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Textile recycling enters the fold

Published: May 19, 2025
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This year’s Plastics Recycling Conference featured the first Textile Recovery Summit, a special track devoted to the most recent developments in an old industry. | Big Wave Productions/Resource Recycling, Inc.

This article appeared in the May 2025 issue of Resource Recycling. Subscribe today for access to all print content.

Textile recycling was a novel addition to this year’s Plastics Recycling Conference, but as several experts said at the event, the topic’s roots go back centuries, and its contemporary issues and developments are familiar to just about any recycled material.

A need for better data and better education? Check. A nascent but growing extended producer responsibility apparatus? Check. Advancing technologies for identifying and sorting? Check. An increasingly urgent need to do more? That’s an easy one.

The U.S. produces around 17 million tons of discarded clothing and other fabrics each year, according to RRS, and more than two-thirds of all of those fibers and strings are made of polyester, nylon and other forms of plastic. About 15% of this mountain of material is repurposed or processed into rags, insulation and similar goods or, rarest of all, new clothing.

“Big picture here, we’re generating lots of textiles, and we’re not doing a very good job of recovering it,” said Marisa Adler, a senior consultant at RRS.

Adler partnered with Resource Recycling, Closed Loop Partners, Goodwill Industries and textile trading company Whitehouse & Schapiro to put on the inaugural Textile Recovery Summit, a focused series of sessions and workshops at this publication’s annual plastics conference. The combo event brought more than 2,400 attendees to National Harbor, Maryland, in March.

Speakers and innovators described an industry in the midst of a sea change, as new policy and new technology take hold.

Untrustworthy labels

One crowded workshop gave a hands-on opportunity to simulate one of the first steps in recycling textiles: sorting by composition, most fitting end market and other characteristics. Attendees dug through genuine bales of donated clothing, using their best judgment and portable fabric scanners to answer such questions as whether an old cardigan was made of wool or polyester and whether it would be better off in a nice vintage store or cut into rags.

Identification and sorting are essential for maximizing a used textile’s value, Adler and others said, but there’s a big problem with the little tags that purport to say what a piece of clothing is made of.

“There’s a high inaccuracy on the labels; you can’t trust them at all,” said Helio Moreira, head of sorting for Textile House (stylized as TEXTILE house), a Slovakian company that runs almost 200 secondhand clothing stores across Europe.

To get more reliable information on its wares, Textile House has begun leaning on equipment from Picvisa, a Barcelona-based company that combines spectroscopy with artificial intelligence to identify color, fiber type, texture and more. The system can be tailored to handling post-consumer clothing, for fabric off-cuts and clippings, and just for shoe soles, said Silvia Gregorini, Picvisa’s business development manager.

“Probably one of the key elements is that we have the knowledge on the technology, and they have the knowledge on the market,” Gregorini said of her company’s partnership with Textile House. “Of course there’s an investment to do when we install this technology, but on the long term this is a machine that allows you to scale up volume.”

Similar systems were also highlighted during the textile summit’s innovator stage, a pitch competition among five recycling start-ups.

California-based Refiberd, for instance, uses a hyperspectral camera and an AI system trained on a library of thousands of fiber samples to detect all manner of fiber blends, said Rebecca Geppert, director of partnerships. The system was about to be deployed to a commercial facility for the first time.

“The hyperspectral camera gives us the spectral data, but without anything to interpret that spectral data, you really don’t have anything that detects the material composition,” Geppert said.

Besides fiber composition, chemical additives make clothing even more complicated, and even the same product from the same company can differ from one piece to another, said Christopher Wai, co-founder and CEO of Sixone Labs, which the contest’s judges picked as the winner.

The British Columbia-based company builds a database of all of those different permutations to guide chemical recycling, which breaks plastics down into their molecular components for remanufacture but often relies on pure feedstock. Wai said Sixone’s database allows this process to be finetuned so that polyester can be extracted from fabric that would conventionally be considered impure, such as a cotton-poly blend, while also leaving the cotton and other components unharmed for other uses.

“As we think about clothing, I look at it as a big puzzle,” Wai said. “This is a data problem more than a recycling problem.”

Emergence of EPR

Another panel discussion dug into California’s SB 707, an EPR law for textiles that passed late last year and is the first of its kind in the U.S. Like most EPR programs for other materials, the law requires producers of apparel or textile articles to form a producer responsibility organization that will conduct a needs assessment and set recycling targets over the next few years, among other duties.

The program’s details are in development, but it’s already creating exciting opportunities to grow textile recycling and set an example for other states, several experts said. Chelsea Murtha, senior director of sustainability for the American Apparel & Footwear Association, said member companies often discuss their circularity goals with her, but only one-on-one.

“It has been a struggle to give them a space to really have those conversations at the industry level that doesn’t violate anti-trust guidelines,” she said. EPR can give them “that space and that platform.”

Joanne Brasch, director of advocacy at the California Product Stewardship Council, also praised the law’s emphasis on repair, as distinct from straight resale on one hand and deconstructive fiber recycling on the other.

“There’s this entire stream in our textile stream that, with just a little repair, with a little upcycling, some (innovation) and creativity, it can still have its reuse functionality,” she said. “One thing that 707 does is create that third stream, and it puts a lot of funding into that repair stream.”

EPR for clothing has been around for years in several European countries and has been invaluable in ensuring the existence of end markets for textiles and fibers, Moreira at Textile House said.

“We are quite reliant on that, and if this type or shape of legislation would be widespread throughout the EU, it could put up a demand. Otherwise, we will never be as competitive as Asian feedstock,” he said.

Still, several panelists voiced concerns over the California law’s implementation, saying regulators should listen to industry expertise, while the industry should also prepare for new and more extensive data collection and other changes. As the first state EPR programs for packaging go into effect, Andriana Kontovrakis, director of EPR solutions for Reverse Logistics Group, pointed to widespread procrastination among packaging companies as an example to avoid.

“A number of big companies came to us in the summer and were like, ‘We’re not ready, what do we do?’ And we’re like, you should’ve come to us like two years ago,” Kontovrakis said with a laugh. “The more forward-looking you are, the farther out you start, the better off you are.”

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First-person perspective: Key developments in California’s plastic laws

Published: May 15, 2025
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Nareeta Martin/Unsplash

California continues to be a leader in sustainability with the passage of a series of laws aimed at increasing diversion, waste reduction and consumer knowledge.

SB 54

In 2022, California enacted Senate Bill 54, or the Plastic Pollution Prevention and Packaging Producer Responsibility Act. SB 54 is an extended producer responsibility law aimed at reducing plastic and packaging waste and shifting the cost of recycling this material from the consumer back to the producer. This is done primarily by establishing a framework for development of a producer responsibility organization, an entity which producers join and pay fees to. The PRO then implements and funds waste management, recycling and reduction practices. Circular Action Alliance was selected as the PRO for California and other states.

Additionally, SB 54 mandates that certain sustainability and plastic reduction thresholds be met in the coming years:

  • 25% reduction in all single-use plastic packaging and single-use plastic cutlery, plates, cups and containers by 2032.
  • 65% recycling rate for all single-use plastic packaging and the same types of single-use plastic food serviceware by 2032.
  • 100% of single-use packaging (including non-plastics like glass, ceramic, metal, paper and fiber, and wood and other organics) and single-use plastic food serviceware must be recyclable or compostable by 2032.

