Anthony Cialone is a veteran entrepreneur and executive with a long-standing focus on sustainability, innovation, and industrial transformation. Over the course of his career, Tony has specialized in turning waste into value, launching and scaling businesses that upcycle challenging waste streams into high-performance, commercially viable products. As Founder and COO of Lehigh Technologies, he helped lead the development of micronized rubber powder from end-of-life tires back into applications such as recycled tires and asphalt. Today, he is applying that same expertise as the Founder and Chief Development & Innovation Officer of Microtec Development & Holdings (MTDH), with a primary focus on AggrePlex – MTDH’s first vertical/innovative company dedicated to transforming post-consumer glass into highly-reactive, activated ground-glass pozzolan (AGGP) that replaces Portland cement, reduces carbon emissions, and enhances the performance of concrete in infrastructure and building applications.

John Shegerian: Get the latest Impact Podcast right into your inbox each week. Subscribe by entering your email address at impactpodcast.com to make sure you never miss an interview. This edition of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by ERI. ERI has a mission to protect people, the planet, and your privacy, and is the largest fully integrated IT and electronics asset disposition provider and cybersecurity-focused hardware destruction company in the United States and maybe even the world. For more information on how ERI can help your business properly dispose of outdated electronic hardware devices, please visit eridirect.com. This episode of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by Closed Loop Partners. Closed Loop Partners is a leading circular economy investor in the United States with an extensive network of Fortune 500 corporate investors, family offices, institutional investors, industry experts, and impact partners. Closed Loop’s platform spans the arc of capital from venture capital to private equity, bridging gaps and fostering synergies to scale the circular economy. To find Closed Loop Partners, please go to www.closedlooppartners.com

John: Welcome to another edition of the Impact Podcast. I’m John Shegerian, and this is a very special edition. I’ve got a fellow New Yorker with me today, Anthony (Tony) Cialone. Anthony is the founder and chief development and innovation officer at AggrePlex. Welcome, Tony, to the Impact Podcast.

Anthony: Thank you very much. I’m happy to be here.

John: Well, I’m happy you’re here, and I’m also envious of you, because as we shared off the air a little bit, I’m living in Fresno, California. Now, you are the smart one. You moved from New York to Naples, Florida. And wow, I mean, Naples, Florida is where so many of my friends reside, and it’s just one of the nicest places in this whole country. So obviously, in this conversation, you’re the smarter one. So I’m happy to have you on today.

Anthony: Appreciate that. Thank you very much.

John: Hey, Tony, listen, before we get talking about everything you’ve done with AggrePlex and how you came up with that, let’s go talk a little bit about your background. Talk a little bit about your career and your education, and then career as a lifetime entrepreneur. How’d you even get to this place?

