Garbage In, Profits Out: CEO James Cline of Trex Creates Value from Plastic Bags and Waste Sawdust

April 26, 2018

James E. Cline has been the President and Chief Executive Officer of Trex Company, Inc., since August 17, 2015. He served as the Chief Financial Officer of Trex from March 18, 2008, to August 17, 2015, and its Senior Vice President from August 2013 to August 17, 2015. Mr. Cline served as President of Harsco GasServ, a subsidiary of Harsco Corporation, from July 2005 to December 2007.   In this exclusive interview with the Wall Street Transcript, Mr. Cline details how Trex has developed into a multi-billion dollar company.

Trex was formed by one of our founders in the late 1980s. The gentleman had a business that was a recycling business, and the recycling was he took day-old bread, made breadcrumbs from it, and he sold the breadcrumbs. As a result of that, he ended up with a lot of plastic bags that the bread came in, and he was not the kind of guy to throw anything away, so he said, “I’m going to make something out of this.” What he ended up doing was mixing it with sawdust, thinking that he would manufacture fire logs. But unfortunately for him, when you mix the polyethylene plastic with sawdust, it takes a very high temperature to ignite it and get it to burn. So he threw it behind his building, forgot about it for a while, came across it a month or so later, and looked at it and said, “Hey, this hasn’t deteriorated. I’m going to make industrial flooring.”

The valuble product is also a green product.

I think when you look at Trex, a lot of people when they first look at us, they say, “While it’s a beautiful board, everybody else makes the same kind of board,” but we’re really different than anyone else. Our board is 95% recycled material. We keep about 400 million pounds every year out of the dumps and the landfills, and we utilize that to manufacturer a product, and we’ve been extremely effective with that. In fact, that gives us the competitive advantage versus others because we are using recycled material.”

For the complete details on how this growth company is creating value, read the entire interview in the Wall Street Transcript.