Curbside connoisseurs: Iredell County's Toter turns pellets into trash and recycling products.

• Author: Roddey, Jennings Cool

Employees are laser-focused inside Statesville's Toter plant. Some monitor the molding process; others imprint and assemble finished products. Inside the warehouse is loud and warm, but staffers are hard at work, creating everyday products from small, plastic pellets.

Wastequip is a manufacturer of waste-handling equipment. The company acquired Toter, including its 30-year-old Statesville plant, in 2007.

Wastequip employs about 325 people in North Carolina, which is roughly 10% of the company's total workforce across 47 locations in North America. The corporate office led by CEO Marty Bryant is in Charlotte's SouthPark neighborhood, while its two plants in the state include the Statesville Toter site and Amrep, which makes garbage-truck bodies, in Salisbury.

Toter trash and recycling bins start as raw material, typically created from burning natural gas or crude oil, and undergo the company's patented molding process, in which molds are filled with plastic micro-pellets. They then move to an oven that melts the plastic while the machine rotates. Following rotation, molds are cooled, trimmed, marked and assembled.

"There is magic in motion, so to speak," says Nick Daddabbo, director of product management for Wastequip. "Taking little pellets all the way to a full cart."

Daddabbo, who joined the company in November, oversees product management responsibilities across the brands, including development processes, working up new product ideas and future strategies. He has worked in product management and development leadership for more than 20 years.

In 2020, Toter started using a robotic machine for mass production. The company still uses its older machines, though the newer model "is safer for employees, puts out more product over time, runs all the time, and is just as good in quality," Daddabbo says. Though the newer machine is automated and could run 24/7, a skilled technician oversees the process to ensure it is working properly.

Wastequip introduced its corporate responsibility program, CORE, in 2020. Toter's goal was to reduce the amount of virgin resin--or resin that has never been used in a product--in cart manufacturing by 25%. It became known as Project25, the company's ongoing commitment to sustainability.

The gas and crude oil used to create Toter cans can't be replaced, and the process to obtain it can disrupt ecosystems...