301 - Empowering Consumers: The Key to Tackling Plastic Waste and Environmental Impact with INEOS Styrolution America's Justin Riney

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.

Justin Reine, welcome to the show. You are the commercial sustainability manager for a company called Ineos Revolution. And your responsibility is for sustainability in the plastics work of your company throughout all of the, take it, the Western Hemisphere. Welcome to Leaders. Yeah, yeah.

So I appreciate you having me. I always enjoy doing podcasts, spending time talking to new people. I always enjoy this.

Oh, great. So why don't you give us a little bit about your backstory?

My backstory is random. I think most people look at my resume and they try to figure out They try to put connections together and they can't figure it out. I can't figure it out either.

So I— That sounds like me as a lawyer.

Yeah. So I refer to myself as an accidental plastics professional, but, uh, now I'm somewhat of an evangelist, but I came out of the agricultural world where I was trading commodities right out of grad school, did that for a couple years, and then a packaging company came calling. In late, early 2000s. I don't even know what you call that, the, the double aughts or whatever the heck people use to refer to the— right before the teens. And so I did that for— I was in packaging for probably 8 years and then I got into resin sales, but I was a resin buyer for a long time and didn't know a thing about polymers when I got into the role. I spent a ton of time with people that were way smarter than me. And you'll find that in pretty much every company. And I always love it when people say things like, if you're the smartest person in the room, find another role or another job. I always hated that because I think there's a level of arrogance to that, to ever think that you're the smartest person in the room. I've never thought that in my career. I never will, mainly because I've been surrounded by great people that have poured a lot. Into my career. So I'm getting to the point where I've been in these kind of roles for 10, 15 years. So I think it's time for me now to start pouring into the next generation. But yeah, my, my background for college, I was a history major, no science whatsoever. And now I talk science all day long and it makes no sense. It really doesn't. But, uh, a lot of smart people have led me here.

So INEOS is a huge company, a multinational company, and you're part of the Styrolution Group. Tell us a little bit about the company and the, and then the division that you're in.

All right, uh, so the INEOS Group is one of the largest petrochemical companies in the world. We're involved in just about all facets of the plastics and petrochemical industry. Our, our company makes the building blocks that go into PET, so water bottles. We have a company that makes PVC. Our company is Styrolution, so we make all things made out of styrenics or styrene monomer. This, obviously, not everybody on the call is going to understand what that is, but, uh, just think polystyrene. Or so we're the building blocks that would go into making something like a Styrofoam or what's really called expanded polystyrene. ABS. So think kids' toys that click together, or that goes into cars. And we've got a lot of other products. I don't get— I don't want to get too much into the weeds. But then we also have a company that makes what most everybody understands, polyethylene and polypropylene. We got companies all over the world that do a lot of different things, but the Styrolution part is where I'm focused, which is the polystyrene, ABS.

And what's your job as the commercial sustainability manager?

It depends on the day. That's why I like it. So I, I do a little bit of the advocacy side of the business. We're currently kicking off a new industry trade group. We're one of the founding members of the Polystyrene Recycling Alliance. I spend a lot of time trying to build that and become my baby. And then I also spend a lot of time talking to legislators, and that's either in DC or local. Specifically in areas where we have production facilities or presence, if there are any kind of laws out there that are, will be detrimental to the business and then detrimental to either their district, them being the legislator or their state. Uh, most people don't understand how all of these things fit together. So spend a lot of time educating legislators, but then The primary part of my business is growing sales in our eco products. So eco products to us are anything that's made out of a bio-based or bio-circular. So most plastics are made from fossil fuels. I think a lot of people look at plastics as being a negative in the world because of the fossil fuel that goes into making our products, but we're actually using biomaterials. One, one thing that we're doing a lot of is used cooking oil. So that would be a biocircular product to make the building blocks that go into making our products. So we're offsetting the, the use of fossil fuels or post-consumer resin or recycled. So we're using post-consumer recycled material in blends, uh, up to 30% right now where we're also offsetting virgin plastic production. And that's my role. My role is to grow that side of our business. And that's my passion. That's what I care about. I'm an environmentalist in the plastics industry, which some people don't really like when I say those things. And if anybody wants to check out my LinkedIn feed, there's a lot of arguments that happen on there. A lot of people don't really like what I'm selling, but at the same time, I just, I try to stick to facts. But yeah, that, that's pretty much what I do in a nutshell.