Smaller steps toward these goals are required for the years leading up to 2032. For example, single-use plastic packaging and single-use plastic food ware must be reduced by 10% by 2027 and 20% by 2030. Importantly, the 25% reduction and 65% recycling rate requirements only apply to plastic items, while the general requirement that all single-use packaging be recyclable or compostable by 2032 applies to any packaging material covered by the statute.

In order for producers and the PRO to work toward these requirements, the California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery, the state agency in charge of implementing SB 54, was tasked with establishing a Covered Material Category list to establish which materials are recyclable and compostable at the requisite levels. CalRecycle released its first CMC list on Dec. 28, 2023, and updated it on Jan. 1, 2025. This list helps producers and the PRO determine which materials will meet California’s standards and which materials they need to phase out.

Over the last few years, industry groups, environmental advocates, regulators, lawmakers and the PRO have been working together to determine how the law will be implemented.

On March 7, 2025, the deadline to finalize regulations for SB 54, Gov. Gavin Newsom told CalRecycle to restart the regulatory rulemaking process for SB 54 due to concerns about the potential costs to businesses and consumers. Now that Newsom has ordered negotiators back to the drawing board, it is unclear how and if broader deadlines in the statute will be met.

As it stands, in California, the first major deadline for producers is Jan. 1, 2027. By this date, producers must both join a PRO and reduce single-use plastic packaging and single-use plastic foodware by 10%. Both the PRO and California lawmakers have stated that the statutory timelines remain in effect despite setbacks for regulations.

SB 343

In 2021, the year before SB 54 was enacted, California adopted SB 343, or the “Truth in Recycling” law. This law seeks to give consumers “accurate and useful information related to how to properly handle the end of life of a product or packaging,” primarily through creating stricter requirements for when companies can use the familiar “chasing arrows” symbol or any other indicator of recyclability on products and packaging.

The law requires a minimum demonstrated level of actual recycling for various materials before they can be labeled as recyclable. To this end, SB 343 directed CalRecycle to conduct research and publish data on the materials collected, sorted, sold or transferred for recycling in California, including whether the materials meet recyclability thresholds. Manufacturers and other interested parties can then use the data to determine whether compliant recyclable claims can be made. CalRecycle published its final Material Characterization Study report on April 4, 2025, and manufacturers are required to comply with labeling requirements based on data in this report starting Oct. 4, 2026.

SB 343 and SB 54 are parallel laws. While SB 343 restricts labeling products as recyclable unless certain threshold levels of recycling are met, SB 54 simultaneously mandates that California work toward meeting those thresholds. Additionally, the CMC list for SB 54 is built from the findings of the SB 343 Material Characterization Study.

Other EPR Laws

Outside of California, other states across the nation are prioritizing waste reduction with their own EPR laws, including:

  • Maine: Stewardship program for packaging material, Maine Rev. Stat. § 2146 (2021).
  • Oregon: Plastic Pollution and Recycling Modernization Act, SB 582 (2021).
  • Colorado: Producer Responsibility Program for Statewide Recycling Act, House Bill 22-1355 (2022).
  • Minnesota: Packaging Waste and Cost Reduction Act, HF 3911 (2024).

Key Takeaways

SB 54 and SB 343 set ambitious goals for California, and it is not clear that the state is on track to meet them. Because these laws have important deadlines and milestones in the coming months and years, businesses affected by them should stay informed. Registering with CAA, California’s PRO, can help businesses ensure they are receiving the most current information.

We expect that more state EPR laws will be passed in the near future. Prudent businesses that operate nationally should make sure to keep up with these laws to remain compliant in this ever-changing landscape. Competent environmental counsel may be required to navigate these innovative laws.

Sedina L. Banks, Sherry E. Jackman and Bryce Lourié are attorneys in the Environmental Group at Los Angeles-based Greenberg Glusker and specialize in advising clients on complex regulatory compliance matters and litigation.

The views and opinions expressed are those of the author and do not imply endorsement by Resource Recycling, Inc. If you have a subject you wish to cover in an op-ed, please send a short proposal to [email protected] for consideration.

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First-person perspective: What’s next for the scrap metal industry?

Published: May 15, 2025
Updated:
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Aleksandar Malivuk/Shutterstock.

This year business news headlines have been dominated by tariffs imposed on imports and their impact on a range of U.S. businesses and consumers. While much is up to debate, one thing is clear: The tariff environment will continue to be fluid in the months ahead, and the scrap metal recycling industry is not immune to its dynamics. Moreover, the industry’s scale and the role it plays in addressing environmental and supply chain challenges are not widely recognized.

The scrap metal industry in the U.S. is enormous, second only to the whole of the Asia-Pacific region in consumption and processing. The American Iron and Steel Institute reports that nearly 70 million tons of domestic steel is recycled annually to make new steel, and according to IBIS World, the U.S. scrap metal recycling industry in 2024 registered total revenue of $43.3 billion, with market size growth at a compound annual growth rate of 4.3% between 2019 and 2024.

Moreover, the western U.S. scrap metal recycling market alone accounts for nearly one-fourth (24.9%) of the national share, and the region is projected to register a CAGR of 5.6% from 2022 to 2032. With a long runway for growth projected, it is critical to understand the potential short- and long-term impacts tariffs will have on the scrap metal industry, especially if you are an operator in this vertical.

How could tariffs on steel and aluminum imports affect those forecasts? Much can be learned from the introduction of tariffs in 2018. Based on previous scenarios, tariffs will likely increase domestic demand for scrap metals as U.S. manufacturers seek local sources to mitigate the added costs of imported primary metals. There are several other factors to consider when looking at the potential impacts tariffs will have on this industry in both the short- and long-term.

Short-Term Benefits for U.S. Scrap Recyclers

Initially, tariffs on metals should help domestic recyclers by increasing demand for U.S. scrap, raising prices and profits. The domestic steel and aluminum industries will likely benefit from reduced competition from imports, which indirectly supports the recycling sector.

In the immediate term, the reintroduction of tariffs is likely to lead to an increase in U.S. steel prices. This is due to the reduced availability of imported steel, prompting domestic mills to raise prices to balance supply and demand.

Over the next three months, the impact on recyclable steel prices will depend on several factors:

  • Supply chain adjustments: Domestic steel producers may ramp up production to meet demand and, hence, potentially stabilize prices.
  • Market sentiment: If the market anticipates sustained tariffs, prices may continue to rise. Conversely, expectations of tariff removal could lead to price corrections.
  • Global trade dynamics: The ebb and flow of responses from the current administration and other countries, such as retaliatory tariffs or trade agreements, will influence U.S. steel and aluminum prices. We are already seeing this as the European Union, China and Canada react to the U.S. administration’s tariff actions.

Long-Term Uncertainty Due to Global Trade Disruptions

The long-term impact of the tariffs will depend on several factors. If U.S. steel and aluminum production remains strong, scrap recyclers could continue to benefit. However, if demand weakens or if global trade disruptions persist, recyclers may face declining exports, increased market volatility and potential price declines.

Other factors include:

  • Domestic production capacity: The ability of U.S. steel manufacturers to expand production will be crucial, and the announced tariffs come at a time when industrial production and capacity utilization of these metals have declined to unusually low levels. However, if this capacity is not enough, building new smelters or reopening closed plants is a time-intensive process and could take years.
  • Market equilibrium: As domestic production adjusts, the market may reach a new equilibrium, with prices stabilizing based on the new supply and demand dynamics.
  • Policy developments: Changes in trade policies, such as the removal or modification of tariffs, will directly affect steel prices.
  • Costs and consolidation: In early April, global brokerage firms began to raise their projections for the likelihood the U.S. could enter a recession. If one were to materialize, the impact on the scrap metal industry will largely hinge on the duration. A prolonged downturn could sharply reduce demand, drive up costs and trigger consolidation — potentially favoring larger, well-capitalized scrap metal operators.