Anthony: So I started out typical Bronx boy, went to Fordham Prep, ended up at Fordham University, thought I was going to be a baseball player, had a shoulder injury, so that decided I really need to focus on academics. I got my undergraduate degree from Fordham, my MBA from Fordham, and an accounting tax from NYU. And then I started to work for my future father-in-law on the back of a garbage truck in New York City. I would spend nights on the garbage trucks, and during the day, put a suit on, and we’d run around the city with accounts and so on. Part of my job at that time was to find ways to value. And back then, we didn’t call it ways to value. Back then, we were talking about how do we divert from the landfill because we didn’t want to pay the landfill costs, not because we saw recycling or we were being sustainable. We didn’t have those words at the time. We were being green because it was motivated by economics. It was good business practice to know where your waste was going to divert and to create valuable commodities. But today, we call it waste of value. We call it circular economy. We call it sustainability. Our ESG program was, hey, we had to be a good neighbor because it meant good business sense. We didn’t want people complaining. So these are the type of things we did naturally. But today, it looks like we’ve got to have a more formal process and people want to measure and document and maybe get carbon credits and different things. But back then, we did it because it was the right thing to do. And that’s how I was brought up in the business. So part of my job there was to, for instance, we had C&D material, construction wood demolition, and we were the first to convert wood waste into wood pellets for residential use and commercial use. So we were always at the forefront of recycling and pulling materials from the waste stream. And that has been my job. After that, I founded a company called Lehigh Technologies, where we took waste tire rubber, micronized it, and replaced synthetic and virgin rubber in the manufacture of new tires. And since then, Michelin’s bought the company and the technology, and they’re going to put a recycled content tire up to 50% using recycled materials. The concern back then, 20 years ago, was recycled material usually inferred inferiority. Maybe it’s going to be a little bit less than virgin. So when you look at a tire, no one really cared about a dollar or two per dollar savings. So they’re like, oh, I’ll buy the virgin tire. So the industry back then didn’t see the value in having recycled content just to save a dollar or two per tire. Now to a tire industry if you’re producing 20, 30 million tires a year, that’s a lot of money. But from a customer standpoint, it wasn’t a big deal at that point. Fast forward, the technology has evolved that recycled content tires not only perform better, have better fuel efficiency, better roll resistance, and last longer because they don’t build up as much heat. So now you have technical performance, you have economic savings, and you have this sustainable lower GWP (Global Warming Potential). So you have a lower carbon footprint tire. So now it’s come full circle. And what I like to say where we are today it took me 20 years to become an overnight success in circular economy. And today it’s a little bit different because before I had to go to the CEO, get his buy-in, had to go to the manufacturing guy, get his buy-in, the purchasing guy, get their buy-in, the technical chemistry guys get their buy-in. But today we go to the chief sustainability officer. If they like the deal, they bring in everybody and they get total buy-in much quicker. So we have rapid adoption, but there’s still a lot of barriers out there in the marketplace. Is the infrastructure available to aggregate the feedstock that we’re trying to acquire? Is it in the form that we can use? And I like to say where we play is we’re between the waste company that’s aggregating this material and the manufacturer. The manufacturer doesn’t want to be in the waste business and the waste company doesn’t want to be in the manufacturing business. So we sit in the middle and we extend either deep into the waste business if we have to clean it up and prepare it or deep into the manufacturing business so we prepare something that they can easily integrate not only into their formula, their manufacturing process, but their end product performance. So you got to engineer across the board, not show up with a baggie and say, hey, it’s recycled material, producer responsibility, here you go, figure it out. You’ve got to provide them with the technical information because these are technical functional materials if you want to get paid value for it. And that’s really what we’ve learned.

John: So Tony, I want to go back to Lehigh. You’re unbelievably educated, obviously Fordham, great university, got your undergraduate there, your MBA, then you go on to NYU, another great university, and you get tax and accounting background. You’re not a chemical engineer or an engineer per se. Where was the genius, at Lehigh, to come up with the technology to create recycled rubber, which was a big deal 20 years ago, like you said. This was before circularity was part of our vernacular. This was before sustainability was part of our vernacular. This was before the shift from the linear to the circular economy was going on. Way before any of the trends said this was a business proposition. How did you A, come up with the science and the technology, and then B, push through all the inertia that was out there in the corporate world for adoption purposes?

