Cass Ballenger: “first let me give you a quick history of my company. I founded a company in Hickory North Carolina, in 1957 with a loan…”

“first let me give you a quick history of my company. I founded a company in Hickory North Carolina, in 1957 with a loan on my house. This company prints and converts polyethylene, polypropylene and cellophane for packaging for companies like Procter & Gamble and Johnson and Johnson for overwrap for cookies, baby diapers, the packages themselves. That is what the company does. It started off in 1957. At the present time we have 250 employees. What I want to do is gripe. I would like to gripe about our government. Several years ago, air pollution regulations went into effect. There was a whole list of various and sundry things that were polluting the air and doing horrible things to everybody's breathing and so forth. But at that time, my company, you have to print something on polyethylene that will evaporate and leave the ink there, so we were printing with methyl alcohol as a solvent and nylon as the coloring. You print the film, blow hot air at it, and evaporate the solvent. Well, what happened is the methyl alcohol at that time was going out the roof. Along comes an outfit called EPA, and EPA, with this long list of pollutants, decided that methyl alcohol, this is 5 or 6 years after the whole thing started, 5 or 6 years later they decided that methyl alcohol was a positive solvent. Well, I had seven printing presses in this plant of mine, and at that time we asked EPA, since they said we were polluting, what should we do?”