By day he’s making pizza on the coast in Florida but at night and any other free time, he’s at work in his lab of sorts trying to find the perfect biodegradable plastic cup. Joey Daniels, a CDA/IA/MSU alum got an idea when he was visiting his happy place. “In the summertime, I would come down (to Florida), rent a little apartment, and work beach chairs down in Florida,” Daniels said. “And I was around the beach, right on 30-A, working this beautiful coastline. And it was just polluted with plastic – with cups and lids and straws and bags.” Understanding the man-made mess on both levels of creation and littering, he knew it would never stop but he wanted to try to find a way to make a difference. Becoming a plastic trash collector wouldn’t put a dent in the problem but changing the actual plastic would go a long way. As a pre-med major at Mississippi State, he was learning the ins and outs of biology and chemistry but decided to make a 180 of sorts and started studying polymers. “I was trying to figure out ways to design some sustainable polymers. If they were polluted by accident or on purpose, they would disappear in a couple of months. Microbes would totally eat it and it would be wiped off the earth.” At MSU this was actually happening in the lab. It took three years and a paper was published but the process wasn’t commercially viable. “It was pretty expensive to produce,” Daniels said. He graduated and took his knowledge West to Arizona State University for more study of the same. Everyone in the ASU lab was trying to win the race of making a commercially viable sustainable plastic. “I decided to get away from the material manufacturing part of it and I wanted to get into the actual product manufacturing of it because nobody knew how to make parts or products from this plastic. I dropped out of Arizona State and went to work for a thermoforming facility in Arizona learning how to make plastic cups.” Creating his own “vo-tech” of sorts class with on-the-job training, he learned the machines and how to make parts and ended up buying an old one in a scrapyard. He set up shop in his dad’s hangar in Hollandale and them moved it all to Florida. “Finally got a warehouse down here and trying to build a market for biodegradable products here in Florida. Because this is where I kind of got the idea and kind of got the inspiration to build products like this. And I thought it would be amazing if I could build products in Florida while using raw materials from the Delta. It would be kind of like a good little symbol of my life.” His one-man company, New Wave Plastics, is working to solve the problem and he’s working with Delta materials such as rice husks but admittedly the first cups with the resource were “ugly” as he described. “It's something I'm still working on, something that's a work in progress.” His iterations run him about $3,000 each time. That’s a lot of pizza making during the week to fund his future. Oh, and his pizza bosses? Just a couple of guys from the Delta who went to State and decided to make the pizza business a bit more fun, creative and delicious and have done so with their Lost Pizza empire. He might just make it. I’m praying he does.
