Back to Top

Category: Resource Recycling Magazine

Looking back on 2024

Published: January 9, 2025
Updated:
by

Evgenii Panov/Shutterstock.

This article appeared in the December 2024 issue of Resource Recycling. Subscribe today for access to all print content.

Even without the major hurricanes or before the election season, 2024 was a year of change for the recycling sector, with new players coming to the fore, old players building out their footprints and an ever-clearer view of the industry’s shortfalls and successes.

Nonprofits, communities and multibillion-dollar corporations alike consolidated, partnered and tested new ways to recycle materials and to explain the recycling system to its users. Extended producer responsibility, the right to repair and other policy ideas advanced on some fronts but not others. And on a global scale, companies and nations grappled with the reality of omnipresent plastics.

Like re-reading an old diary, we’re spending a few pages looking back at some of the year’s biggest news and trends to help make sense of where everything landed — and to get a glimpse of what might come next.

Unmasking fire hazards

The year began with a January report from the National Waste and Recycling Association and RRS estimating that more than 5,000 fires occur annually at recycling facilities, many likely linked to wayward lithium-ion batteries inside recycling streams that can incinerate everything around them when crushed or damaged.

“Basically they’re like a flower spinner you’d see on the Fourth of July, but they’re heavier and they’re burning at about 700-plus degrees,” said Matt Tracy, site superintendent for the Metro South transfer station outside Portland, Oregon, during a February forum hosted by the Association of Oregon Recyclers.

The study found that the rate of catastrophic losses rose by 41% over the last five years, and the cost to insure facilities has followed suit, rising to as much as 50 times previous costs.

Facilities like Tracy’s across the country have adopted several tactics for dealing with and preventing these fires, including burying the batteries in CellBlockEX, a dry medium made from recycled glass and specifically designed to extinguish or suppress lithium-ion battery fires, and enlisting FireRover, the remote fire monitoring and suppression system.

This year the federal government awarded hundreds of millions of dollars toward lithium-ion battery processing operations to boost their capacity. And multiple technology companies have also turned to the X-ray band of the electromagnetic spectrum, aiming to pierce through MRFs’ incoming boxes and bottles to flag misplaced batteries and other hazards before they catch fire.

A young company called BinIt in January announced that it had received $6.4 million in seed financing for its imaging system combining cameras, X-rays and artificial intelligence, for instance. In the spring, Call2Recycle and Electronic Distributors International installed a similar battery-sorting system in Ontario, one of four of its type in the world. And Battery Detection Solutions spoke with Resource Recycling in November about its own X-ray scanner, which could eventually be adapted from MRFs to collection trucks.

“The only way to eliminate the chance of a fire is to make sure the batteries can’t get in,” said Rich Cisek, Battery Detection Solutions’ founder and CEO. “Even if some magic battery comes out tomorrow where people are like, ‘Hey, look, it doesn’t catch on fire anymore when you shred it,’ we’re still going to have a decade and a half of risk around the stuff.”

State policy changes

Minnesota in May became the fifth U.S. state to pass extended producer responsibility for packaging, joining the ranks of California, Colorado, Maine and Oregon. It created a framework for manufacturers to contribute to increased recycling of their products over time and passed along party lines, with Democrats in favor.

“The burden of managing this ever-growing deluge of packaging waste currently falls on local governments — and taxpayers,” State Rep. Sydney Jordan, who sponsored the original bill, said in a written statement at the time. “Today’s bill takes steps to ensure the producers of this waste are paying their fair share.”

The success followed several months of negotiation and collaboration among a wide variety of industry stakeholders, including nonprofit MRF Eureka Recycling and Ameripen, an industry group representing packaging producers that hadn’t supported such a policy until Minnesota’s final version.

Other narrower EPR policies also passed this year, including for textiles in California and electric vehicle batteries in New Jersey, both firsts in the U.S. And work continued on previously passed EPR bills, with California, Colorado, Maine and others deciding annual recycling targets, producer responsibility organizations and other details. EPR attempts were unsuccessful, meanwhile, in still other states, including Michigan and New York.

