The North American garbage and recycling industry suffered 53 on-the-job worker fatalities in 2019. | Juice Flair/Shutterstock
The number of solid waste industry fatalities decreased last year, but the death tally for 2019 nonetheless has one industry organization concerned.
O-I Vice President of Global Sustainability Jim Nordmeyer welcomed a crowd of 50 participants to the Texas Glass Recycling Workshop.
Even as the vast majority of municipalities have not made changes to recycling service, the coronavirus impact has been felt in programs around the country. | VO IMAGES/Shutterstock
The global escalation of COVID-19 is hampering some North American recycling programs, impacting Chinese users of U.S. recovered fiber, constraining global shipping, denting stock prices and threatening an economic recession.
CalRecycle is set to award nearly $16 million to six composting and anaerobic digestion projects. | Jan Vaclav Herodes/Shutterstock
Garden State lawmakers passed a food-waste reduction bill, an industry group released tips on starting waste reduction programs, and California is set to award millions for composting and anaerobic digestion projects. Continue Reading
With newly announced process, Chinese importers can apply for tariff exemptions beginning this week. | Sumrit Tesrumphun/Shutterstock
The Chinese government will consider exempting tariffs on OCC and other recovered fiber on a company-by-company basis. Meanwhile, a tariff on U.S. recycled paper pulp shipments into China has been lifted for one year.
The Total Fiber Recovery project joins a number of other domestic recycled fiber processing capacity expansions that have been announced or come on-line since China began restricting imports. | Siwakorn1933/Shutterstock
A plant taking in mixed paper and OCC is on the way in Virginia, the latest planned domestic market expansion for U.S. recovered fiber.
The U.S. in 2019 shipped 192,000 short tons of mixed paper to South Korea. | Mariusz Bugno/Shutterstock
A large buyer of U.S. scrap paper and plastic is planning measures to reduce imports and increase domestic recycling of those materials.
Notable changes have taken place in markets for curbside recyclables over the past month, including an increase in OCC prices and a steep dive in natural HDPE prices.
During recent earnings calls, a number of fiber company executives touched on pricing trends they are seeing around OCC and other grades.
One major U.S. mill operator is actively shipping recycled paper pulp to China, and another is installing equipment to bring in lower grades of paper feedstock. Those were a few takeaways from recent earnings calls from publicly traded paper firms.
A recent Greenpeace report noted companies are increasingly calling a wider variety of products “recyclable.” | Marko Rupena/Shutterstock
Several recycling industry reports were recently released, including a Greenpeace indictment of recyclability labeling, the latest updates from Closed Loop Partners, and one state’s investigation of food waste in public schools.