Understanding the Problem: Plastic Waste

so this has been something that towers had in the works for several years uh it's patent pending for a variety of different utility patents i guess starting with what the challenge is and as you know probably the last 12 18 months there's been a lot of challenges in the industry from a supply chain perspective and one of those shortages or bottlenecks has been the availability of plastic cartridges so i think we're all hopeful that things will go back to normal at some point but one of the challenges is there's a lot of legislation that's out there pending the national break free from plastic pollution act is one many other states have similar local legislation at different levels but eventually i think single-use plastic is likely to be taxed fined or just outright banned in different capacities and the problem with caulk tubes currently there's about 1 billion roughly a year just in north america that are thrown in a landfill is because of the caulk or adhesive residue inside they're not recyclable so um did i hear that right there's one billion of these things thrown in our landfills every year just in north america not worldwide and this is a single-use plastic so does this thing degrade in the landfill does it disappear or is it there forever it's a good rub question good so we are going to be talking to the chemist behind all this stuff so i'll ask rob about that and but i think you know so when you're using this tube there's some left over in this tube right yeah so uh there's some left in the top and the tip as you're familiar with and from what doesn't get pushed out from the top of the plunger and then as the plunger goes up there's little tiny amounts of residual that are left throughout the tube as well and if you have a clear tube you would see that if you have a color tube you'd see that but when you have a white tube with white caulk you typically don't see it or if you're using a colored caulk and you look at the end sometime you'll probably see some of that residual that you don't otherwise notice and so that plunger inside there is actually sealing that caulking in there so that caulking basically is in the landfill it doesn't dry out it's inside this tube is to a certain extent yeah and over time anything will dry out i think the challenge is when you try to take that plastic and reuse it because of that caulk residue it's not really an easy process to get rid of the caulk to reuse the plastic yeah so i think so is it um you know tower…