On the e-scrap side, Oregon and Colorado both passed right-to-repair legislation last spring, require electronics manufacturers to allow independent repair shops and consumers access to the parts, tools and documentation needed to fix devices. While Oregon and Colorado were the fourth and fifth states to do so, respectively, they were the first to ban the use of software to ensure a device will only operate with specific individual parts, or parts pairing, which can interfere with third-party repairs or with device functionality afterward.

On the international stage

The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution assembled global leaders multiple times this year to hash out a global treaty on the subject, with the fifth meeting set for Nov. 25 through Dec. 1 in South Korea.

INC-5 would be the last chance the delegates have to meet the deadline of having treaty text ready to present to a Conference of Parties by the end of 2024, a finish line that was set in a March 2022 vote. Delegates have broadly agreed on the need for mandates on product design, composition, performance and EPR, though there have been disputes over production caps and other areas.

Next year will also herald wide-ranging impacts from another global agreement, the Basel Convention, which controls the international trade of a wide array of electronics and their contents, such as plastics. The U.S. is one of the few countries that is not party to the convention, meaning that starting Jan. 1, U.S. e-scrap companies will no longer be able to export their output to virtually any overseas buyers. It’s a huge change that IT asset disposition companies have spent the year figuring out how to handle.

“It really has become the de facto agreement for the circular economy,” said Paul Hagen, an attorney with Beveridge & Diamond and a longtime Basel expert, speaking during a panel at the ISRI2024 conference in Las Vegas in April.

Aiming high, and adjusting

Disappointment was another theme of 2024, with Unilever, Colgate-Palmolive, PepsiCo and other major consumer goods makers announcing they’d fall short of their 2025 goals for recycled content usage and other measures.

Post-consumer resin production needs to increase as much as fivefold to meet those goals, according to a report this summer from RaboResearch, part of the Dutch financial services company Rabobank.

Bloomberg’s latest edition of its Circular Economy Company Ranking, an annual publication tracking corporate sustainability pledges, in October found widespread “difficulties in sourcing sustainable feedstock and materials, and a lack of infrastructure for sorting and recycling — all against the backdrop of rising costs.”

As a result, brands likely will shift their focus more broadly to carbon emissions targets rather than putting plastic usage under the microscope, RaboResearch wrote. And Bloomberg noted that, in lieu of adequate mechanical recycling capacity, many firms are banking on chemical recycling.

Chemical recycling questions

Chemical recycling goes beyond conventional mechanical recycling, breaking post-consumer plastics down into their basic molecular components for remanufacture, as opposed to physically chopping them into flakes for melting.

The technology started the year on a defensive footing, with The Recycling Partnership in February calling for more evidence of its benefits to people and the environment. Maine passed legislation classifying it as solid waste processing rather than recycling in March, and the National Recycling Coalition proposed a similar draft policy in the summer.

“Recycling has always evolved and changed,” and chemical recycling is just another innovation “responding to the reality that some … plastics in the current packaging stream are difficult or unable to be recycled mechanically,” TRP said in a position statement on its website. “Change is good, but it needs to be planet-positive, transparent, and measurable.”

Petrochemical companies have nonetheless poured hundreds of millions of dollars into chemical recycling technologies, calling it a game-changer that can solve the plastic problem. Eastman early this year announced plans to build its second chemical recycling facility in Longview, Texas, for example, with up to $375 million from the U.S. Department of Energy, though the election has raised questions over that support.

Energy giant ExxonMobil recently announced it would triple its U.S. chemical recycling capacity in Texas. Shortly after that announcement, Cyclyx, which supplies plastic scrap to mechanical recyclers as well as chemical recyclers such as ExxonMobil and LyondellBasell, announced it would proceed with its second plastic processing center in Texas, too.

Skepticism around chemical recycling’s promise continues to dog the industry, however. A November report from Zero Waste Europe, based in Belgium, called it “partial recycling” and said successful commercialization “will require huge financial and regulatory support and time.”

A clearer view going forward

The past year brought a slew of studies and reports that, taken together, helped fill in the map of the recycling landscape across the country.

Three-fourths of recyclables are lost at the household level, even though 73% of all U.S. households have recycling access, according to a January study from TRP that estimated the residential recycling rate is 21%. The “State of Recycling: Present and Future of Residential Recycling in the U.S” report pointed to a lack of access to recycling services and a lack of education and communication as major culprits.

