn't even know there's an issue.

Wow.

Yeah.

That, those people became a good customer, I imagine. Yeah.

And then they shared with us the one year that the purchaser's like, how good it is for us. I'm like, other than dealing with me, how good is it? And she's, we save $158,000 a year in air freight on that one crate. That they buy. Wow. Because it's, it was like, what was it, 180 pounds less than what they were using before. Wow. And they had never had damage since we started doing this back in 2013, 2000, early 2014. Never had a single damage.

Wow. So that's crazy. So obviously really excited about your work. What is it that gets you up in the morning and gets you going? You've been doing this for a while now.

I love every employee that I have. I personally have hired, and we have a philosophy that we get up, we solve problems. When somebody comes to me with something new, and I'll tell them, I'll be in a meeting with them, we're going over it, we're out on their plant floor, we're looking at the pictures, we're looking at the item busted, the problems, and I'll say to them, I need 2 days, and then let me call you back. And they're like, why 2 days? I'm like, because between 3:15 in the morning and 4:11 in the morning, the idea is going to come to me and I'm going to wake up and I'm going to draw— I literally get out of bed, I draw it all out, take pictures of it if I need to, I send it to my attorney so that they can make it into a patent. And I just love like working with people, they're stressed out because they have an issue and just solving that problem and seeing them be successful in the business because the worst thing in business is to ship your product out, have your customer receive it damaged. And now you have this big— I call it a fireball effect, right? The sales guys like taking daggers, like the production people are trying to either build a new one, or you're spending hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars, sometimes even hundreds of thousands of dollars fixing the problem. And there really was no problem, just somebody smashed this thing. But if my crate can get it to the other end of the line, comes off, works, everybody's happy. The customer's like telling everybody, oh my God, we got this new machine and it's doing X and we had zero issues with this company. That makes me happy.

Wow.

And we make money at it too. So that makes me even more happy.

How many patents do you have personally?

How many what?

How many patents do you have personally?

Personally, I'm on my third one.

Oh, good.

Yeah, we have 36 before me as a company. The ones I have, actually 2 of them are worldwide patents now. And we're pretty excited about them because a guy who lives out in— his name is Guy— who lives out in California called up 4 years ago, almost 5 now. And he got one of my sales ladies on the phone and he's, I want to buy one of those or 2 of those corrugated crates. And she's, okay, give me the size. He goes, I don't even care. Just pick your most common size. I want to buy 2. And she's, we don't really do it like that. They're all like custom. Custom. And she's like, why? He says, I'm gonna spray paint them and light them on fire. And she's, what? So she's, can I have somebody call you back? So she calls me, she goes, Roger, this guy sounds nuts. So I'm gonna let you deal with him. So I call him up and like, hey, guy, Roger Mort Pact. Tell me about spray painting my crates and lighting them on fire. And he's, I invented an ink or paint for the Saudi Arabian government. They paint like limos, the king's limo, they'll paint armored vehicles. You walk up with a flamethrower and hit it with 1,800 degrees, and for 24 hours it will sit there and send 60 degrees into the vehicle. So the outside of the vehicle's on fire, the inside you're in the AC. And I'm like, sounds pretty cool. I says, you know what? I really want to see this happen, but here's my deal. I'm going to give you the two crates. I'm going to ship them to you for free. I'm going to send you a label for one of them. When you're done burning them, I want the one back. And he's like, why would you want it back? I said, we are crates that we make out of corrugated. You can use them hundreds of times. We have people that still use them from back in 2011, 2009. I said, but if your paint flakes off after it's been burned, I know that crate's only usable for one time. And he's like, why is that important? I said, when you're trying to sell something to people that are in manufacturing and they're using it as a vehicle to get to places and get back for their products, being able to say, hey, you can use this for the next 5 years, they really have no issue with the price because they're like, you know what, I'm going to use this thing 55, 100 times, right? Okay. So $1,000 is not a big deal. But if you tell them, hey, this is a one and done, and it's $1,000. And the part— yeah, the part they're putting in it is worth $10,000. It's not happening. So he did his thing. He sent me one back, it worked. And then we started seriously talking. And what he was trying to do was these lithium batteries that come out of Asia and all the cargo containers, 1 out of every 10 cargo container ships coming here was having a lithium battery fire in a container. So what they were doing, because you can't put them out, is they just literally just used the crane on the ship, picked the container up, dumped it in the ocean, and kept on sailing. Yeah. And then all these guys from PETA and all these other folks started getting involved and they started following these ships. Now, these ships could no longer do that. So these ships were pulling into port, like in Norfolk, Virginia, was about 3 years ago. They pulled into port, one of the containers is smoking. The poor fireman gets on the boat and they don't— they tell— they give him the documents and all it says is batteries. He's thinking it's just a regular old battery, lead acid. Nowhere on there does it say lithium-ion. He opens the door. Soon as they get there, 240 feet in the air, the fireman gets shot and he died. Right. So guy was like, if we could put these— because we sell moving containers to movers. So inside every one of those 40-foot containers, there's 40 of these 45 by 45 by 50 tall containers. He's— if we spray paint the containers, we put them in there and they have a battery fire with one battery, you only lose 1 out of 40 of the containers in there and it doesn't set off the rest of the cargo containers. So it burns out in place. So when they get to port, there's no way of a reignition, there's no way of anybody getting hurt. So we did that. It worked as far as spray painting the containers and all, but the problem is you get air through the sides of the containers. So then my pleat wrap, which is the, uh, 3-layered paper I was telling you about, we thinned this ink down to under 32-second viscosity, or the paint, which made it now an ink. Now, when you print this onto my paper and I make my 3-layer pad, which is now called ThermoShield, if you wrap, say, a car-sized battery, like a 16-volt, a 12-volt battery in my, in our paper, inside the paper, the thing could be burning at around 1,500 degrees. An inch away from the paper, you feel like 90, 100 degrees. Yeah. And it takes, it took 21 hours to burn down from the 1500 degrees down to less than 100. So we could open it up and take a look at it.