I know plastics has been in the news a lot lately. We're talking about microplastics and pollution and the fact that landfills are filled up to a large degree with plastics that don't degrade over time.

If you look at the stats, actually, plastics are only up to 13% of what goes into a landfill. The biggest problem in your landfill, and if you're not composting now, you should be, is that's the biggest problem in any landfill. It's the largest contributor of greenhouse gas emissions. In any landfill is the breakdown of food.

Organic.

'Cause they're not built for that. That's not what landfills are for. So if you're throwing your food away into a landfill, that's a problem. So please stop.

Yeah, no, I've been composting for years. I, I, I live in rural California, so I can afford to do that. Yeah. So plastics can constitute about 15% or 13% of the bulk of a, of a, of a typical urban landfill. And what steps are being taken to make, especially in packaging, make them more environmentally friendly and biodegradable? Other— you talked a little while ago about building plastics out of organic compounds.

Yeah, it's good to make a distinction. Using the organic compounds does not make it necessarily biodegradable.

That's not really— oil can be considered an organic compound. Exactly.

What we're trying to do is we're trying to make a circular economy. We want to collect all of the material that's used for our packages and products. We're not actively producing packaging, so we make the building blocks to make packaging, and we want to collect all of the materials that are made out of— polystyrene is a packaging material. It's a smaller packaging material, so collection becomes a problem for us, and because there's just not enough scale. There are breakthrough technologies that might help with that. Advanced recycling. I don't know if you've heard at all about advanced recycling, chemical recycling, molecular, but it can take all hydrocarbons. So polyethylene, polypropylene, and polystyrene, you can put them all together and you can break them down using heat and that'll get back to the building blocks to make new plastics. And so we're doing a lot of that too. We're trying to get more of our material collected. If we can get more of our material collected, we can bring more of it back, and then we can offset more virgin production. So that's the primary way that we're working on this, and that's what the Polystyrene Recycling Alliance is going to do. The whole purpose of it is to grow recycling access for polystyrene in the Americas, and when we get the access, then we can improve the rates because we can get more material collected.

It seems to me that one of the problems is that there are so many different kinds of plastic that we use in our day-to-day life that knowing what to recycle and what not to recycle is— it's tough. Daunting task for a consumer.

It's confusing for me and I'm in the industry. So when I came, I moved to the Charlotte area probably 4 years ago, right, right before COVID hit. And the first thing I did when I got here was I called my municipality to see what was accepted. Curbside. Not a lot of people do that. Not a lot of people check the numbers on the bottom. We get a lot of hate because people think that's greenwashing, but really the numbers are on there so people can identify what material it is, and then you can look at your municipal code to see what's actually collected in your area, what to put in there. We got to make that easier for people. That's one big thing. And We got to do, we got to do the sorting and the collecting a lot better than we do today. So Americans, only 43% of Americans that have access to recycle actually recycle on a daily basis. 71% when they're surveyed say they recycle, but they don't. Yeah. So there's a big disconnect there and that's not industry numbers that comes from a third-party source. North Carolina DEQ did a study recently, and I think their numbers were around 44% of people that actually participate that have the ability to. And even 40% of people in North Carolina don't have the ability to. That's another problem when you look at rural areas. How do you collect this material?

It's tough. It is. I'm thinking about where I live in Central California, just south of Yosemite National Park. Our county does not no longer has blue and green containers. You got a green container, that's it. So we try to, we try to sort out glass and, uh, metal and whatever plastics we think we might be able to recycle, and then we have to manually take them to a recycling collection point to recycle. And then of course we compost all our food waste.

You're doing more than 60% of Americans.