TRP and GreenBlue in September followed up with new online data highlighting recycling program acceptance rates for 50 different material types across the country, using local recycling program data that represents nearly all of the U.S. population. They aim to update the U.S. Community Recycling Program Acceptance Data twice yearly.

As Resource Recycling reported in January, a study from Eunomia Research and Consulting also found that nine of the 10 states with the highest recycling rates have deposit return systems. Deposit states account for 27% of the U.S. population, according to the study, but provide more than half of all aluminum cans, glass bottles and PET bottles recycled in the country. Other studies this year found deposit recycling rates are falling slightly in those states as well, which some observers said meant the systems need bigger deposits and other changes.

Among several material-specific studies, a revised methodology from the American Forest & Paper Association put the 2023 recycling rate for paper at 65-69% and cardboard at 71-76%. That’s significantly lower than previous AF&PA reports and more in line with estimates from Bloomberg Intelligence and Circular Ventures, which disputed AF&PA’s figures for years — including in these pages.

Marissa Heffernan, Antoinette Smith and Colin Staub contributed to this report.

Posted in Resource Recycling Magazine | Tagged |

The political pendulum swings back

Published: January 8, 2025
Updated:
by

Donald Trump’s return to the White House will likely bring far-reaching changes to the recycling system, experts say. | Dan Holtmeyer/Resource Recycling Inc.

This article appeared in the December 2024 issue of Resource Recycling. Subscribe today for access to all print content.

The clear victory of Republicans across the branches of U.S. government could affect the municipal recycling world in a number of ways. It’s early, but some signs from the past — and some recent analysis from industry observers — offer a glimpse of what’s to come.

In the Nov. 5 general election, President-elect Donald Trump received 312 electoral votes to Kamala Harris’s 226, Republicans won control of the U.S. Senate with 53 seats to Democrats’ 47, and Republicans have secured a majority of U.S. House seats. The trifecta gives the party broad power to enact its policies.

For recycling stakeholders, some of the impacts will be general: Tariffs, tax cuts and other economic policies would undoubtedly filter down to affect the recycling sector, as with virtually every other industry. Those policies could be similar to those proposed and enacted during Trump’s 2017-2021 administration.

For instance, Trump has said he’ll impose tariffs on Canada, China and Mexico, the country’s three largest trading partners. That policy hearkens back to the Trump administration’s previous trade war with China, which affected recycling in the form of increased costs for machinery components and basic facility needs like baling wire, on top of the tariffs’ broader impact on the economy.

President Joseph Biden later kept and expanded some of those tariffs, but not on the level of the measures Trump has proposed. Industry groups such as the Recycled Materials Association already shared an analysis suggesting the new tariffs Trump has described would “negatively impact the U.S. economy.” And retailers like Walmart have said publicly that prices will likely go up with new tariffs, according to Forbes and other outlets.

Meanwhile, the tax cuts of 2017 were lauded at the time by industry groups representing recycling interests, and among new tax proposals, the Trump administration is expected to extend the cuts, some of which were set to end at the end of 2025.

In some ways, the lack of federal recycling policy could insulate the plastics and chemicals sector from major policy impacts.

“U.S. states have been the traditional leaders in passing policies to improve recycling and reduce plastic pollution,” said Kate Bailey, chief policy officer with the Association of Plastic Recyclers, in a written statement. “We expect that to continue and to be strong for many years to come because polls show there is widespread support to improve recycling and reduce plastic waste. APR’s policy focus has been at the state level, and we will continue to prioritize working with state legislatures to improve recycling collection and increase the use of recycled plastics in place of virgin feedstocks.”

APR owns Resource Recycling, Inc., publisher of this magazine.

“Spending public funds for the sake of sustainability, rather than efficiency, is most likely in the past,” said Bailey Robin, cofounder and CEO of recycled commodity trading platform Matium. He added that it would be important to see how tariffs may affect the industry.