The paper doesn't burn.

The paper doesn't burn. The paper actually, what happens now that we thin down this paint before it would send wherever the heat was coming from, it would send 60 degrees the other way. Now, after thinning it down, wherever the heat's coming from, it sends 60 degrees that way. And moisture that way and still to 60 degrees the other way. So this thing is wrapped inside this paper. The paper gets super saturated and it's emitting this moisture towards the battery. The batteries, in order to get what we call nuclear, they off-gas when they get to 350°C. They put out like a, about a quart to 2-quart size thing of gas. That gas comes out, collects air. If it can get oxygen, it rolls back into the battery and now it has everything it needs to explode. Without the oxygen, the lithium creates its own oxygen, just enough to stay burning for sometimes an hour, 2 hours if it doesn't get fully involved. But we control the environment. We never allow it to get above 780°C. If it ever gets to 820°C, the thing goes off like a car battery, right? 12-volt. Probably the same force of about 170 to 180 hand grenades going off at the same time. Wow. Yeah.

That's pretty cool.

Yeah. So that, and now we've pre— off of that, my other patent is we've taken that paper and we found out that if we just used one layer of paper, but put on twice the amount of the zinc. And you inside, say, a car battery, inside of a car battery, there's 180 to 250 of these little cells. They're about the size, a little bigger than AA, they're called 18650s. If one goes off without my paper, it just is a chain reaction. It sets the entire battery off and it becomes— each one of those has the power of about a 12-gauge shotgun going off. And it's shooting a piece of molten cobalt wrapped in molten copper, and sometimes through walls, through people.

Wow.

Like crazy. But with my paper around every layer, we've never had a single one of those cells set off another cell. So if you're in a car, like there's a popular car that used to have— they just changed the cell format down to a bigger cells, but less of them. Their old cars had 10,800 cells in the car. So if one caught fire, one cell, it would set off all 10,800 usually. And the car sits on the side of the road and burns for 30 hours because the fire departments can't put it out. So every—

yeah, they put 20,000, 30,000 gallons of water on these cars and they're still burning. So are you selling this stuff to battery manufacturers?

