dozen industry insiders, including three top executives who represented the big plastic producers and agreed to talk publicly for the first time. back then, one of the vice presidents at the societyndustry was lew freeman. he noweads a local environmental coalition, but he remembers a pivotal board meeting in the late '80s, when the industry was worried about its public image. >> the ve president of the dupont company pulled me aside and said, "you, you guys better get up to wilmington. there's dissatisfaction about what's going on with the solid-waste issue." we took a trek up to wilmington, and this one dupont executive, he said, "i think if we had five milliodollars"-- which seemed like a lot of money then. >> sullivan: five million? >> " we had five million dollars, we could, we could, we could solve this problem." >> sullivan: they created the council for solid waste solutions, drawn from their ranks of bigil and petrochemical companies that made plastic, like amoco, chevron, dow, and exxon. the group had a plan and turned to a veteran of the industry, ron liesemer, to execute it. >> they wanted to know, was i interested in being the guy who actually made recycling happen ac