I know, but by doing any of that, you got to be really conscious about it. And I think the, the thing, the troubling thing that I see is I look at a piece of plastic and I say, what do I do? Other, other than obviously a, a, a beverage jar or container is obviously recyclable, but what do you do with that plastic container that came from Trader Joe's that carried some asparagus or meat or whatever?

I mean, there are companies out there. I don't like free advertising, but I'll give some free advertising for people. There's a company called Ridwell. That does a lot in, in the care in California and on the West Coast where they'll send you a box for all of your hard to recycle items and you can ship it back. I haven't checked the GHG emissions on all of the shipping of that kind of stuff, whether or not that actually makes sense because to me, does it make a difference? Yeah, I look at sustainability holistically. I want to make sure that any decision we're making is actually going to be a net benefit. From an ecological standpoint. And recycling is one way to do that. But that's not the only way. We need to reduce and reuse wherever we can. I think Americans and not just Americans said that people always get on my case because I bash Americans a lot and I am one. So I guess I can get away with it. But the world has changed to such a consumer-minded approach and it's just more and more I think every once in a while, maybe just stop and think, do I actually need this? And maybe look at things from a different perspective for a little while. And maybe we can start to make a dent that way too.

So you've been at, you've been at this for 15 years or so. What is it that gets you up in the morning and gets you excited to go to work?

Arguments, maybe? I don't know. So I took this job and one of the first things that I was asked was, why polystyrene? Why are you doing this? Because my background in the plastics world was very wide. I had some experience in polyethylene, polypropylene, polystyrene, ABS, colorant. So a lot of different materials. Polystyrene to me is a challenge. It's under the microscope a lot. People are trying to ban polystyrene as a packaging material. EPS is a Big issue, what most people call Styrofoam. People look at that as a real negative. I'm recycling EPS today and getting that back into our products. You just have to densify it. So there are ways to solve these things. And when you look at EPS, it's 98% air, right? So you're— it's too efficient for its own good. Can't recycle it because you can't ship air around the country.

It's a pain in the ass.

It's really expensive.

Yeah. And it's a pain in the ass to put in the garbage can.

Yeah. And, but there are ways that you can densify that. There are drop-offs. There's a drop-off system here in Mecklenburg County, just north of me for Charlotte, where they call them, I think it's Fomasaurus Rex is what they're calling these things where you can bring in your foam and you throw it into these big containers and then they have a densifier that puts them into blocks to make it so you can ship it. Wow. And there's value to it. And the. Material's clean, it's great, we can reuse it, and I can buy as much of that as collected. But nobody understands that. People don't understand it because all of the stories out there are, we need to ban polystyrene, we need to ban expanded polystyrene, when, well, what I— probably the lowest carbon footprint option out there.

What I need is a machine, a little machine that I can put outside by my trash can that I can dump my my styrofoam in, whatever, and it crushes it, densifies it, and then I get a little block and I take it to my recycling guy.

Yeah, you can use a trash compactor, just even a smaller trash compactor. It's not going to densify it as much as if you got a real commercial, right? But it, it will— it'll pack it in there for you, make it easier for you to transport. California though, they're banning food service EPS. January 1st, 2025.

So you probably won't have as much of it out there. No more Big Macs in foam containers.

Yeah.

I've talked to several people within McDonald's and they said moving away from EPS was a dark day at McDonald's because they understood that it wasn't the best decision for the environment. But consumer pressure is what consumer pressure is.

Right. Justin, what do you think it is that's unique about you that's made you successful in your career?

I actually just had a conversation about this the other day. I've been blessed in my career with people that have poured a lot into me and have selflessly given of their time to educate me. And the conversation came around to, why do you think that is? Why do you think people chose you? To really spend this time and to really impact you early on in your career? And the person that I was talking to was somebody I worked with many years ago, and, and his feedback was, it's because you listened when people spoke, you're curious, you're abundantly curious, you wanted to learn, and you just had a general love for whatever it was you're doing. I could be considered a workaholic. I think if you ask my wife, she would I always say that I'll be sitting around on my couch and see something on the news and be like, okay, how can I spin that to make that into a positive for me? And how can I use that narrative to change hearts and minds? And she's like, you gotta shut down at some point. I can't. It's just not in my nature. I, I don't do vacations. I don't do any of that kind of stuff. I just, I love what I do. And I think people have really taken to that. And it's not— and I don't even think it's anything that, that I'm special or that I was smarter than anybody else, because I'm not. I think it's just people saw that I cared and I wanted to learn and I wanted to ask questions. And I think that's been key throughout my career.