Navigating Uncertainty

Simply put: The market prefers stability and certainty. However, there are steps that scrap metal operators can take to approach planning when there is a high level of uncertainty ahead.

  1. Don’t panic: Stay prudent and plan to adapt to the circumstances, but don’t overreact. In other words, business owners should take steps grounded in the facts.
  2. Experienced leadership: Ensure there is a battle-tested team in place surrounded by trusted advisors. Businesses with strong, experienced leadership are well-equipped to navigate tariffs as well as other challenges and opportunities that will arise in 2025 and beyond.
  3. Diversify: In any market, diversification is key, but now even more so. Companies are taking steps to further broaden their customer base and supply chains. This includes strategic acquisitions that provide flexibility, such as securing railroad access to U.S.-based steel mills to mitigate potential export challenges from tariffs. Regardless of market conditions, diversification must remain a priority because with the stroke of a pen, industry dynamics can shift, requiring companies to pivot quickly and implement plan B or C.
  4. Enhance inventory management: The introduction of tariffs increases price volatility. The knee-jerk reaction is to stockpile inventory. However, such actions need to be taken with care. Diligent inventory management is key to prevent overexposure and maintain price margins. The more efficient companies are in managing their inventory, the better and less expensive it becomes ­— reducing the need for the use of other tools like hedging.

The tariffs first imposed on aluminum and steel back in 2018 had mixed effects on the U.S. scrap metal recycling industry. While they initially boosted domestic demand and prices for ferrous and non-ferrous scrap, they also disrupted global trade patterns and increased market volatility. We expect similar dynamics will be at play in 2025. In the short term, recyclers will potentially benefit from higher prices, but in the long run, retaliatory tariffs will shift global trade flows and potential oversupply issues could create challenges.

The ultimate impact of the reinstated tariffs will depend on the trajectory of U.S. steel and aluminum production, as well as ongoing trade policies and international market adjustments. To navigate these challenges, business leaders must stay strategic — keeping a level head, diversifying their customer base and supply chain and closely monitoring inventory levels to protect margins. It will not be easy. Companies that maintain optionality and remain flexible will be best positioned to thrive in an ever-evolving global landscape.

Craig Takeshige is a senior vice president and Orange County market leader at Umpqua Bank. He is a commercial banker with 30 years of experience serving the financing needs of the scrap metal industry.

Kevin Foley is a senior vice president and commercial & industrial relationship manager at Umpqua Bank. He is a commercial banker with 15 years of experience and deep expertise in manufacturing, distribution and commodity-based industries.

The views and opinions expressed are those of the author and do not imply endorsement by Resource Recycling, Inc. If you have a subject you wish to cover in an op-ed, please send a short proposal to [email protected] for consideration.

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MRF updates: An opening in NJ and a closure in MO

Published: April 29, 2025
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Interstate Waste Services’ new facility has an annual capacity of 215,000 tons, the company said. | Courtesy of Machinex

Two U.S. MRFs have been on opposite ends of good and bad fortune this month, with a new $30 million facility opening in North Arlington, New Jersey, two days after a 23-year-old MRF was destroyed by a tornado in Columbia, Missouri.  Continue Reading

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Pushing reuse to the next level

Published: April 9, 2025
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Organizations across the U.S. have been working to grow reuse programs to the scale of cities and beyond. | Courtesy of Petaluma Reusable Cup Project

This article appeared in the April 2025 issue of Resource Recycling. Subscribe today for access to all print content.

Systems for collecting, sanitizing and redistributing foodservice items are ready to scale up with the help of curbside collection, certain policy changes and other factors, panelists said at the Resource Recycling Conference late last year.

“The next chapter of reuse needs to be tested at city-scale to create an immersive and convenient experience, so that it can be widely adopted,” said Andy Rose, head of circular systems modeling at Perpetual, a nonprofit that works with communities to design and implement reuse systems.

Such a program could feature a common set of reusable items that’s disbursed through a variety of businesses, checked out like a library book or with a deposit, then finally collected back through bins around town, he said.

Rose and other program leaders described progress from coast to coast, including a reusable foodware program at Grand Canyon National Park, a plastic cup reuse pilot in Petaluma, California, and a glass container study in Durham, North Carolina.

Macy Zander, local reuse manager for another national nonprofit called Upstream, pointed to the significant share of resources — almost half of new glass and plastic, for example — that goes into hundreds of billions of single-use items every year in this country.

“Though recycling is clearly a very critical piece of the solution to effective waste management, we believe that there needs to be a shift in focus upstream to cut waste before it is even put out into the world,” she said. “The majority of these items are used by consumers for mere minutes or sometimes seconds before they get discarded.”
She added: “There’s a brighter side to this, though, and that is reuse.”

In many ways, the push offers a return to tradition while also cultivating local economic development and benefiting public health, the panelists said. And the field is wide open for someone to take the lead.

“Some people would argue with me, but I would say there is really no example of a reuse system deployed at scale globally, with the possible exception of beverage reuse in Germany,” said Elizabeth Balkan, director of Reloop North America, which takes American officials on tours of European systems that, as with recycling, often outshine those in the U.S.

“We gotta get to work, right? Because we’re behind,” Balkan said. “And there’s a lot of great lessons learned that we can also capture, so that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel.”

‘We need everybody’s help’

A program much like the one Rose described played out over three months last fall in Petaluma, a medium-sized town about an hour north of San Francisco.

The regional government agency Zero Waste Sonoma partnered with Closed Loop Partners’ NextGen Consortium, a brand-supported initiative to address single-use foodservice packaging, to create an open-loop cup reuse system, meaning it wasn’t restricted to one business or event.

Instead, 30 restaurants, including chains and mom-and-pops, shared a purple polypropylene cup that residents could drop off at more than 60 matching purple bins around town. It went further, with a paid public awareness campaign, the participation of a local MRF to pick up misplaced cups and an Uber Eats-style pickup service — “all the bells and whistles,” Zero Waste Sonoma Director Leslie Lukacs said.

“This is the first of its kind in our nation to do an equitable program because there is no deposit; everybody is just getting the reusable cup, and that’s it,” she said.

In the end, roughly 220,000 cups, or more than half, were returned, enough to provide environmental benefits compared to single-use cups, according to the final Closed Loop report released in February. On top of that, at least 80% of local residents knew about the program, understood how to participate and wanted it to continue.

“This data is not just going to help our community, it’s going to help everybody in the reuse space,” Lukacs said. “It’s been a highlight of my career to have this happen in my own backyard.”

The city of Seattle has taken a similarly wide-ranging approach to its own reuse program, said McKenna Morrigan, strategic adviser for Seattle Public Utilities. The Reuse Seattle initiative aims to support a reuse ecosystem by contracting for dishwashing and other services, recruiting participating businesses and paying for pilot projects and public communications.

“We know that we are not going to be able to make the progress that we want to see around reuse on our own, you know, as a city. We need everybody’s help to make progress,” Morrigan said. “We really see our role as creating the conditions for reuse solutions to flourish.”