Anthony: I think the education background helped me identify all the kind of the business, economic, financial barriers, market barriers that were out there. That helped me to understand those barriers. And then I made the assumption, if I can make the product, where do I get the feedstock? If I can make the product, who do I sell it to? What is their willingness to pay? What is the value proposition? Am I solving a problem? Do they need this? Or is this maybe a want? And then how long is it going to take me to get that adoption cycle for them to buy at scale? I think that’s where that financial background came in. Once I had that, I then said, okay, what’s the product I need to make versus hey, there’s a tire problem, there’s a glass problem, there’s a circuit board problem, whatever it may be. Let me come up with a technology, and then I’ll make a product. Then I got to go find a market. Now let’s go to the market first, and then figure out what’s the technology that we needed. And what we discovered is that we are who we are. My mother used to say all the time, you’re born round, you don’t die square. The chemistry of the material that we’re dealing with is the chemistry. Maybe we can separate reinforcement like steel or fiber. Maybe we can take away some other materials. But in essence, we’re going to be left with some basic chemistry that we cannot change. And the other thing I didn’t want to do is get into a lot of these thermal or chemical type of businesses where you put something in, and then you don’t know what comes out. Because if the raw material changes, if the heat, the chemistry, the dynamics change, either the yield, the purity, or the amount of what you’re targeting can be very variable. So knowing that feedstocks in the waste business and the recycling business are always variable, meaning they change. Even glass, for instance, you can have more liquid residue on the surface of the glass and not realize it. You have more paper, label, glue, things of that nature. The glass may look clean to your hand, but from a chemistry standpoint, there’s some anomalies in there that you got to deal with. So having said that, I looked at this and said, I know what I need to make. Now let me go find the technology to do this. And what I decided to do, I wanted to create technical functional materials through size reduction. I am what I am. My chemistry is the same. I’m not changing it. I’m just making it so small, it’s easy to put into a formulation or back into a product. Because when it’s so small like that, it becomes high surface area, high reactivity. Not only does it encapsulate, but it starts to bond. And then you get these superior performance. So in the case of glass, if we’re some of the smallest particles in the cement concrete mix. So not only do we react in the hydraulic and Pozzolan reaction in the chemistry of creating the durable paste, which is cement, we are some of the smallest particles. So we fill in all the voids and capillaries. And when we do that, we become a very dense material. And then you have less water infiltration. You have more resistivity, more resilient, longer lasting concrete, stronger concrete. And that’s really what it’s about.

John: I want to go back into that in a second, but I want to step back. What year did you sell Lehigh to Michelin? About?

Anthony: I think 2005 or so.

John: So we’re very similar. I sold my company, my first company that I scaled up in 2004. You sold it in 2005. Where then was the aha moment that the next vertical you should be tackling is glass, and it should be you to do it, that you want to get back in the batter’s box after having just done Lehigh, which was no easy climb. First of all, there’s no entrepreneurial journey that’s ever easy, especially in sustainability dating back that many years. Sustainability wasn’t even a thing back then. So as you said, there was a business case for it. So now, when did you have the aha moment, say, okay, I’m getting back in the batter’s box. That’s one thing. But then I’m also going to now tackle glass as the new vertical for recycled glass. When was that? When did you have that?

Anthony: Let me throw you a curveball. So when I finished with the rubber and tire business, I got into the compost business down here in Florida. So you take in green waste, you wind row it, you compost, you turn it. I was Old Castle and Scott’s largest supplier in Florida. I was in 75% of all their bags, SKUs, the base material, but it’s a commodity business. And with all the hurricanes here, a pile here, a pile there, you’re dealing with logistical costs and people aren’t paying for the value of the product anymore. So I try to figure out how can I create a more valuable compost product? And what I realized is compost very simply is made of the green waste and the woody lignus material, the woody biomass material. The green material that breaks down in compost contains all the NPK, all the nutrient value, the nitrogen, the phosphate material. And then the biomass adds no physical or chemical value. What I realized, if I can take that material, put it into the same mill I used in tire recycling, I can pull out all the moisture in that and make it a very light material. When I grind it and make it a light material, it’s a substitute for Canadian peat, coconut coir, and Florida peat. So when I add that back to my compost, I got potting media. And I don’t have to add in all these expensive mined materials, heat treated materials, all the logistics. I create a locally sourced, manufactured, and produced product that is economically sound. And now I differentiate myself. I’m not selling compost at $30 a ton. I’m selling potting media at $150 a ton. And that’s the business I was in. So I re-engaged with my friends in Germany that had the technology that we use for the rubber recycling. Now I’m using it for my biomass, my compost business. And a buddy of mine shows up and says, hey, I need to grind glass so I can make these lightweight aggregate materials out of glass. Foamed glass, they call it. And they’re using it to substitute for heavier aggregates in road construction and things of that nature. But they need a very tight particle curve. So he said, can you make this 70 to 45 microns? And I said, yeah, I think I know the mill. Went over to Germany, did some tests. And we came back. We made 50% between 70 and 45 micron and 50% minus 45 micron. So I showed up with it. I was very proud. And they’re like, this is great, but we don’t need this minus 45 micron. It’s too small for us. I’m like, well, what do you do with it? They said, well, it’s a Pozzolan. You should sell it as a Pozzolan. And that’s how I started. I started to learn about Pozzolans and how it can help and replace Portland cement and concrete, how big of an issue carbon is in the cement and concrete industry, that it solved both a technical problem but also an environmental carbon problem for the industry. And that’s how we started. And it was really based upon someone asking me for a little help.