Similarly, in a presentation at Pack Expo before the election, Rebecca Marquez, director of custom research at PMMI: Association for Packaging and Processing Technologies, said the trade association did not anticipate any federal packaging extended producer responsibility legislation because the U.S. is too fragmented, so it will likely remain state responsibilities.

The Plastics Industry Association — along with the Recycled Materials Association, Radius Recycling, Eastman and Dow — was among more than 600 business leaders that signed a Nov. 5 letter from the National Association of Manufacturers pledging to work with whomever was elected.

Meanwhile, the Aluminum Association, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, American Beverage Association, The Recycling Partnership, World Wildlife Fund and dozens of other industry and advocacy organizations on Nov. 19 urged Congress to pass two bipartisan recycling bills before the end of the year — before the new federal government arrives, though the groups didn’t note this explicitly.

The Recycling Infrastructure Accessibility Act and the Recycling and Composting Accountability Act would enhance federal recycling and composting data and provide more grants, particularly to underserved areas. They’ve easily passed the narrowly Democratic Senate but not the narrowly Republican House.

“More recycling is good both for the planet and for the broader manufacturing economy,” the organizations wrote to Congressional leaders in both chambers. “Together, these bipartisan bills would advance the nation’s recycling capabilities, support a robust and circular economy, and help secure critical domestic supply chains.”

Industry stakeholders may be anticipating less interest in recycling-related legislation in the upcoming legislative landscape, said David Biderman, a waste and recycling consultant and former trade association president.

“The clock is running out on the 118th Congress, plus the results of the November elections will usher in an administration far less concerned about recycling than the Biden Administration,” Biderman said. “The Republican-led House and Senate that will convene in January 2025 will have many higher priorities than this legislation.”

Potential EPA impacts

Recycling policy is largely set at the state and local level, and programs are mostly overseen by municipal governments. But the federal government does plenty of work collecting data and facilitating conversations to advance materials recovery.

Those efforts are always subject to change when there are leadership transitions in Washington. The early efforts of the prior Trump administration to significantly reduce the EPA’s budget offer clues about what could be coming down the line.

Back in early 2017, the Trump administration proposed cutting EPA’s budget by 31%, prompting fears among recycling stakeholders that the agency’s longstanding Sustainable Materials Management work could grind to a halt. Recycling lobbyists sought to defend the programs, noting both their economic and environmental benefits. In the end, after working its way through the U.S. House and Senate — both of which were Republican-controlled — the budget was revised to remove many of the drastic cuts.

One longtime recycling industry stakeholder told Resource Recycling that the state-level emphasis could become even more pronounced amid the new political environment.

“Should residential recycling not be a priority at the federal level, one way it can prosper is for states to grab the bull by the horn and legislate it through mandates such as EPR or container deposit laws,” said Myles Cohen, founder of Circular Ventures and previously president of Pratt Recycling.

Trump announced he plans to nominate former Rep. Lee Zeldin of New York as EPA administrator. Zeldin served in the House of Representatives from 2015 through 2023 and has been an outspoken Trump ally over the years.

“Lee, with a very strong legal background, has been a true fighter for America First policies,” Trump wrote in a statement on social media, noting that Zeldin “will ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions that will be enacted in a way to unleash the power of American businesses, while at the same time maintaining the highest environmental standards, including the cleanest air and water on the planet.”

Zeldin voted in line with the League of Conservation Voters 14% of the time, according to the organization, indicating relatively low support for pro-environment measures. A couple of exceptions were the votes he cast to increase regulation on PFAS.

Grants in jeopardy

Although Trump has not specified plans regarding recycling, Trump said in a September speech to the Economic Club of New York that he would “rescind all unspent funds” from the Inflation Reduction Act, which has helped greenlight such projects as Eastman’s second U.S. chemical recycling plant in Longview, Texas.

“Eastman is already under award contract with the DOE for our project in Texas,” said spokesperson Kristin Parker. “We are working together closely and don’t believe the change in White House leadership will impact our award.”

In March, the project was awarded up to $375 million in funding and was to begin negotiations with the U.S. Department of Energy. During negotiations, the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, which administers the Industrial Demonstrations program that selected Eastman, and the recipient finalize the project scope and the proposed budget. “The complexity of the project, the selectee’s responses, and OCED’s reviews will all impact the negotiation timeline,” according to the office’s website.