The effort has partly come down to policy, she noted. Before 2022, Washington’s food code only allowed bring-your-own-cup programs for coffee shops and the like under certain conditions, involving paperwork and separate approvals.

“That’s a hard no” for busy small business owners, Morrigan said. “It’s pretty simple, but it turns out that’s actually a policy impediment in most states in the country to this day.”

An unsurprising ingredient in the reuse formula is the money, Morrigan added. The state and local economic development department provided some funding for Seattle’s work, and the city was on the hunt for more.

“A few weeks ago I was feeling pretty excited about where the EPA was going with their SWIFR dollars,” Morrigan said at the November conference, referring to the general election a few days prior and to the federal Solid Waste Infrastructure for Recycling grant program. “I don’t, unfortunately, think that the federal government is going to be a source of significant funding for any of our work in the near term the way we hoped it might be.”

Her words proved prophetic, as the Trump administration immediately halted billions of dollars of federal spending, including for SWIFR grants, to ensure they all aligned with the president’s priorities. The money had been approved by Congress, and federal law and U.S. Supreme Court precedent previously prevented such an appropriation hold-up. Several courts have since ordered the resumption of much of the funding, but some EPA grant recipients have told Resource Recycling the money is still locked or uncertain in recent weeks.

Zero Waste Sonoma applied for SWIFR’s second round in the fall to continue and expand the cup reuse program, Lukacs said in March. She had little hope of receiving it.

“I’m not quite sure if the SWIFR grant still exists,” she said, adding all of the cups and bins are in storage for the time being. “We’re just kind of pausing until maybe spring to see what happens.”

Whatever funding mechanisms are available, Lukacs reiterated her view that reuse programs must be a shared expense. Local or federal government funding is “part of the solution, but it’s not the full solution,” she told conference attendees.

‘Renormalizing reuse’

Petaluma and Seattle’s examples illustrate the need for broad, systemic, infrastructural changes to allow reuse to reach its full potential, said Crystal Dreisbach, Upstream’s CEO. She pointed to polystyrene containers and trays, which have raised health concerns over contact with hot food and can be replaced with reusable alternatives yet are common in restaurants and schools. Why do we still use those?

“The answer is not because people are dumb or that’s all there is,” she said. “Really we haven’t created a system yet to make anything else possible.”

Interoperable, shareable infrastructure is essential — “It’s washing dishes, it’s transporting dishes, it’s storing dishes,” as Dreisbach put it. Businesses have been reusing pallets, crates and other back-of-house equipment for decades, she added, “and that type of reuse saves corporations an incredible amount of money.”

Upstream, Perpetual, Reloop, a fourth nonprofit called PR3 and many other groups are united in the quest to bring the same norms to customer-facing wares, Dreisbach said.
In her previous work in Durham, North Carolina, for instance, she worked with a network of partners, including a local MRF, to test out curbside collection and reuse for glass containers, the kinds used by distilleries, salsa makers and any number of other local businesses.

“They said the cost of the glass to put their stuff in was more costly to them than making the actual product,” Dreisbach said. And MRFs could benefit from joining reuse programs as well, with revenue streams that aren’t dependent on volatile commodity prices: “They can do what they do best — collect, transport, sort, redistribute — in a whole different way.”

More recently, Upstream last year received a grant from the National Park Foundation to lead a 2.5-year reuse program in Grand Canyon National Park that might be replicated in other national parks. And the Chicago Bears launched a reusable cup program at its stadium in November, which could provide an anchor venue that makes washing infrastructure accessible to schools, hospitals and other establishments, Dreisbach said. Moves like these bring reuse closer to becoming an everyday utility, much as it was decades and centuries ago.

“We’re renormalizing reuse, aren’t we?” she said, adding she prefers the word recirculation. “It creates a visual concept.”

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Recycling for renewables

Published: April 9, 2025
Updated:
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Multiple states and other communities are working to bring an extended producer responsibility framework to solar and wind. | bombermoon/Shutterstock

This article appeared in the April 2025 issue of Resource Recycling. Subscribe today for access to all print content.

As extended producer responsibility continues expanding in fits and starts around the U.S. — for carpet and paint here, batteries and packaging there — the implements of renewable energy are emerging as another EPR frontier.

Washington is the only state with a solar panel EPR policy in place, according to the Product Stewardship Institute, but similar bills have been proposed this year in Connecticut, New York, and Georgia, and New York’s Niagara County has had its own scaled-down version since 2022. A proposal covering wind turbine blades has been introduced in Illinois, and another for both solar and wind is up for consideration in Minnesota.

EPR policies in general require the manufacturers of certain goods to contribute money and other resources toward programs that collect and recycle those items, often in increasing proportions over time.

“The reason I brought this bill, when a lot was happening with green energy, was because I knew there needed to be a plan for the end of life for this stuff,” said Minnesota State Rep. Peggy Scott (R-Andover), adding she wants to avoid a repeat of a $22 million hazardous waste cleanup in her district several years ago. “These blades are huge. And I knew there were some pretty powerful chemicals involved.”

The original language of Scott’s bill would have mandated producers of these renewable energy systems to implement a product stewardship program for the collection and recycling of discarded materials and prohibited the sale of such products in the state unless producers were part of a stewardship plan approved by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.

Progress on the renewables EPR front has been bumpy and uneven, however. Shortly after Scott’s bill was introduced, she enacted a delete-all amendment, which stripped out everything except a moratorium on disposing of wind and solar infrastructure in landfills, pointing to a recent report from the MPCA on the topic that she and other state officials are reviewing.

“In talking to the MPCA, they were supportive of the plan and thought it was an important first step, but they needed more time to figure out if this needed to be done with legislation or more administratively,” Scott added. “I think more will happen in the future. People want this to be addressed, and I told the MPCA I want to continue to work with them on this.”

And while Washington’s law was approved in 2017, the state has yet to enforce it, said Dave Bennett, communications manager for the solid waste management program run by the state’s Department of Ecology.

The Photovoltaic Module Stewardship and Takeback Program requires solar panel manufacturers to provide a convenient, environmentally sound recycling system for panels bought after the law’s passage. It also requires manufacturers of panels sold in the state to have a state-approved stewardship in plan as of July 1, 2025. Noncompliance carries a fine of up to $10,000 per panel sale.

“Many solar panel manufacturers missed the July 2024 deadline to submit a stewardship plan,” Bennett said. “While (the Department of) Ecology is working to bring manufacturers into compliance, we believe the majority will continue to disregard the law or decide to stop selling panels into Washington.”

Challenging panels

Solar panels and wind turbine blades contain valuable metals and highly refined semiconductor materials that can be recovered and used in new products. But both are currently difficult to recycle through existing methods due to their durability and composite construction. More than two-thirds of panels meet the legal definition of hazardous waste under the EPA, according to Scott’s office.

“One of the most pressing concerns with improper solar panel disposal is the presence of hazardous metals, including lead, cadmium and selenium,” said Brett C. Henderson, CEO and co-founder of Solar Panel Recycling, which has facilities in North Carolina, Georgia and Texas.

“Solar panels are designed to be durable and well-encapsulated, making them safe while in use on rooftops or in the field,” Henderson said. “However, when a panel’s protective encapsulation is compromised — whether through improper landfill disposal or incomplete recycling practices — the risks increase significantly.”

Beyond environmental pollution, the landfill disposal of solar panels is a growing concern due to capacity constraints as more and more panels reach their end of life, he added.

