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(left to right) ISRI Chair Mark Lewon of Utah Metal Works, Mike Peters of Genesee & Wyoming Railroad, and Bill Sullivan of the American Trucking Association
The sessions at last week’s ISRI2018 Convention & Exposition in Las Vegas covered the latest on China, fiber recovery, contamination and more, with speakers providing a number of perspectives on recycling’s future.
Facing rock-bottom fiber prices, Waste Management’s recycling revenues experienced a 16 percent decrease during the first quarter of 2018.
Chinese authorities plan to halt imports of more scrap categories by the end of the year, including post-industrial scrap plastic and a variety of scrap metals. The country also announced a list of even more imports it will ban by the end of 2019.
Increasing end market demand and improving infrastructure are essential ingredients for a sustainable plastics recycling industry – and for recycling as a whole.
Mathy Stanislaus, who served under President Obama, says current U.S. EPA leaders aren’t fully valuing materials recovery and are harming the industry by putting a singular focus on deregulation.
Canadian equipment manufacturer Machinex has introduced a “self-aware” sortation robot, which uses artificial intelligence to quickly remove materials from processing lines.
Sunday marks 48 years since the first Earth Day, an annual event full of recycling-related events and announcements. This year, plastics are at the center of the conversation.
Many recycling associations are preparing for their biggest gatherings of the year, and three group leaders recently explained how China-related market disruptions will be tackled at their events.
China has issued its latest round of import permits for scrap paper and plastics, and approved volumes remain particularly low on the plastics side.
In the course of one year, Los Angeles-area exporters cut their scrap polyethylene shipments to China by 99 percent, leaving thousands of tons of plastic looking for a home. Other countries were only able to absorb about one-fifth of the volume.