“When it comes to the reliability of the grants, well, we’re in a new political world, so I’m not going to predict what happens,” Eastman CEO Mark Costa said in a Nov. 21 investor call. Eastman’s investments help work toward reshoring U.S. production and building a local economy, which is “in line with the current agenda of the incoming administration.”

Costa added that programs funded by the IRA and the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, which incentivizes U.S. manufacturing especially for semiconductor chips, “are incredibly important for our national security.”

In an August letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson, 18 Republican lawmakers said, “As Members of the House Republican Conference, we write to urge you to prioritize business and market certainty as you consider efforts that repeal or reform the Inflation Reduction Act.”

They continued: “Prematurely repealing energy tax credits, particularly those which were used to justify investments that already broke ground, would undermine private investments and stop development that is already ongoing. A full repeal would create a worst-case scenario where we would have spent billions of taxpayer dollars and received next to nothing in return.”

Treaties could be tabled

Recycling stakeholders should anticipate the U.S. pulling back from involvement in global regulatory efforts, according to law firm Beveridge & Diamond.

“Prepare for the withdrawal of engagement on international environmental and waste treaties, as the Trump administration prioritizes domestic development, tariffs (and potential restrictions on imported goods), and increased exports of domestic natural resources,” the firm recently wrote. “This includes the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and implications to ongoing international conversations around global emissions reductions and the regulation of plastics.”

While the analysis didn’t mention the treaty by name, the implications would likely extend to the Basel Convention, which regulates the movement of hazardous waste materials around the world, and in recent years has expanded to cover shipments of mixed scrap plastic. The convention will expand its regulation of end-of-life electronics beginning next year.

The U.S. remains one of the only non-party countries to the Basel Convention, and that fact has increasingly shut U.S. companies out of the global trade of recycled materials. Non-party countries are prohibited from trading materials that are regulated under the convention with party countries.

The Beveridge & Diamond analysis touched on the U.N.’s in-development global treaty on plastics, which the U.S. has engaged with. Notably, the U.S. this year pivoted on key controversial components on the draft treaty to support plastics production limits. The abrupt shift from previous opposition to such measures garnered a strong reaction from the plastics industry and cautious optimism from environmental groups.

In a Nov. 15 media briefing held by Break Free From Plastics, Sarah Martik with the Center for Coalfield Justice, said members of the U.S. delegation “confirmed they were not supporting” such caps anymore and “instead will rely on market signals and individual countries’ signals to set these caps and timelines for us.”

Meanwhile, back in the U.S., one industry association says the federal shift could affect the landscape of voluntary industry commitments as well. In a statement, the U.S. Plastics Pact said its work to achieve recycling targets occurs “independent of shifting federal policies.” But the group noted “critical gaps remain at the federal level that limit our ability to fully achieve these targets, regardless of the administration in power.”

The Pact added it doesn’t anticipate building up federal plastics recycling policies will be a priority for the next administration, but it emphasized that “plastics recycling is a bipartisan issue, and we remain committed to advancing the conversation within the supply chain.”

Marissa Heffernan and Dan Holtmeyer contributed to this story.

Posted in Resource Recycling Magazine | Tagged |

Recycling leaders converge

Published: January 7, 2025
Updated:
by

The 2024 Resource Recycling Conference included sessions on recycling policies and local programs. | Dan Holtmeyer/Resource Recycling Inc.

This article appeared in the December 2024 issue of Resource Recycling. Subscribe today for access to all print content.

Hundreds of recycling program managers, advocates and other experts gathered in Louisville, Kentucky, in mid-November to share successes and lessons from across the country during the 2024 Resource Recycling Conference.

Sessions touched on such wide-ranging topics as deposit and extended producer responsibility systems, residential food scrap collection, textiles and resident education. As several speakers said, the field of community recycling is always changing and growing.

“The minute you think you’re a subject matter expert, a new law is in place and you have to create new programs,” Leslie Lukacs, executive director of Zero Waste Sonoma, said during the conference opener.

Finding material destinations

Finding end markets for recyclable materials requires both building connections with existing businesses and community organizations and helping new ideas take root, several recycling officials said during a panel on market development.