New York’s Niagara County became the first local government in the U.S. to pass an extended producer responsibility law relating to solar panels. As of Aug. 1, 2022, Local Law No. 4 requires all manufacturers of solar panels to finance the takeback and recycling of photovoltaic modules.

The county was home to several environmental mishaps, most notably the Love Canal toxic chemical dump that was discovered leaking in Niagara Falls in the 1970s. That “unsettling environmental legacy,” along with the state’s growing solar energy presence, prompted action, said Dawn Timm, director of the county’s Division of Environmental and Solid Waste. New York is ninth in cumulative solar production in the nation, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association.

“The (county) Legislature made an effort to preserve the long-term environmental legacy of the community amid the proliferation of solar development,” Timm said. “We’re taking proactive steps now to prevent mismanagement in the future.”

Companies must come into compliance within 30 days of their first solar panel sale in the county by developing a stewardship plan to ensure panels are taken back safely and at no additional cost to residents. Plans must include:

  • A description of how manufacturers will finance and adequately fund the takeback and recycling system.
  • Details on how the program will minimize the release of hazardous substances and maximize the recovery of components.
  • Stipulations for product takeback at convenient locations within the county.
  • Performance goals requiring 100% of panels recaptured by 2026 and 85% of that material being recycled by 2031.
  • Assurances of enough available money to finance the program.
  • Annual reports documenting implementation.

The law charges companies $1,000 for an initial stewardship plan fee and then $250 per year afterward. Violations carry a penalty of up to $100 per module per day. The county can also seek injunctions against developers that continue projects without a plan.

The law was written in conjunction with the Product Stewardship Institute, a nonprofit that works to reduce the impact of consumer products on health and the environment.

“Solar panel recycling is a new frontier, and as the first generation of solar panels comes out of commission, this type of forward-thinking policy will be needed by other communities, counties and states,” said Scott Cassel, PSI’s CEO.

To date, the county has approved nine plans, Timm said — one manufacturer plan, for LG Electronics, and eight project-specific approvals.

“As the first in the nation to establish such a law, Niagara County has continuously responded to the curiosity of other states, governments and related organizations by providing insight and feedback about our experiences,” Timm said. “Early on, developers and installers were less than pleased. However, we have demonstrated a reasonable approach to implementation and feel we equally support development while preserving the integrity of our community.”

Mixed perspectives

Henderson at Solar Panel Recycling said that while EPR has proven effective in electronics recycling, he has concerns about its practicality and overall effectiveness in the solar industry, and a straightforward landfill ban on solar panels would be more effective.
North Carolina has a ban on solar disposal in construction and demolition facilities that goes into effect this December, for example, and a broader landfill ban has been proposed in Illinois this session.

“This would naturally drive stakeholders — including manufacturers, asset owners, true solar recyclers and collectors — to develop the most efficient methods for collection and proper recycling,” he said. “An open-market approach would drive continuous research, development and innovation in solar recycling and collection, fostering the most efficient and cost-effective solutions without the constraints of EPR mandates.”

One of his concerns is the effectiveness of enforcing EPR policies on foreign solar manufacturers, who produce the vast majority of panels sold in the U.S., based on data from the U.S. International Trade Commission. He said the greatest improvements could come from innovating new applications for recovered materials, such as refining silicon into nanoparticles for various industrial applications.

A.J. Orben, co-founder of We Recycle Solar, a Yuma, Arizona-based company that handles recycling of solar panels and often advises on proposed state policy, noted that outside of Washington the cost of recycling is borne by the asset holder.

“It’s costly,” he said. “The economics don’t make sense. It costs more to break the panels down than the value of the recovered materials.”

Balancing that math is one of Washington’s struggles, Bennett said, along with limited recycling options in the Pacific Northwest and hazardous material concerns. A pair of bills before the state legislature in March would let the industry continue to operate legally in Washington while fixes are developed, delaying the effective date until at least 2028.

“Our legislative proposal will establish a facilitated advisory committee to identify concerns with the law and develop recommendations to overcome setbacks,” Bennett said.

“Modifying the law will make the solar takeback program stronger and remove barriers to increased deployment of solar in Washington, helping the state achieve clean energy goals.”

But not everyone agrees that more time is needed. The Energy Fair Trade Coalition, a nonprofit advocating for accountability in the energy sector, sent a letter to Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson in October calling for immediate enforcement of the law. Executive Director Bret Manley cited a potential recycling cost of up to $67.5 million for panels that have been sold in Washington since 2017, a cost companies aren’t on the hook for.

“This glaring oversight threatens consumers’ ability to responsibly recycle their solar panels,” he said in the letter. “Washington resources are precious, and ensuring a clean environment for future generations is paramount.”

A solution for wind turbines

It’s no coincidence Minnesota is considering turbine EPR, as the state and its neighbor to the south have been the site of several disputes over wind turbine disposal.

In September the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission extracted a pledge from wind power developer NextEra Energy to move dumped turbine blades after several years of complaints. Around the same time, the Iowa attorney general filed suit against Global Fiberglass Solutions, a blade-recycling venture based in Washington, over claims of improper blade disposal.

Wind turbine blades primarily consist of fiberglass, balsa wood and foam, along with other trace material that is held in shape using an epoxy resin. But blades have been notoriously difficult to recycle because of the epoxy resin that coats the fiberglass, said Jeff Woods, director of business development for Regen Fiber in Fairfax, Iowa.

The company recycles end-of-life wind turbine blades and virgin scrap material left over from wind blade manufacturing to create reinforcement fibers for industrial applications. Additionally, the company operates a facility in Des Moines that recycles scrap from new blades and maintains a blade processing plant in Lubbock, Texas. Its products can be used in concrete, asphalt and composite applications.

Regen’s recycling process is mechanical, with blades arriving at its facilities after shredding. Instead of trying to remove the resin, which can be a chemically and energetically intensive process, the company takes advantage of the epoxy’s positive benefits like alkali resistance and added strength and durability.

“We’re addressing a critical need in the wind industry by offering a truly sustainable recycling solution that diverts blades from landfills or being burned,” Woods said.

Posted in Resource Recycling Magazine | Tagged |

Adrift in the freeze

Published: March 31, 2025
Updated:
by

Through a hail of executive and court orders and related uncertainty over federal funding, Recycling Education and Outreach grant recipients worked to pick up where they left off. | Andrea Izzotti/Shutterstock

This article appeared in the March 2025 issue of Resource Recycling. Subscribe today for access to all print content.

Jan. 20

The 26 executive orders signed by President Donald Trump on his first day in office unleashed weeks of missing funding and confusion for recycling programs across the country — problems that have yet to reach a clear conclusion.

Titled “Unleashing American Energy,” one executive order directed all agencies to “immediately pause the disbursement of funds” from the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, often called the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, to ensure that federal spending aligned with the Trump administration’s priorities.

The two laws had dedicated hundreds of millions of dollars to new recycling facilities and other initiatives, such as the U.S. EPA’s Recycling Education and Outreach program and its Solid Waste Infrastructure for Recycling, or SWIFR, grants.

Another order told federal officials to “coordinate the termination of all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear.”

Though a huge variety of programs throughout the government have been affected, the Recycling Education and Outreach program, which emphasized environmental justice and reaching multicultural and underserved communities, sits at the crux of these two orders. Below is an account of the administration’s early moves through REO grantees’ perspectives.