John: And besides cement having such a carbon issue and having such a big impact when it comes to building and just infrastructure work, glass is a pain in the ass in terms of disposal and recycling as well. So you’re really solving on both sides of the equation a problem.

Anthony: Yeah. So we’re diverting from the landfill, what we call container glass. Now, there is bottle bills and they’re all glass recycling, your wine, beer bottles. But they do that by color. And they have other specifications that there’s a lot of rejects there. So as much as the glass goes through the system, about 60% ends up in a landfill as disqualified material. It’s too fine, too small to separate by color. It has CSP, ceramic stone porcelain, which if you get little pieces in your bottle, you’re going to have specks and then blemish and so on. So there’s a lot of rejects in order to meet the color spec of the bottle industry. And the great news is we complement them. We want all that material. We’re indifferent when it comes to color, CSP. To us, it’s all silicon material. It’s all ready to be made into a high-end pozzolan. So solar panel glass, windshield glass, plate glass, building glass, medical glass, especially the beakers, test tubes, vials. There is so much discarded because of the quality control. Just post-manufacturing, never mind post-consumer, there’s so much available out there that ends up in the landfill that we can divert and take in. And then solar panels are going to be a huge one. As those materials start to have end of life and come more and more into the waste stream, what do we do with them? Because there are certain silvers and other materials, you can’t put them in a landfill and they’re very, very hard to recycle. What we do is we micronize them so finely we can now go after all those materials and reclaim all the silver, the cobalt, the coppers, all the metals. So we enable that high-efficient, sustainable recycling and then we can really decarbonize the whole manufacturing process and reintroduce these products either into concrete and/or back into other glass applications. We’re actually putting some of these pozzolans and pinks and coatings. They impact-resistant, fire-resistant. They’re adding other types of positive properties. So it’s pretty exciting.

John: I just want to get some context here. It’s very exciting, by the way, because I know glass for our company has been a big problem for all these years and so we’re super excited to have you on the show today to talk about something that we know is a problem. Talk about concrete. When I think of concrete, I’ll think of a cinder block. The cinder block now made out of your material is how much lighter. Talk about why your cinder block now made out of all the pozzolan is so much more high-performance in terms of weight, height, fire resistance, and everything else compared to the traditional cinder block or whatever. I just want to give some sort of contextual experience to the listeners and viewers.