You've talked about listening a lot, and of course, this show is called Listening with Leaders. How did you learn how to listen?

Trial and error, I think, is the best way to put it. Very early on in my career, I was challenged to speak up more, and I always found that— because I was always annoyed with the guy in a meeting or the, the woman in a meeting that would— felt the need to add an opinion in every meeting. And I just, I hated that because I, if I didn't have something value-add to say, I wasn't gonna say it. So I got to the point where I complete 180'd that because I, I was coached to speak more in meetings. So then maybe 6 months later, they're like, hey, you don't need to always throw your opinion out there. So you guys told me 2 weeks ago or 6 months ago that you wanted me to talk more. So now I'm talking more. You have to find your happy medium. I still am very focused on, I'm only gonna talk if I'm adding value. If I, and I'm very thoughtful when I'm in a meeting. Is what I'm about to say going to add value to this meeting? And if it doesn't, I'm not gonna say it. And the last thing I wanna do is to sit and wait for somebody to stop talking so I can throw my point out there. Because I'm not listening to what that person says. And I do not have a monopoly on good ideas. Far from it. I rarely have the best ideas. I like to take a little piece from what everybody said and you can synthesize all those things together. And that's typically where you get your best solution for whatever the problem is. If you're not listening to other people, you're never going to get that piece of information that probably would have solved the problem. And so I've just, I've been very focused on that for a very long time.

So let's say you're in a meeting and you're listening, what are, and somebody's talking, what are you listening for?

What's your emotion?

Which, oh, okay.

Emotions, the first thing, because when you hear somebody and they get really passionate about something that they're saying, typically there's a lot of thought behind that in business settings. That's not always the case. I think sometimes people jump to emotions too quick. And you don't have the whole thought process behind it. But I think that's the first thing I listen to because I've had difficulty in my career. I've been told multiple times, I've done all these different Myers-Briggs assessments or whatever, and they said on empathy scale, you're a -50 and everything else you're really high. So I've made a conscious effort to really pay attention to the emotional side of things as I've gotten older. And so I've really— I've listened to that first, and then second, I just take in what people are saying because I've found that the people that don't talk much, when they have something to say, there's a ton of value there. And I try to push those people to talk more. But sometimes personalities, they're just not going to do that. That's not their comfort zone, so they're not going to do it. So whenever somebody that doesn't speak a lot says something, I'm going to highlight the fact that person said something and I found it valuable. And so I try to do that kind of stuff all the time. I try to active listen as much as I can without being obnoxious, because I've always, just me personally, been annoyed with people that like Yeah. Oh yeah. Cause that's just, it drives me insane. So I try not to do that, but just eye contact, very focused, no devices around me. The only device I have is I've got an iPad, but I take notes on it. And that's the only reason why I have it for Microsoft OneNote. But yeah, I think a lot of this is just learned behavior. Because it's not my first inclination to do these things. Just naturally.

You're right. When you think about it, as children, we're ordered to listen. As students, we're ordered to listen. As employees, we are ordered to listen, but we're really never taught to listen, to your point. And listening is a specific social skill that has to be taught and mastered. It's not something that we come by naturally. Which is why there's so many poor listeners. Yeah.

And I was actually having another conversation recently with that same gentleman that I mentioned earlier, and we both commiserated that the higher you go in an organization, the worse that becomes. And the more likely it is that whoever is the CEO or the highest person in the room is just waiting for their turn to speak.

Right.