“I always say don’t throw away a job,” said Wayne Gjerde, soon-to-be-retiring recycling market development coordinator at the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, referring to the economic potential of trash. Throughout his career, he’s held onto a rule of thumb: “It’s all about the money. If you can’t make money, there’s no end markets, it’s not going to happen. It’s not sustainable.”

Emmet County Recycling in rural northern Michigan doesn’t have the volume to draw the interest of far-flung buyers, said panelist Lindsey Walker, who works on market development for the county. But her program has turned that potential difficulty into an advantage, using the county’s understanding and control of its waste streams to test out hyper-local opportunities and to build on successes.

Around 15 years ago, for example, a marina approached Emmet County wanting to recycle PE shrinkwrap for boats.

“Come to find out, right in our very own town with a kid I graduated with, we have Petoskey Plastics,” an LDPE manufacturer that could take the film, Walker said. What started out as a small pilot continues today, with some material also going to Trex for its composite lumber.

“About 95% of our materials are staying in the local circular economy in Michigan,” Walker added, with programs for organics, glass, cartons, wood and other materials. “Seek out local markets, build relationships and provide good clean commodities,” she advised.

States and local governments can also take an active approach to help grow new end markets from the ground up, other panelists said. The NextCycle initiative by consulting firm RRS, for example, takes the established tools of entrepreneurship incubators — business plan training, mentorship, pitch competitions and connections to investors — and aims them squarely at reuse and recycling.

“It provides an on-ramp for innovation and entrepreneurship,” said Elisa Seltzer, a senior consultant at RRS who launched the Emmet County program before leading NextCycle Michigan. Colorado and Washington state also have their own branches of the program, with support from state governments and other organizations leading to tens of millions of dollars invested and millions of pounds of material recycled.

“We need resilient supply chains, domestic manufacturing, and recycling is sitting in the perfect place to provide the feedstock and grow our economy,” Seltzer said. “Real small players can play a role in their communities, and some can scale really big.”

For example, a wine bottle reuse business called Revino is supplying wineries around the Pacific Northwest and recently obtained a specialized bottle-washing machine from Germany after joining NextCycle Washington, said Elizabeth Chin Start, founder of Start Consulting Group and a partner in the state initiative.

Another participant, the nonprofit Refugee Artisan Initiative in Seattle, turns used textiles into purses and other household products and has now connected with the U.S. Forest Service to reuse its old firefighting hoses.

“It’s just so inspiring to see these groups,” Start said, adding that the Washington program takes care to involve local organizations and focus on underrepresented communities. NextCycle is also laying the groundwork to expand into Oregon.

Angela Fox, sustainability manager for the city of Royal Oak, Michigan, said taking part in NextCycle allowed her to connect with experts and get invaluable technical assistance.

She came in hoping to get her community on solid footing for an upcoming renegotiation of a waste management contract. Now the city is working on pilot projects for organics at schools and the farmers market, streamlined collection in the business district and other improvements.

“None of this would have been possible had it not been through NextCycle,” Fox said. “It’s really been nothing but amazing.”

– By Dan Holtmeyer

The panel for end market development included, from left to right, Lindsey Walker of Emmet County Recycling, Wayne Gjerde of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, Elisa Seltzer of RRS, Elizabeth Chin Start of Start Consulting Group and Angela Fox with the city of Royal Oak, Michigan. Dan Holtmeyer/Resource Recycling Inc.

‘Keep doing what you know to be right’

The opening plenary session featured women leaders in sustainability who have been highlighted in moderator MaryEllen Etienne’s recurring “Women in Circularity” feature that appears on its own website and on Resource Recycling’s website.

The panelists discussed their own varied backgrounds before entering the industry. Crystal Dreisbach, CEO of reuse-focused Upstream, emphasized it’s important to ensure the next generation can succeed. Although there are often job openings in the sustainability space, she noted organizations often end up poaching established sustainability leaders from each other. It’s logical to want to hire experts, but Dreisbach advised companies to focus on new blood. One way is to create internships.

“It is a lot of work to host interns, you have to mentor and coach and handhold a lot of times, but the payoff is huge,” Dreisbach said.