Anthony: So when you produce a block, a precast tilt-up wall, a foundation, or pour concrete in general, very simply, it’s about the mixture of cement with water and the aggregate and the sand. And then they use other SCMs (Supplementary Cementitious Materials), like fly ash or slag. And what they do is they make a mix and that mix has a certain amount of strength and that mix has a certain amount of weight, durability, R-factor, insulation properties, things of that nature. So when you use our pozzolan, we not only aid in the hydraulic reaction, we call a secondary reaction, which is called a pozzolanic reaction, where we consume more of the CH or the excess paste that doesn’t turn into durable paste. We consume that and that’s why you get longer-term strengths and stronger concrete, stronger block, things of that nature. But because our density is much lighter, the product is lighter, the R-value goes up. So if you’re building a data center, and forgetting about today, scope one, two, and three, if I use your product, how much carbon savings do I save? I mean, it’s significant and it’s something that’s important, but the real value is if you can control one or two degrees of temperature over a 40-year project, you’re talking about millions of dollars in energy savings. You’re talking about millions of dollars in insurance costs, millions of dollars in repair and maintenance costs, because it’s more durable, more resilient, it’s stronger concrete, it’s got less permeability, things of that nature. So it just makes it a more resilient concrete. So instead of being a 30, 40-year life of a structure, it’s now 50 or 60. So now you can amortize that longer, you’re green financing, you can get your lease credit, you can get lower interest rates. So what’s happening now, everybody’s going from buy green to build green, meaning let’s look at the life cycle of this. There’s more money to be saved and made, and that justifies the upfront green premium of paying for these products. Because right now, the decision is, do I use Pozzolan, or do I use a different mix? Do I want to pay more or less, things of that nature? And that’s really the question that has been out there. But we’re lucky because we’re more advanced in the adoption life cycle. I like to characterize as a three-stage life cycle. We introduce a recycled product to market, it’s inferior to the virgin product and costs more, and no one wants to use it. And there’s the typical early adopters, like we see. You in the tech business, you understand that. And then all of a sudden, it’s equivalent in cost, it’s equivalent in performance. But the real breakthrough and the real adoption is where it’s more cost-effective, so it’s cheaper, but it performs better than the virgin material. And that is the case of Pozzolan. And we’re lucky because there’s some infrastructure already there, aggregating glass, and we’re going to piggyback on that. And where we’re going to wind up is because we can pay more for the Pozzolan, we can pull through more glass through the recycling infrastructure, because we can pay more to get more glass to recover, reclaim, and reuse.

John: So if I’m a real estate developer in Manhattan, or any big city USA, and I’m trying to build a LEED-certified building, I want to use your Pozzolan in that building for all the reasons you just laid out. It helps me get to my LEED Platinum certification faster, it’s going to save money with regards to energy savings, insurance savings, and all those other wonderful ancillary benefits that add up to a very big ROI for the upfront investment.

Anthony: That’s correct. And that’s the whole idea about decarbonizing the construction industry, is to have a positive ROI, whether that’s because it’s more cost-effective today, or over the life cycle, or no one’s going to do it. It can’t be sustainable unless it’s economically sustainable. That’s how I look at it.

John: Yeah. For our listeners and viewers who’ve just joined us, we’ve got Anthony Cialoneo with us today, the founder, chief development and innovation officer of AggrePlex. To find him, you can go to www.aggreplexus.com. It will be in the show notes, so you don’t have to write it down if you’re walking your dog, or in the gym, or driving your car, or anything like that. Every entrepreneur faces major roadblocks when you try to get something off the ground. What were some of the biggest challenges you faced when you were launching and trying to get this socialized? And how do you overcome those challenges, Tony?

Anthony: So, the biggest challenge is the proof of the marketplace. By nature, we’re introducing a relatively new technology, but it’s to produce a product that’s known. We’re doing something at scale and at volume, at a cost that hasn’t been done before. And that really unlocks the opportunity to use glass, is the core technology. So, once we can get it as fine as we do, which is new and novel, and we can do it economically, and we can do it at high volumes, then we had to go to the cement concrete industry, and they deal in millions of tons. So, to move the needle, a facility’s got to supply 100,000 to 200,000 tons of material. That’s how much glass each facility needs. You’re replacing OPC, you’re replacing fly ash and slag, and these guys are buying millions of tons of these products a year. So, in order to overcome the supply dynamic, you got to get them interested. You have enough volume to supply, because no one wants to put 2% or 3% of anything into a product. It’s not meaningful. They want to put 20%, 30% across the board in a standard formulation, and they want to be able to have an EPD for their concrete that demonstrates the low carbon and they don’t want to jump back and forth. So, that was the biggest thing, is getting buy-in from the cement concrete industry. One, can we supply enough material? And two, since we don’t have a facility built at this point in the United States, they’re like, well, if we can’t see it in touch, just call us when you have it built. But in the meantime, my financiers are, show me the dog will eat the dog food, so I can give you some money. And so, it’s a catch-22, and then you got to have credibility. You sample, you test, you demonstrate, and you stick around long enough. They start to believe you, and you get one or two of these guys start to support you. And it’s the ones that remember what it took for them to get where they are, the entrepreneurship to help out, and it sounds like you’re the same way. You see an opportunity, hey, you need a little credibility with my brand to help your brand get off the ground, and that’s what we need to do. We got to pay it forward, and we got to do the right things, and that’s really what went on, and that’s the biggest challenge we had.

