There’s excitement in Donna Johnson’s voice when she talks about trash.

Johnson, president of Pinnacle Technology, 619 E. Eighth St., already has made a name for her company by developing a way to use discarded wheat straw — something farmers often burn to get rid of — as an agent to stiffen plastic. Now her company is close to finding a way to take unsorted plastic from everyday trash and recycle it into something usable for industry.

Donna Johnson's company, Pinnacle Technology, 619 E. Eighth St., has developed a means of making plastic using wheat straw. A South African company last year announced plans to open a plastic plant that uses Pinnacle's wheat-straw technology.

Unsorted plastic, Johnson says, is the “holy grail” of her business, in part because the sorting now required to make strong recycled plastic is labor-intensive.

“Things are really coming together right now,” Johnson said.

Johnson’s company has been in Lawrence since 1995 and employs 13 people. It made a major breakthrough last year when a South African company, Spanish Ice Properties, became the first worldwide to announce plans to open a plastic plant that uses Pinnacle’s wheat-straw technology.

Basically, the process is to grind the straw, mix it with plastic and add chemicals to make the two materials bind. The lightweight plastic that results, made of up to 50 percent straw, is meant mostly for uses where the strength of the plastic is more important than its appearance, such as in shipping pallets.

Pinnacle and Agro-Plastics, the subsidiary Johnson created to manage the technology, will receive a royalty for each pound of plastic produced at the plant. Johnson has said she thinks the deal has the potential to double the company’s revenues, and she’s hopeful it could boost Kansas’ rural economy by providing another use for straw.

Despite a prediction that the plant would start churning out its plastic by last July, as of March the plant hadn’t reached full production capacity.

“We’re scaling from the lab up to a full plant, so there’s always issues in trying to get all the pieces hooked together right,” she said.

Johnson said there are two or three other companies worldwide interested in using the straw technology, but she said she would wait to finalize any further deals until the South African plant was up and running.

One of the problems in grinding straw is that it must be ground so finely that it risks being burned. Pinnacle is turning to the former Soviet Union to help solve that problem.

The company owns worldwide distribution rights to a new grinding technology being developed in the Ukraine at a site once used to build communist bombs. The scientists working on the project are a team of former Soviet weapons scientists trained through a U.S. Department of Energy program.

“They grow mushrooms in the bunkers now, and our grinders are right next to satellites,” Johnson said.