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and having our ownership very involved has allowed us to be agile, especially with the changing environment right now." Some of those changes involve embracing new technologies that facilitate greater efficiencies through automation – a concept some people are initially concerned about. "When you hear a term like 'robotics' you might think that is all about taking away jobs from employees," Muldoon pointed out. "But by incorporating automation you really are talking about adding consistency in quality and efficiency not to mention greatly improving safety at the workplace. It doesn't take drastically away from the amount of employees. Like we said, our new Fayetteville facility will bring hundreds of jobs to the area. These will include driving the forklift or monitoring the equipment for quality control. We still have operators, packers, people assembling things, etc." A very important aspect of Ecotech's mission is reaching out to the community and doing their part to educate the public. "When we first started working with Walmart, for instance, it was absolutely more about addressing their initiatives and less about educating the customers," Overbey said. "Now we are educating the customer and letting them know they can be proud of the product that they're buying in terms of the additional measures and sustainability that the particular product is contributing to our world. We're also becoming more locally visible in terms of putting some of our Ecotech dog bowls out at local restaurants and facilities with a little bit of education about our company and encouraging people to recycle." One thing that Ecotech is very proud of in their Springdale facility and will continue in Fayetteville, is something they call Grassroots. "We bring school age kids into our facility in Springdale every year and educate them on recycling," Overbey said. "We explain how it impacts our environment and the ocean. They learn how cool it is that when they are recycling a water bottle it can truly impact the environment. The education piece of it is huge for us, not only nationally but very much locally." Muldoon agreed that getting the public more educated about environmental issues is essential to our community, our nation, and our planet moving forward. "Consumers, I believe, want to make the better choice but it's just knowing what that is and having it as an option," he said. "If it's not available to buy, or it's not affordable to buy, they're not going to do it. I think as a society we have a lot of work to do, especially if you look at other nations in terms of how they recycle and how they deal with their plastic. And getting that message out there, educating and working together is important. Not one person can do it, we have to work together to try to find a solution to eliminate plastic waste and convert it back into a product. That's our mission and that's what we're doing." Ecotech is looking to open their Fayetteville facility and begin production November 1 of this year. "It's going to be pretty much our current setup in Springdale with two recycling lines," Muldoon said. "We plan to greatly expand the injection capacity in that facility over the course of the next three years. When we open, it will be about the same footprint as Springdale using about 200,000 square feet. We will eventually take over the entire 700,000 square feet with potentially growing the workforce over that time span as well." New 700,000 sq. ft. Fayetteville location. Ecotech's Colton, Ca. plant. Over the next three years the new fayeTteville location will become a state-of- the-art recycling facility. Continued from page 13 14

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