John: Are you at that tipping point right now, where you’re about to convince a few folks to take a shot in the cement industry, in the construction industry, and then build your first plant, and start scaling this thing? Is that where you are in the journey right now?

Anthony: Yeah, so we’ve got commitments. We have letters of intent, and we go from an MOU, to a letter of intent, to a formal agreement, as we go through the different gates. Show us you can get financed. Show us you’ve got a shovel in the ground, and demonstrate the output of the facility, and we’ll go from where we are today with an MOU, all the way through an offtake agreement. They want the product. They want to be able to use it for green. They want first mover advantage. They want to be able to say, I’ve got green concrete, and I happen to have all the Pozzolan in Northern California, or wherever we put our first facility, which is going to be in Modesto, California. So there is a competitive advantage for them to jump in. I look at it and say, hey, if we don’t show up, it didn’t cost you anything. If we show up, you’ve got something that’s unique in the marketplace for the next four or five years.

John: Tony, wait a second. You’re going to open your first plant in Modesto. That means we’re going to be neighbors in Fresno. It’s right up the street from us here. Holy Toledo. Exactly.

Anthony: And then you’ll be down in Naples. At least [inaudible].

John: Now, there’s another great family that made their home in Modesto and made their fortune there. It’s called the Gallo family. So I’m sure you’re aware of that. So Modesto is a great place.

Anthony: The Gallo family is the ones that had the vision to bring us in. So they have one of the largest glass recycling facilities in the world in Modesto, California. They supply their own glass to their glass manufacturing facility. Like I said, in that process, there are materials that don’t meet their specifications. So instead of landfilling it, they said, how do we make a better product? They heard about us, they brought us in, and now we’re going to co-locate at their facility and take all their scrap and ensure it’s all recycled.

John: That makes so much sense. And Modesto’s a great place to do business. And man, you’ll be right up the road. I can’t wait because then I can come see it in person. So talk a little bit about your goals and your dreams. I mean, you’ve been here before. This is the cool thing about repeat entrepreneurs, repeat success entrepreneurs, that you have that pattern recognition. You know the journey, you’ve been on the road before. Talk a little bit about your goals in the next 5 to 10 years and where this thing can really go as you evolve it and launch. In a perfect world, and I know nothing’s perfect, Tony. You and I know man plans and God laughs. But when would you open that first facility in Modesto for proof of concept with such an amazing partner like Gallo?

Anthony: So we’re looking to break ground October, November of this year. We just brought on a private equity partner who’s sponsoring us up to $250 million and would give us more to roll out multiple facilities throughout North America and into Europe. And the idea is the world’s getting smaller and smaller. All the concrete cement companies are all being acquired. There’s six or so majors. You deal with them. The idea is to partner up and roll this out, put these facilities as glass, as the major component in feedstock. But we can also do mine tailings. We can also do calcified calcium and different limes. We can do foundry sand. So all this sand they do for casting like for John Deere and Caterpillar, when they do all the big metal components, that sand gets a heat history. That heat history makes it pozzolonic. We don’t have to add any more energy to it. They’ve done it already. All these materials are on-site impoundments. They’re just sitting there, millions and millions of tons. And we can go on-site, reclaim the land, get this material out of the ground, and create a pozzolone material for the industry. And that’s really where this is going, is not just glass, but anything silica-based or calcium-based that has been calcified or gone through some sort of heat process, we can go back and we can reclaim and create SCMs for the cement industry. And that’s really the vision of what we’re trying to do.

John: God willing, obviously there’s a massive demand for this out there. And do you believe there’s enough supply out there to feed the demand that you’re going to have once you prove the success?

