A new materials recovery facility in Florida is ready and willing to accept glass, but a local municipality refuses to send it over fears the MRF will change its mind. That glass dispute is happening in Fort Walton Beach, a city of nearly 20,000 on Florida's panhandle. According to Northwest Florida Daily News, the City Council inked a deal to...

The City of Fort Worth, Texas is changing its relationship with outreach organization Recyclebank as it works to increase recycling among the multi-family and commercial sectors. Recyclebank is an educational platform focused on helping cities connect with their residents on the subject of sustainability and recycling. Recyclebank does that by rewarding residents for their recycling efforts with points, which can...

Schupan Electronics Recycling, a division of Schupan & Sons, Inc., is growing its processing line and has its eye on even more growth in the future. The company recently purchased two buildings near its corporate headquarters in Kalamazoo, Mich. The e-scrap division moved into one of them."We moved into a new facility, just under 30,000 square feet," said general manager...

The e-Stewards standard and certification program announced details today on a plan to regularly use GPS tracking devices as an enforcement and verification tool. This announcement comes on the heels of the Basel Action Network's controversial e-scrap tracking study that also used GPS devices. For that study, the Basel Action Network (BAN), founder of the e-Stewards certification, placed 205 tracking...

Samsung has recalled 2.5 million of its Galaxy Note 7 smartphones due to a potentially dangerous problem that has caused some of the phones to explode. While this is definitely a problem for Samsung, it's also a problem for the e-scrap processors who might be responsible for handling the phones. The problem for processors is the lithium-ion battery. OEMs have...

Officials raided several unlicensed e-scrap recycling sites in Hong Kong recently and allegedly found large amounts of chemical waste coming from thousands of LCDs. The raids were conducted in the New Territories, an area of Hong Kong that is reportedly receiving large amounts of e-scrap exports.According to the South China Morning Post, the raids were part of a joint investigation...

Plastics collection and recycling in the U.K. is on the rise, just not as quickly as the industry expected. The Household Plastics Collection Survey by Recoup found that more than 550,000 tons of plastic packaging were collected for recycling in 2015. That is a 1.4 percent increase from the year before. With 1.2 million tons of rigid plastic packaging generated...

Eleven people were arrested over the summer in two separate fraud investigations by the California Department of Justice (CDOJ). The suspects are accused of trying to illegally redeem out-of-state beverage containers under the California Redemption Value program. In one case, five people, including a husband and wife, were arrested. Investigators from CDOJ were in Reno, Nev. on an unrelated matter...

The mayor of Chicago presented his 2017 budget proposal to the City Council last week and it includes a 7-cent fee on all paper and plastic bags given out at stores. The goal of the fee is two-fold: help fill a $137.6 million budget hole and give the city's bag ban some teeth. The city imposed a ban on plastic...

The U.S. recycling rate for PET containers has dropped just under 1 percentage point to 30.1 percent. According to the 2015 PET recycling activity report by the National Association for PET Container Resources, (NAPCOR) and the Association of Plastic Recyclers (APR), nearly 1.8 billion pounds of containers were recycled in 2015. The groups estimate that just under 6 billion pounds...