Jan. 27

The nonprofit Oregon Community Warehouse in Portland collects donated furniture and other home goods for formerly homeless families, refugees and others in need, which helped it secure a $1.6 million REO grant to spread awareness of its services, especially among the city’s multicultural communities, Communications Manager Phil Gerigscott said.

“As far as we know, we are still receiving funding and that won’t change,” he said, adding he had accessed some of the grant dollars as recently as Jan. 23. “We’re definitely a little nervous, but it seems like hopefully still smooth sailing.”

The organization has long relied solely on word-of-mouth, so the grant was meant for more staff members and contractors, updating the center’s website and developing culturally specific ads — after English, Portland’s most common languages include Spanish, Chinese, Ukrainian and Arabic, Gerigscott said.

The warehouse’s EPA contacts generally had been easy to reach, Gerigscott added. But he hadn’t heard more details about the order. The agency also didn’t return Resource Recycling’s request for comment at the time.

“We’re under the assumption that no news is good news,” Gerigscott said.

Near the end of the day, a new memo from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget vastly broadened the scope of multiple funding pauses like the “Unleashing American Energy” order.

“Each agency must complete a comprehensive analysis of all of their Federal financial assistance programs to identify programs, projects, and activities that may be implicated by any of the President’s executive orders,” wrote Matthew J. Vaeth, the OMB’s acting director.

“In the interim, to the extent permissible under applicable law, Federal agencies must temporarily pause (bolded in original) all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance, and other relevant agency activities that may be implicated by the executive orders, including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.”

Jan. 28

Uproar against the halted funding came swiftly, with the National Council of Nonprofits and others arguing in the U.S. District Court of Washington, D.C., that the administration didn’t have the authority to cancel Congress’s appropriations and was violating their constitutional freedoms of expression and assembly. In response, District Judge Loren L. AliKhan placed an administrative stay on the freeze lasting several days.

Meanwhile, the Hampton Roads Planning District Commission in Virginia, which had been awarded a $2 million REO grant for a “Start Smart, Recycle Right” outreach campaign, received an email that afternoon from its EPA contact.

“EPA is working diligently to implement President Trump’s Unleashing American Energy Executive Order issued on January 20 in coordination with the Office of Management and Budget,” the EPA wrote. “The agency has paused all funding actions related to the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act at this time.”

Gerigscott shared a similar message by text: “We just received official word that funds are halted until further notice.”

At a press conference, Trump Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt reiterated that the pause was temporary and said she had spoken with Trump’s then-unconfirmed nominee for OMB director, Russell Vought.

“He told me to tell all of you that the line to his office is open for other federal government agencies across the board, and if they feel that programs are necessary and in line with the president’s agenda, then the Office of Management and Budget will review those measures,” Leavitt said.

Jan. 29

Lynn Onstot, spokesperson for the city of Joplin, Missouri, said the city’s REO project was still in its early stages of data-gathering, but its funding hadn’t been affected. Joplin was awarded $1.7 million for a multimedia advertising campaign with a particular focus on partnering with schools, reaching residents of disadvantaged census tracts and increasing participation in Joplin’s opt-in curbside program.

After the administrative stay, Vaeth at the OMB released a two-sentence memo rescinding his earlier one. On the social media site X, Leavitt noted that the early executive orders, including the ones affecting the infrastructure law, weren’t rescinded.

“This is NOT a rescission of the federal funding freeze,” she wrote. “It is simply a rescission of the OMB memo. Why? To end any confusion created by the court’s injunction. The President’s EO’s on federal funding remain in full force and effect, and will be rigorously implemented.”

Jan. 30

Walking Mountains Science Center in Eagle County, Colorado, was on the cusp of starting in earnest its $570,000 project to train recycling advocates among local Spanish speakers, said Amelia Kovacs, the center’s sustainability programs manager.

“Our grant is very second-half heavy, with creating a drop site, actually tracking beginning and end diversion rates in those priority communities,” she said, and several people were recruited and hired.
The organization had put in a draw-down request for some of its funding the day before, but it hadn’t gone through yet, and the EPA had sent no clarification.

“We’ve been asking them many times, ‘so should we be worried?’” Kovacs said. “It’s clear as mud.”

The organization leans heavily on local and state funding and can carry on without the REO grant, she said. But she’ll likely have to sharply scale down the REO project, if it can continue at all, perhaps by reframing it to support the rollout of the state’s extended producer responsibility policy.

By this point, the administration had eliminated multiple programs protecting civil rights, cancelling the Biden administration’s environmental justice initiatives, suspending refugee aid and putting a freeze on the Justice Department’s civil rights enforcement after rescinding an executive order dating back to the Civil Rights Era that, in its present-day form, banned federal contractors from discriminating against employees because of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or national origin.

Trump and other officials have said diversity initiatives amount to reverse discrimination.

“In my personal eyes, I see this as a tactic to scare, and for people to kind of shift their eyes away from the good work that is happening in our community,” Kovacs said of the administration’s actions. She wasn’t discouraged from working to reach disadvantaged residents, she added.

“It’s even more reason why we should exist. It gives me more fire, I would say, to continue my work, because to me it feels more necessary than ever.”

Jan. 31

In the U.S. District Court of Rhode Island, another lawsuit against the funding freezes brought by 22 states and D.C. led to a temporary restraining order against the administration, during which the judge said no funding could be frozen.

“Defendants shall also be restrained and prohibited from reissuing, adopting, implementing, or otherwise giving effect to the OMB Directive under any other name or title,” wrote Chief Judge John J. McConnell, Jr.

Back in Virginia, the Hampton Roads Planning District Commission received another message from an EPA official: “Funding has been paused for grants under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act at this time. This pause pertains to all funding on existing grants for the SWIFR and REO grant programs. The pause on these grants remains in place even though it has been lifted for other federal grant programs. We will provide more guidance as EPA’s Office of Grants and Debarment makes it available to our program.”

Feb. 3

Judge AliKhan in D.C. granted a similar temporary restraining order, drawing on two centuries of legal tradition to find that the freezes implicated issues of nationwide importance.

“Defendants’ actions appear to suffer from infirmities of a constitutional magnitude,” AliKhan wrote. “The appropriation of the government’s resources is reserved for Congress, not the Executive Branch. And a wealth of legal authority supports this fundamental separation of powers.”

Feb. 6

Amid the back and forth, the Ciudad Soil and Water Conservation District in New Mexico slowed but didn’t halt its work on a $590,000 grant for collaborating with local schools and other partners in low-income and disadvantaged areas, District Manager Joshua O’Halloran said. It seemed like the EPA was loosening up with the money, so he told staff to work on it on an as-needed basis.

A year into the project, people have been hired and food-scrap composting programs have rolled out at a big middle school and a senior center.

“It’s kind of delayed us and caused a lot of conversations with partners,” O’Halloran said. “We have the risk of losing trust with them, and that was a bigger deal than anything.”

The whiplash from the last administration’s requirements to the current one’s has been confusing and difficult to navigate, he added. The organization’s $3.8 million yearly budget is 98% grant-funded, meaning that there’s no backup money and the REO project can’t continue without its grant. But “regardless of what an administration or the EPA says, we’re going to stick to what’s true for us,” he said.

“Working with all of those people as our constituents is what’s important to us,” O’Halloran added. “We’re not going to change who we are because somebody in Washington tells us that’s what’s important to them.”

