At the end of the movie Back to the Future, mad scientist Emmett “Doc” Brown reappears with his time-traveling DeLorean, newly powered by garbage thanks to a fictional recycling reactor from the future called Mr. Fusion. A company in Japan is building its own Mr. Fusion. It’s even bought a replica of the iconic car to promote it. Recycler Jeplan is working to extract cotton fiber from used apparel and convert it to fuel. Jeplan says 1 ton of junked clothing can generate about 700 liters of ethanol, sparing land and water resources that could be used to grow food. The company says it’s also developed a way to recycle polyester. That compound is blended into many fabrics to reduce costs, improve durability, and make outfits wrinkle-resistant. It’s used in about 60% of the clothing produced worldwide each year, according to Jeplan, and can be a valuable resource when broken down and reused in new clothing. Recycling plastics, paper, and metals is common, but much of the clothing produced annually around the world ends up in landfills and incinerators. “Only 10% of clothing gets recycled, and that includes secondhand sales,” says Masaki Takao, co-founder and chief executive officer of Tokyo-based Jeplan. “That’s true in every country.” Takao and his team are working on a technique that extracts polyester fibers from clothing through multiple distillation and vaporization cycles. The process generates half the amount of carbon dioxide that’s produced when making the material from scratch. Getting the polyester to a high level of purity is the hard part, Takao says: “Nobody is doing it, because it’s so difficult.”

Questions for Discussion 

1. Which of the Big Five personality traits do you think Masaki Takao is likely to be high on and why?  

2. Which of the other personality traits that affect managerial behavior do you think Takao is likely to be high on and why? 

3. Which values do you think are especially important to him? 

4. Do you think he is high or low on emotional intelligence? Why do you think is the case?