Anthony: Absolutely. Because what we like to do is, there’s the initial supply, which is we’re going to complement the Gallo wines and take all their waste that they can’t use or byproducts that they can’t use. And then there’s all that glass that doesn’t end up going to them, that still ends up going to landfill. We’re going to go pull that through, and then we’re going to go after other sources of glass that people just don’t count. Solar panel, windshield glass, medical glass, plate glass, things like that. When we think glass, we think of our wine bottles and our beer bottles and our jars. But there’s so much more glass out there by weight that we’re not accounting for. But when we do that, there’s plenty of glass. But even with that, to your point, the amount of glass that’s out there that we can quantify is going to be about 50 million pounds. Right now, the cement industry uses 50 million tons. The cement industry uses over 300 million tons of fly ash and 300 million tons of slag. We’re shutting down coal-fired facilities so we don’t make fly ash anymore. And all the steel mills are going to electric arc versus blast furnaces. They’re all better environmental, but the negative consequence that these products don’t exist anymore, and we’re importing them from all over some different countries. And that’s what really gets me is that we’re importing these materials, and where they’re coming from have poor environmental standards on how they’re producing it. But yeah, we’re buying because we need it. Now, if we can produce our own substitute products or additional materials, then we can source locally, clean up our own lands, and not have to support these poor environmental processes that are out there. And really get them to compete with us, not only on price and performance, but compete on environmental stewardship. Are you doing the right thing? Are you decarbonizing? Do you have a lower carbon footprint? Or just the idea of transporting it from somewhere in Asia to the United States, the fuel consumed in the shipping. If we can eliminate that, we can have a huge environmental impact.

John: That’s awesome. So you’re thinking way beyond the United States. How many locations in a perfect world would you need to serve the United States to open up here? And then where would you open up first outside the United States? Where’s the interest been coming in from outside of the United States?

Anthony: So there’s eight sites we’ve identified in the United States for glass puzzle manufacturing. And Australia, we’re talking about Germany, in Europe, is some other places. And they have some sophisticated glass recycling over in Europe. So we want to partner on and kind of bolt ourselves onto the back end of some of the existing facilities and hit the market running. So they get what they need to make their colored for glass, that we take all the by-product material and we put that into the cement industry. And that works in Europe a little bit better than the United States, because in the U.S., we have these big cities with big markets and big demand. In Europe, they tend to be a little bit more fragmented. So you can have smaller scale facilities servicing that market region. And it works out very nice. So that’s our focus. And we’re looking for partnerships with some of the glass recyclers that are out there. And we’re talking some of the major ones right now, and there’s a lot of interest. They all have eyes on this Modesto facility, the success. And from that, this will catapult us to expand and jump into these other markets.

John: So when you break ground in Modesto in, God willing, October, November, when will it open? When’s your goal to open and how long will it take you to build something like this?

Anthony: We’re hoping in first quarter of 2026, when we get it commercialized.

John: Really?

Anthony: Yeah, we did bought the company that makes the key components and technology in Germany. So we own that company and that was the longest lead item. So once we control that manufacturing and access to that technology, we can cut down our construction timeframe and really get to it. And that’s really what we’re concentrating is repurposing their focus to build these glass puzzle on facilities.

John: That’s so exciting. Well, that’s great. Is there anything else you’d like to share about the AggrePlex products before for our listeners and viewers and educate them any more on opportunities for the glass industry in the months and years ahead?

Anthony: I think we’re good. I think we touched on all the high points that we wanted to talk about. And I’m really appreciative of the opportunity to explain both the technology and the opportunity. Thank you for this forum.

John: Oh my gosh, Tony, you’re going to be a massive success. You’ve already been a major success. You already know this road traveled of the entrepreneur. You already know how to take the hits and just keep moving forward. And you’re hitting two industries more than that, but you’re hitting glass recycling, which has been really challenging. You mentioned bottle bills earlier. It’s good for our listeners and viewers to know, shame on us as a country. We think we’re the most evolved and developed. There’s only 11 states that have bottle bill laws. So when you’re saying this stuff is still leaking into landfills and the rejects and everything else, we’re still not that sophisticated when it comes to that. So bringing someone like you in to fill the gaps and the voids that exist when it comes to responsible glass recycling, that itself is major. Then when it comes to construction and having superior products that are made out of green materials. That’s like you’re winning on both sides of the equation.

