The Recycling Partnership will provide half a million dollars to help the City of St. Paul, Minn. purchase carts for 78,000 households. The nonprofit group announced it was supporting the rollout of 64-gallon carts in St. Paul, which is currently collecting single-stream material in 14-gallon bins. The switch has been contemplated for the last couple of years. "Moving from single-stream bins...

Nearly half of U.S. adults say people in their communities encourage recycling but aren't overly concerned about it. Additionally, areas where recycling is strongly encouraged tend to have better recycling access and a more recycling-aware populace. Those were a couple of takeaways from survey results released by Pew Research Center. A post-survey write-up by Pew also touches on recycling service...

Environmental services company Suez Environnement has partnered with TerraCycle to expand the recovery of difficult-to-recycle materials in six European countries. The France-based waste, recycling and water treatment giant bought 30 percent of the shares of New Jersey-based TerraCycle in Belgium, Finland, France, the Netherlands, Sweden and the U.K. Suez is publicly traded. Under the partnership, TerraCycle will continue to run its...

Two large municipalities in the southwest have sought local manufacturing solutions to help divert usable material away from landfill.

The U.S. EPA developed its 2006 rule on CRT management to help divert the lead-containing glass away from disposal and toward recycling. But a decade later, with the value of recovered glass a negative, the U.S. continues to see high-profile instances in which recycling isn't occurring. "Basically, we've been seeing a pattern consistently across the nation of stockpiles, illegal disposal,...

The closing of container-redemption centers across California has meant dirtier downstream loads of recovered glass. Regulators are now adding emergency regulations to ensure that increased contamination doesn't threaten the state's glass recycling industry. California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery (CalRecycle) staff say existing state regulations force them to shut down secondary glass processors with residue rates above 10 percent...

A new big top has opened in the Florida panhandle, but instead of housing animals and circus performers, the building holds the latest in advanced single-stream sortation equipment. The Emerald Coast Utilities Authority (ECUA) recently opened a new 25-tons-per-hour single-stream MRF in Pensacola, Fla. The facility was designed, manufactured and installed by Eugene, Ore.-based Bulk Handling Systems. Expected to sort...

A densifier innovation aims to boost the cost-effectiveness of transporting EPS plastic for recycling. Intco Recycling, based in Shandong Province, China, makes four models of its Greenmax brand hot-melt densifiers for foam polystyrene and polyethylene. The smallest in the series, the M-C50, has a 10.2-horsepower motor and is capable of densifying 110 pounds of foam per hour. The largest is...

Unifi's new PET recycling plant uses advanced dry de-labeling equipment and a host of optical sorters to generate a clean feedstock for fiber manufacturing. The Reidsville, N.C. facility relies on sortation and washing equipment from two major recycling equipment companies, Bulk Handling Systems and Amut. The $28 million investment helps synthetic yarn manufacturer Unifi move further upstream to control feedstock...

A new sortation system from Bulk Handling Systems automatically separates film products for recycling so they're not later lost as residue in a fiber stream. The combination of a FiberPure optical sorter from National Recovery Technologies (NRT) and an optional Nihot pneumatic extraction system allows materials recovery facilities (MRFs) to automatically remove films from the two-dimensional stream. NRT and Nihot...