Along those same lines, Stacy Savage, founder and CEO of Zero Waste Strategies, said older generations need to start taking Generation Z seriously. She said it feels like young people are not being given the same chances.

“People in the older generations were given the opportunity to lead at very young ages,” she said. She advised current leaders to give young employees chances by “bringing them into the fold, incorporating their ideas — collaboration is key — and giving them the opportunity to lead.”

The panel also discussed the challenges of working in a dynamic field like sustainability and recycling, especially amid a rapidly changing regulatory environment.

There are frequently unforeseen challenges. Lukacs at Zero Waste Sonoma described her organization’s push to create EPR for marine flares, which can’t be safely disposed of in any way currently. The bill received 100% support in the state House and Senate, sending the bill to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk. Then he vetoed it.

Lukacs and other stakeholders figured out the technicalities that led to Newsom’s veto and even came to agree with his decision. They plan to return next year with a revised proposal.

All of that speaks to the need for sustainability leaders to practice persistence, the panel agreed.

“I’m in my fourteenth year of working against a system of waste that has been cemented as a cultural norm,” said Dreisbach. Sustainability advocates must persist, she added, “because if you keep doing what you know to be right, and you get 10,000 hours or more of that, you become an expert in that thing, whatever it is, and you can make change.”

– By Colin Staub

Attendees participate in a workshop during the 2024 Resource Recycling Conference in Louisville, Kentucky. Dan Holtmeyer/Resource Recycling Inc.

Curtailing contamination

Ongoing and continuous customer education and communication is vital to further grassroots recycling efforts, according to several panelists at another session.

The city of Louisville, Kentucky, uses a system that includes “oops!” tags, to notify residents of contaminants including bagged items, EPS foam and big items or tanglers, said Karen Maynard, solid waste education manager for Louisville Metro Government. The city also distributes “way to know” tags to reinforce residents’ good habits. As a result, the city has noted a 37% decrease in contaminants and an increased recovery rate at the MRF.

In Florida, Pinellas County found that data analytics can indicate which promotional platforms would be most effective in reaching residents, said Ashley Wayland, environmental outreach specialist. For example, developing an ad that causes an emotional connection with the viewer performs well, and so the county is using paid ads on Facebook and Instagram to target specific groups, such as dog owners or cyclists, and focusing on persuadable residents as a whole.

Proactive communication is proving effective in Salt Lake City, said John Lair, president and CEO of Momentum Recycling, which uses various technologies to track collection trucks and prepare monthly diversion reports for commercial customers, among other tasks. An app called Recycle Coach can send automated collection-day reminders to improve cart set-out rates, including for monthly glass pickup service, for example. In addition, when a customer fails to set out their bin four times in a row, this triggers an alert to account managers, which has reduced cancellations.

“It’s all about proactively getting information at our fingertips so we can keep these customers recycling,” Lair said.

– By Antoinette Smith

Posted in Resource Recycling Magazine | Tagged |

Sorting through the multifamily challenge

Published: November 20, 2024
Updated:
by

Courtesy of Park La Brea

This article appeared in the November 2024 issue of Resource Recycling. Subscribe today for access to all print content.

With higher population densities, space constraints and the constant arrival of new tenants, multifamily housing often presents one of the biggest chasms for residential recycling and composting programs to cross. Park La Brea, a 4,255-unit community in the Miracle Mile District of Los Angeles, has bridged the gap for 12,000 residents spread across 49 buildings thanks to continual outreach and collaboration, several officials said.

“We’re an 80-year-old property, but that doesn’t mean we have to operate like we’re 80 years old, and for me, this is very much a big environmental push,” said Aryn Thomez, vice president of property management for Prime Residential, which owns the complex. “We wanted to do right by the environment and also stay ahead of the legislative curve.”

Thomez noted the key to a successful composting program in a multifamily property — especially one as large as this — is a collaborative approach between management, the on-site team, the hauler, composter and others. In Park La Brea’s case, Valet Living collects the compost at residents’ doors six days a week, EcoSafe provides 2.5-gallon liners to residents, and final organics collection is done by Athens Services, which also collects recyclables and trash.