Feb. 10

The Chicago-area Metropolitan Mayors Caucus’s last word from the EPA was to pause its $2 million REO grant, said Edith Makra, director of environmental initiatives.

“We were going great guns; in fact, I was supposed to have new staff, my new recycling education and outreach coordinator, starting last Wednesday,” she said. But she couldn’t make a commitment to a new hire.

“We are very, very angry about this,” Makra said. “It’s a kick in the gut to the work that we’re doing across the board.”

Other federal agencies with grants to the caucus have resumed those grants, she added. If EPA’s didn’t, the group wouldn’t have the resources to continue its advertising campaign.

“It’s paused, so I can’t speculate on what that means. It’s not rescinded, and they’re not trying to do a clawback,” Makra said. “But this grant is underway; we’re doing the work, and I never ever would have expected this to happen.”

Back in the Rhode Island District Court, the judge found federal agencies had been disobeying his previous order and keeping funds frozen, ordering them immediately to comply.

Feb. 11

Kerrin O’Brien, executive director of the Michigan Recycling Coalition, said her organization had no trouble accessing its REO grant and had gone ahead and hired two people to meet the grant’s obligation, despite the EPA’s message to pause work.

“We’re bearing that risk right now and committed to our people,” she said.

O’Brien saw the program as vulnerable to the administration’s rejection because of its environmental justice goals, she said, but the work is nonetheless worthwhile.

“Whatever we call it — Justice40, DEI, whatever — there is still demonstrated need throughout Michigan — rural, urban, subrural, suburban — to help people understand how recycling works, how they can participate correctly,” she said. “All of these systems and programs aim to make our economy more productive, aim to make our natural resources work more for us. All Michigan residents really need to know how to participate in effective ways.”

Bob Crum, executive director of the Hampton Roads Planning District Commission, shared similar sentiments.

“This is critical, critical money for us,” he said. “This money was really going to be some important outreach.”

Feb. 12

Hampton Roads received this message from the EPA: “Thank you for your patience. At this point, we can move forward to resume all grant activities with our existing REO grantees, and work to ensure that these grant funds are spent appropriately.”

Feb. 13

O’Halloran at the Ciudad Soil and Water Conservation District in New Mexico said he received a similar message. Could the organization pick up where it left off? “That’s what we’re hoping,” he said.

Feb. 17

Makra said she still hadn’t gotten word of an end to the pause.

“That would be music to my ears,” she said. “You give me hope, though.”

Feb. 20

In an email, EPA spokesperson Molly Vaseliou said: “EPA worked expeditiously to enable payment accounts for IIJA and IRA grant recipients, so funding is now accessible to all recipients.”

Posted in Resource Recycling Magazine | Tagged |

Unshakeable steel

Published: March 31, 2025
Updated:
by

Potential acquisitions among the biggest steel producers would likely have a muted impact on local recycling. | Rito Succeed/Shutterstock

This article appeared in the March 2025 issue of Resource Recycling. Subscribe today for access to all print content.

The potential merger of U.S. Steel, one of the country’s largest users of recycled metal, with other major steel companies could change the industry’s global landscape. But when it comes to immediate impact on local scrappers and municipal collection programs, mergers and acquisitions generally take a back seat to cold fronts and seasonal thaws, several stakeholders said in recent interviews.

“We’ve had a winter that’s been rougher than we’ve had in the past few years,” said Brad Cook, general manager of the Premier Metals scrapping company in Rochester, New York. “That’s slowed the retail trade down in 2025. Come spring, we’re preparing ourselves to clean the corners and get things going.”
Beyond nature, the extent of any future industry change could depend on how well a given company goes green — and not the green usually associated with recycling.

“Does one company’s relative position put the combined company into a stronger position? Companies in this spot would look at long-term sustainability with a sound economic premise,” said Michael E. Hoffman, CEO of the National Waste & Recycling Association. “A combination of companies could make (incorporating recycled steel) go a little faster.”

What hasn’t been fast is U.S. Steel’s acquisition process, which was subject to federal approval of foreign investments and has therefore moved at a glacial pace, allowing other players to join the game.

Where the deal stands

The proposed $15 billion acquisition of U.S. Steel by Japanese company Nippon Steel has faced a lot of scrutiny since it was announced in December 2023. The deal has rare bipartisan opposition; then-President Joe Biden blocked the deal in January, citing national security risks of a foreign owner, while successor President Donald Trump has also continued to oppose the deal after taking office.

After meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, Trump said in early February that Nippon Steel will shift to investment rather than a takeover. But that plan could fall to the wayside if Cleveland-
Cliffs can buy U.S. Steel, which Cleveland-Cliffs CEO Lourenco Gonclaves told CNBC in January he wants to do in partnership with Nucor Corp.

The companies represent four of the top 25 steel producers in the world, according to numbers from the World Steel Association: Nippon Steel is fourth, Nucor 15th, Cleveland-Cliffs 22nd and U.S. Steel 24th.
Requests for comment from all four companies went unanswered, but industry experts say recycling is a key component of domestic production.

“Steel producers in the United States recycle significant amounts of steel scrap in their production processes,” said Kevin Dempsey, president and CEO of the American Iron and Steel Institute. “Large steel companies clearly have a significant impact on the consumption of steel scrap, and logically then they also have an impact on recycling efforts.”

Doing their part

The companies made an impact on the recycling industry long before any merger talks surfaced. Nippon Steel was one of 15 founding members of the Japan Used Can Treatment Association in 1973. The group was renamed the Japan Steel Can Recycling Association in 2001, advocates for greater steel recycling and hosts and holds educational events in schools.

U.S. Steel has, in the words of CEO David Burritt, woven sustainability into its way of conducting business. In 2021, U.S. Steel acquired Big River Steel in part to bolster its sustainability initiatives. The Osceola, Arkansas, facility earned the ResponsibleSteel Certified Steel designation in fall 2024 thanks in part to a recycled metals use rate of around 90%. Overall, the company in 2023 recycled more than 5.2 million tons of purchased and produced steel scrap while producing 22.4 million tons of raw steel, according to the U.S. Steel 2023 sustainability report.

Cleveland-Cliffs, meanwhile, recycled 6.6 million tons of steel scrap and recovered iron materials, according to its 2023 sustainability report. Nucor eclipses both, recycling 20 million tons of steel annually.

Each company has made individual recycling- and sustainability-related commitments. Those initiatives would presumably continue under combined corporate umbrellas, but what impact that has on steel prices or other aspects of the recycling system remains unclear.

An analysis of recent mergers fails to yield substantive answers, thanks in large part to their timing. Cleveland-Cliffs acquired AK Steel in 2020, right around the time the COVID-19 pandemic began; the pandemic caused iron and steel scrap prices to fall 17.4%, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, to $354 per ton.

The Tata Steel/Thyssenkrupp Steel merger in Europe and ArcelorMittal/Essar Steel deal in India happened in 2021, when mid-pandemic supply shortages caused scrap prices to soar from $536.10 per ton in December 2020 to $739.12 months later.

Overall, scrap supply has remained relatively consistent historically, according to Brian Raff, vice president for sustainability and government relations at the American Institute of Steel Construction. The only potential impact could come if something drastic like the shutdown of a company or major mill were to happen.

“A fabricator really doesn’t care” what’s happening at the major companies, he said. “They’re buying steel to meet project requirements. If there’s more capacity (resulting from a merger), if there’s more steel, that’s great.”