Anthony: Exactly. No, absolutely. I always like to also say, not only these stages of adoption, but to be efficient in circular economy, there’s got to be a maturity in the marketplace. So the demand for the product’s got to be stable and proven. In this case, it’s concrete. It far exceeds anything we can supply. And there’s got to be sophistication in the aggregation system. Where are we to get the type of material we need? Those two things exist. You couple with drivers like regulatory, end-of-life, producer responsibility. You get consumer sentiment that they want recycled materials and other drivers like lead and things of that nature. You put all those together, you can now create a platform for circular economy, which means you’ve got to have that core technology as well to transform the materials into this higher value material. And that’s all coming together.

John: You were early with Lehigh, but now you’re right time, right place with AggrePlex. So you’re literally right on time.

Anthony: I’d like to think so, but you’ve been there, and it’s twice as long as you think, maybe three times.

John: A hundred percent. It always is. It is. But the nice thing is that the trends have caught up with your vision. And the trends of linear to circular economy is not going away. The trends of sustainability and chief sustainability or chief impact officers isn’t going away. The race to net zero isn’t going away and to carbon neutralize the world. So all those trends are long-term trends that our children are going to continue to push forward besides us, Tony. So the great news is that you are generally on time with this, even though it’s still early, because you’re still convincing people that this is the right thing to do. I know because of dealing with both sides of the pain points that it’s absolutely perfect timing and it’s going to be a major success. And it’s not a zero-sum game. There’s so much opportunity for you, no matter who else is out there doing bottles or other stuff. There’s just so much opportunity to take the glass that you’re going to take from all different verticals and then put it into the Pozzolan. I mean, it’s going to be even bigger than Lehigh technologies. And no derogation on Lehigh. But you come back up to bat and you already know what to do. You’re going to hit it out even further now.

Anthony: I appreciate that. But you’re 100% right. They call the triple bottom line here. It’s good business sense to use these materials.

John: A hundred percent.

Anthony: So there’s no reason not to do it. We’ve got to mitigate the risk for the end users to show that we have a stable supply, consistent quality that they can rely on this and then they can sell that to their customers who can rely on it. So there’s a sense of responsibility and proof that we’re obligated to make sure our customers and service them well and give them the comfort and show them the value so they can deploy it across their market and their customers. So we’re pretty excited about it. Everything aligns. Like you said, it’s about execution from this point forward.

John: Hey, this is amazing. This has been wonderful. What I want to do, Tony, is hey, when you come out here to visit your new facility in Modesto, we’re going to get together in person. Or when I come down to Florida next, I know I’m going to be down in Florida soon. You’ll be up here soon. We’ll get together. But also I want you to come back on the impact. Once you launch Modesto and share how the journey’s going, because you’re going to have a lot of exciting updates then for our audience around the world and our listeners around the world that are going to be very, very interested in tracking your success and maybe even getting involved. So I want to thank you for your time today, your wisdom, your fascinating journey. For our listeners and viewers to find Tony and his colleagues at AggrePlex and to get involved, if you want, go and learn about what he’s doing, please go to www.aggreplexus.com. Aggreplexus.com. It will be in the show notes. You don’t have to write it down if you’re doing something else right now. Tony, thanks not only for your fascinating story and career and thanks for your time today, but more important, thanks for just making the world a better place.

Anthony: We appreciate it. Thank you very much for the opportunity. Looking forward to getting back together and sharing the journey. Like you said, it’s important. We can learn from it. I continue to learn every day. I’m excited. So anything we can do together, share. We don’t do it by ourselves. Everybody helps. As I tell people, it takes me 20 years to be an overnight success and I didn’t do it alone.

John: Thanks again, Tony. Thank you.

Anthony: Thank you.

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