We are in the midst right now of working with a couple battery manufacturers, more towards the e-bike side.

Okay.

Because e-bikes, like in New York City, I think it's already at 118 fires this year from e-bikes. Wow. And like 13 deaths just from e-bikes because they, they're all lithium-ion and they're super like, they don't like to be hit. Ion batteries don't like smacking. You're on— in Manhattan alone, I think it is, there's 65,000 electric bikes for delivery people in Manhattan. Wow. And so these things don't like salt. What do they coat the roads with in the winter out there? Salt. They don't like to be hit and they don't like to be wet. 65,000 bikes a day going around, and of course they're hitting potholes, they're, they're hitting curbs, some somewhat But he hits a car and so it's a big deal for them. The firefighters of New York and all these other people are like, hey, get us anything to fix this problem because the problem just keeps getting worse and worse. Wow.

That's amazing. I can see that. I can see that's obviously why you get up in the morning. You get to solve these problems and do this amazing work. And I can also tell that your magic sauce is You love to solve problems.

Yeah. Yeah, that's me.

You get really excited about that and you really get excited getting your team excited around, hey, we're going to figure this thing out and we're going to come up with something even better.

Yep. Yeah. Yeah. My, the people that work for me, the one thing I love most about them is once you figure it out, they never vary from the process. We have a process set. That thing is getting built the exact same way every time, leaving with the same quality again, getting there on time. They get it. They know how important it is. If you make one mistake on, especially with the fireproof paper and stuff like that, you could cost somebody their life.

Right.

So we're very passionate about getting it right the first time, making sure it's perfect. And if something's a little out of spec, just put it in a recycle dumpster. Let's turn it into something else.

Wow. That's amazing. Ah, this is, I, I've been fascinated listening to you, Roger. Incredible. So I'm curious, what's one thing about yourself that we would never know about unless you revealed it to us?

Um, I am a huge patriot of the United States.

Oh, good for you.

Yeah. There's nothing I'm more passionate about than our troops and our firefighters and all the people that just are trying to save people's lives, the first responders. I donate a lot of what I make to these groups just to make sure they— I do like Tunnels for Towers and all these groups that like something bad happens to a first responder or military person, they go and help them out, take care of their mortgage, take care of the family.

Good for you. I teach first responders how to de-escalate really angry emotional people at an incident. In 90 seconds or less.

That still happens in the United States?

Never. But I teach them my listening skills that I perfected in prison, as I told you. And, um, it changes lives.

It's really powerful. Oh yeah.

So it's really cool. This has been a great conversation, Roger. I really appreciate it. And I know my listeners—

I have one more thing for you.

Oh, go.

Next week on Wednesday the 24th. We've actually developed a fire extinguisher through Guy that puts out lithium fires on contact, which there isn't. Yeah, there's nothing out there right now. The firemen are just at their odds because they don't have something that actually works.

But your buddy Guy figured it out.

Yeah, we tested it like 9 times so far. And next Wednesday we tested at a credible lab out in New York with some bigwigs from a huge company that makes fire extinguishers. Wow. And yeah, then, what is it, Florida and Louisiana declared the lithium batteries in like a state emergency. So they have told us, you pass this test, which we already have 9 times, you're gonna come down here and we're gonna light up a whole car and our firefighters are gonna put it out with your stuff. And if that works, let's just go. We want it.

That could be a huge business.

Oh yeah, that's worth $10 billion in sales a year. Wow. Yeah, it's huge. And it's money. I get it. We're all going to get our money from our jobs. But let me tell you, if I can get these guys every— in their hands, something that they walk into a room and the battery's on fire and the room's on fire and they put it out in seconds and there's none of the devastating gases floating around that puts them at danger and they go home to their families. That's it. That's all I need.

That's all you need. It makes your day.

Good for you. Good for you.

Roger, this is a great conversation. Thank you so much.

Oh, thank you. All right, take care. You have a great day.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag Listening with Leaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up, ratings, and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DougNoll. Douglass E. Noll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.