Recycling rates likewise show no major movement based on mergers. Data from the American Iron and Steel Institute shows the North American steel recycling rate to be about 69%; it has remained above 60% since 1970.

That consistency comes with the industry’s maturity. The recycling infrastructure in the United States is more sophisticated than that of steel-producing nations like India and China, Dempsey said. Many of the nation’s nearly 18,000 scrap and recycling facilities have been in business for decades, and the National Materials Council estimates there are more than 24,000 municipal recycling programs operating in the U.S.

Source: U.S. EPA

How steel recycling works

Municipal recycling programs collected 6.36 million tons of steel and other ferrous metals in 2018, according to the U.S. EPA. Cans collected at the curb, for example, are sent to scrap processors, who crush and bundle them before selling to steel-producing companies, Dempsey said.
But curbside activity makes up less than 1% of the steel scrap used by U.S. steel producers, Dempsey said.

Most of the recycled material steel producers use comes from two places.
Recycling processors buy old cars, construction leftovers, broken appliances and other scrap steel, then cut or bale the metal to sell to steel mills.

Prompt scrap — metal that never reached the marketplace, such as leftovers from automobile component manufacturing — is collected by steel companies for reuse.

Mills melt the scrap down at nearly 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Impurities rise to the surface and are skimmed off. The molten metal is shaped and solidified before it’s transported to factories. A recycled item can take its new form in as little as two months.

The cycle never has to end due to steel’s inherent reusability without degradation; the production process allows impurities to be removed. Even those impurities, collectively known as steel slag, are recycled into asphalt and other materials. The Can Corporation of America estimates about 75% of all steel ever produced is still in use in some fashion.

“Most steel scrap can be recycled into virtually any new steel product, so a steel can or deconstructed steel beam can become a new steel beam, or a car door, refrigerator or steel container,” Dempsey said.

Finding scrap steel came more into focus as mills shifted to electric arc furnace technology in the 1970s and 1980s — around the time steel recycling rates began a decades-long climb from around 150,000 tons in 1970 to more than 2 million in 1990, according to U.S. EPA data. These furnaces use electricity to heat material and are fed recycled steel. Traditional blast furnaces need iron ore and coal-based fuel to operate.

Eliminating the need for mined materials, combined with the decreased emissions resulting from production, makes EAF production more sustainable, Hoffman said. Nearly 71% of U.S. steel production happens via EAF.

“The decision to go to electric arc furnace was economic,” he said. “If we were going to produce steel domestically, we had to move to a production method that was more economical.”

All new steel could be made from recycled steel, but scrap scarcity prevents that on a global level, according to the World Steel Association. The average lifespan for a steel product is 40 years, which the organization said prevents a continuous flow of enough product to meet demand.

Dempsey noted the U.S. produces enough ferrous scrap to export about nearly 18 million tons of scrap per year. Hoffman said the country’s long-standing automotive industry has created a generational scrap flow that helps give domestic recycling a leg up on the rest of the world.

Where is the industry going?

There may not be enough scrap to meet producers’ demand, but Cook said the supply domestically always seems to be there — “I’ve been in the business for more than 25 years, and I’ve never seen it stop.”

So any movement by U.S. Steel or other parties may not mean much in the grand recycling scheme. Rather, Dempsey said, companies that can sort scrap more accurately by contaminant level have the advantage, because “the recycling of incoming scrap steel can best be matched to the new steel product’s end use.”

Imports could also have an impact. Whoever owns the major domestic steel companies, they could see an uptick for demand if proposed tariffs on foreign products take effect. That could drive up scrap prices, but since U.S. mills run at about 75% capacity, there’s room to meet a potential demand surge, Raff said.
Dollars are the most important factor, Hoffman said: The bottom line will trump any short-term political motivations when it comes to recycling.

“I would make the case, if you look out 10 years, more metals will be made with recycling, with a green emphasis,” he said. “If you want true, long-term environmentally sound outcomes, they have to stand on the back of a sound economic model.”

Posted in Resource Recycling Magazine | Tagged |

First-person perspective: Benefits of converting to RNG

Published: March 10, 2025
Updated:
by

Courtesy of Nopetro

This article appeared in the February 2025 issue of Resource Recycling. Subscribe today for access to all print content.

Did you know that the U.S. produces 268 million tons of trash each year, most of which finds its way to landfills? But landfills are not just storage sites for waste, they are also the third-largest source of human-related methane emissions in the country, according to the U.S. EPA.

Waste naturally produces methane as it decomposes, and when released into the atmosphere, it contributes to global warming. Yet methane is also the primary component of natural gas. Today waste is being given a second life in the form of harnessing landfill gas for renewable energy production.

For an industry rooted in sustainability, adopting renewable natural gas aligns perfectly with the recycling industry’s mission. RNG is a cheaper, clean, proven U.S.-made energy source that also happens to be renewable. The recycling industry can lead by example through converting its fleets to run on RNG.

How RNG is Made

RNG is the result of a process that captures methane emissions at landfills and converts them into a renewable fuel. This waste-to-fuel process begins by capturing methane at landfills, purifying it and converting it to a clean-burning fuel. Once purified, RNG is interchangeable with traditional natural gas, making it easy to integrate into the existing natural gas pipeline infrastructure for use as compressed natural gas fuel for vehicles.

The RNG industry has seen significant growth in recent years, experiencing a 13% year-over-year increase in 2023. With the recycling truck market estimated to grow over 6% between 2024 and 2032, there is an even greater need for alternative fuel solutions like RNG.

The Benefits of Making the Switch

Converting your fleet to CNG can lead to significant cost savings, particularly as volatile diesel prices continue to fluctuate. The cost of natural gas remains relatively stable and a substantially cheaper option compared to diesel. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, between April 1 and April 15, 2023, the national average price of diesel fuel in the U.S. was $4.25 per gallon while the national average price of CNG in that same timeframe was $2.99 per diesel-gallon-equivalent.

Today all major original equipment manufacturers are manufacturing natural gas trucks on the assembly lines, which ensures that fleets can transition to RNG-sourced CNG vehicles without compromising performance. These trucks offer the same torque, horsepower and range as their diesel counterparts. In fact, Cummins’ X15N natural gas engine is already being tested by major fleets and has been praised for its durability and diesel-like performance.

By making the switch, heavy transportation, such as recycling trucks, and power generation greenhouse gas emissions can
also be reduced by 95%, according to Argonne National Laboratory. RNG also plays a key role in a circular economy model, turning waste into a usable product. For the recycling industry, this means using fuel produced from the city’s waste to power its fleets, creating a closed-loop system that benefits both the environment and the economy.

A Look Ahead

Powering your fleet with RNG or CNG derived from the city’s waste is a win-win scenario. The recycling industry benefits greatly from this transition, as it aligns perfectly with its principles of waste reduction and resource efficiency.

Now is the time to act. By choosing RNG, the recycling industry can make meaningful strides toward a cleaner planet while maintaining the operational efficiency necessary to meet our waste management needs.

Jorge Herrera is CEO of Nopetro Energy. Since its founding, he has led the company’s rapid growth into a vertically integrated clean energy leader focused on global decarbonization through production and distribution of compressed natural gas, renewable natural gas and liquefied natural gas.

The views and opinions expressed are those of the author and do not imply endorsement by Resource Recycling, Inc. If you have a subject you wish to cover in an op-ed, please send a short proposal to [email protected] for consideration.

Posted in Resource Recycling Magazine | Tagged |