A company that manages mobile phone take-back programs has invested more than $1 million in a new processing site and plans to hire hundreds of workers in the coming months. Hyla Mobile has opened a 100,000-square-foot used cell phone processing facility in La Vergne, Tenn., just outside of Nashville. The Farmers Branch, Texas-headquartered company manages phone trade-in programs for large...

A major end user of recovered PET boosted its revenues last year, as it works to expand its recycled-plastic fiber brand and move into new recycling markets. Unifi, maker of the Repreve brand of recycled polyester fiber, reported sales of $647.3 million during its 2017 fiscal year, up 0.6 percent from the year before. Revenue for the fourth quarter totaled...

Nestlé Waters North America has begun adding the How2Recycle label to half-liter PET bottles of all its major U.S. bottled water brands. By the fall, the company will have added the label to the Nestlé Pure Life, Poland Spring, Deer Park, Ice Mountain, Zephyrhills, Ozarka and Arrowhead bottles. The How2Recycle label will tell consumers to empty the bottle and replace...

Aluminum rolling and recycling company Novelis saw its revenue during the April-June period rise 16 percent year over year, an increase driven by higher sales volumes and metal prices. The Atlanta-headquartered company reported revenue of $2.7 billion for the first quarter of its 2018 fiscal year. The company shipped 785,000 metric tons of flat-rolled aluminum products, up 4 percent year...

Global packaging producer Sonoco recycled the equivalent of 57 percent of the packaging it placed on the market last year. That's according to the Hartsville, S.C.-based company's 2016-17 corporate responsibility report. Sonoco Recycling, the company's materials-recovery branch, manages recycling for more than 125 municipalities.  The division handles 3 million tons of fibers, metals and plastics each year, feeding the company's...

The EPEAT sustainable electronics program now includes mobile phones, providing assurance to buyers that the qualifying devices meet certain standards for end-of-life management. The Portland, Ore.-based Green Electronics Council, which runs the EPEAT program, announced on July 31 that mobile phones have joined computers and displays, imaging equipment and TVs in the program. The EPEAT program offers a registry of...

Global e-commerce site eBay is honoring a California woman who immigrated from Colombia with nothing more than a suitcase and later co-founded a successful e-scrap company. Angie Cardona-Nelson received eBay's 2017 Small Business of the Year award during an event on July 27 in Las Vegas. After moving to the U.S. as part of an au pair program, Cardona met...

The group that administers the R2 certification has published advice to help certified companies comply with the electronics recycling standard's requirements. Sustainable Electronics Recycling International (SERI) released guidance on R2's requirements for insurance, closure plans and financial responsibility. The document, which replaces a September 2014 version, doesn't alter the R2 standard but is meant to help ensure companies comply with...

This story has been updated. Inertia continues to build toward the use of tracers and digital watermarks to improve optical sortation of post-consumer packaging. Procter & Gamble is leading an effort to keep everybody on the same page and avoid market fragmentation. Gian De Belder, principal scientist for packaging research and development at Procter & Gamble (P&G), recently provided Plastics...

Many of us carry gift cards in our wallets – especially after the holidays – but they're almost never recycled. However, a recent U.K. effort offers a model for material recovery. The British Plastics Federation (BPF) and Axion Consulting managed what they call the "RecoCard" project, which collected the recycled PVC store gift cards. BPF in July announced they had...