There are some real counterexamples to that, some great leaders that I've been around that One guy in particular, I won't name a name, but he told me that he was never going to give his opinion in a meeting. It wasn't his goal. His goal was to direct the conversation and redirect it if necessary, but he wanted the team to come up with the solution. He never wanted to be the guy that said, here's what we do. And I've listened to that a lot because I'm not perfect at it either though. Let's be clear. I still struggle at times with this stuff.

Sounds like that leader you were talking about does a lot of what I— I'm a professional mediator, and as a mediator, I have no power to make— to tell people what to do. I have to guide them into making their own decisions about how they want to resolve a conflict. And that requires obviously an intense, a very deep, intense listening skill. But sounds like your leader had that idea in mind.

Something else that I think is interesting that just popped in my head because of that, most of my leadership has been, uh, without authority. So I am leading the efforts for our organization on advocacy for our products and selling these materials, but I have no ability to tell legislators what to do. I have no ability to tell anybody within our organization how to make decisions or what to do. So the business managers that manage each of these product lines can still do what they want to do. I just have to influence. That's the only way that I can get anything done. And the easiest way to influence is to listen to what people say.

That's right.

And then guide them.

That's right.

To where you want to go.

You can have conferred authority, actually would be directed authority, like hierarchical authority where you have, because of your position, you have authority. And then you can have the kind of conferred authority that you're talking about where you gather authority because people trust you and because you listen and are a leader, they defer to you even though you don't have, you don't have a positional authority, call it that. And so that's what you've been experiencing. And conferred authority is far more powerful than positional authority.

Yeah, as you probably have learned that people throughout my career, younger people in the organization have always come to me to solve problems or bounce ideas off of And I found every single one of those times I never once gave any of them any advice.

That's—

it was just listen to what they had to say. They would put down all of their thoughts and then I would ask the question, what do you think you should do in this scenario? And then they would come to me and say, I think we should do this. I was like, all right, let's do it. And it always works better that way. Oh, because then they're committed to whatever it is they want to do.

That's exactly right.

Yeah, so exactly right.

One more question, Justin, and I'll let you go. What's one thing about yourself that we would never know about unless you revealed it to us?

You can see behind me there's a hockey goalie stick.

Yeah, I see that there.

So I am from Illinois originally. I did not play hockey growing up. I wanted to. I'm a huge Chicago Blackhawks fan. I've always been a fan. My parents— my mom was a nurse and she worked in ICU and she saw all these kids getting hurt playing football and other contact sports. So I was never allowed to play these sports. So I started playing hockey as an adult. I was probably 28, and it was in Southern California of all places, because I went to college in LA.

Yeah, yeah, I know you went to Azusa Pacific.

Yeah, and nobody knows where that is.

I do. I, I grew up—

actually, I went to high school in Stockton, California, so not too far from, from where you are.

Well, yeah, a little bit to the northwest. I grew up in San Marino, so. All right. I know.

Yeah, spent a lot of time in the Bay Area when I was younger. But anyway, so I started playing at the Pasadena Civic Center, Rec Center, I forget exactly what it was called. And I got into it because the stunt crew from 24 were all Canadians and they all played on Sunday night at a certain time. And I just happened to have bought goalie gear and then they all taught me how to play. And I spent a ton of time with those guys and learned how to skate. Yeah, I haven't played since COVID but, uh, I'm a late in life, uh, hockey playing enthusiast. I'm trying to think about getting back into it. I think my wife would prefer me not to do that. She doesn't want me to get hurt, just like my mom didn't want me to get hurt, but we might get back into it.

Is there much hockey in, in, in your Charlotte?

There is. When I lived in Hartsville, about an hour and a half south of here, when I worked for the packaging companies that I worked for, and I used to drive up an hour and a half both ways. Wow. On Sundays to play in a men's league up here in Charlotte. So I moved up here and then I stopped playing cuz everything got shut down because of COVID But yeah, that, that, that's probably a little known fact that not a lot of people know.

Good for you, Justin. I've really enjoyed talking with you today. Today. Thank you so much for your time.

No, I appreciate you having me on.

Absolutely.

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 #ListeningWithLeaders. 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.

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