“Maintaining cohesive relationships between multiple departments and consistently engaging residents is crucial for an effective organics recycling program,” said Jennifer Duet, sales strategy manager for Athens. “If any one entity tries to do it on their own, it’s more likely to fail, so it’s better to have everyone on board.”

Bringing in the residents

Recycling had been available at the complex for more than a decade. But when the program began in 2022, residents unsurprisingly met it with something of a mixed response.

“Before we even launched it, we had a very comprehensive communication plan to put it out there to our residents and discuss the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ and not make it seem like we were forcing it down their throats,” Thomez said. “We spent a lot of time to show them how this benefits them and the value it creates.”

It took time for people to adapt, but with two years behind it, Park La Brea is seeing a much better adoption and engagement to the composting program. About half of residents are signed up for composting through the valet service; there’s also a green bin in the basement for those who don’t want to wait for pickup or aren’t signed up.

“Especially as new residents come in, you’re starting to see a demographic where this is very important to them,” Thomez said. “We are continuing to see good increases in adoption quarter over quarter.”

As of January 2022, all residents in California, including those living in apartment complexes, have been required to compost organic waste properly. Exactly a decade earlier, recycling was made mandatory. It’s up to the property owners to supply and allow access to an adequate number and size of containers with the correct labels or container colors for each. Park La Brea goes a step further with its services and also stands out for being the largest complex in California to compost.

In the beginning, Athens developed educational materials, including videos, signage and startup kits, to help both property managers and tenants understand what’s accepted in the composting bins and how best to succeed in the program.

“Along with our signage and residential handouts, the Athens Multifamily Manual is designed for property managers as an easy-to-use guide, which includes a step-by-step checklist, communication templates, lease language and participation surveys, making it a comprehensive resource to support an effective program,” said Jessica Aldridge, director of sustainability and zero waste for Athens.

Originally, for recycling and composting for those living in the complex’s 18 13-story towers, things needed to be brought down to the basement. That’s why Valet Living and EcoSafe were brought in, to make it easier for residents to adhere to the composting plan.

“A lot of properties will make it an optional service if residents want it, but the way Athens did it was to give everyone the opportunity to do it just by stopping by to get a bin, or by going door to door to make sure people knew how it worked,” said Gary Bilbro, director of U.S. sales for EcoSafe. “They worked hard to ensure the highest level of participation possible.”

To make it as easy as possible for residents, Valet Living picks up six days a week, instructing people to leave their compost bags outside their doors each evening. The valet service also ensures the appropriate bags get to the bins and picks out obvious contaminants.

New bags are kept in the laundry room, so residents can simply restock whenever they need. There’s also a green bin in the basement for those who don’t want to wait for pickup.

“Park La Brea’s success stems from management’s proactive approach in equipping tenants with the necessary tools to fully engage in the program,” Duet said. “By providing kitchen-pail bag dispensers, valet service for the towers and routine organics barrel cleaning for the garden apartments, the company has made recycling and composting more convenient and accessible, creating a smoother and more enjoyable experience for everyone involved.”

Richard Risemberg, a Park La Brea resident for the past two years, moved in right after the Valet Living service began and said the composting program has been working well.

“They provide this service, it’s $35 a month, and pick up the general garbage and separate the recyclables, and then provide us a separate little can for the compost, and provide the compostable bags to line it with,” he said, adding he trusts the system. “I think the city keeps watch on things and so do think things are getting composted correctly when they take things down to the master bins.”

Risemberg is a part-time landscaping gardener and has used city-supplied compost and mulch on numerous products, so he knows stuff is getting back out the way it’s supposed to be.

“Once in a while, they do run out of the bags, but that’s the only issue I have encountered,” he said. “Overall, I believe this is working and it’s a very good thing for all.”

Other residents have not been as impressed and have complained to management, and even some of their local politicians, about the problems they see.

For instance, seven-year resident Michele Palermo, a writer and executive producer who wrote the composting episode for Martha Stewart Living about eight years ago, opted out of Park La Brea’s compost program because she believed it wasn’t working.

“I don’t feel like it was vetted properly, and it amounts to people leaving really stinky food outside their door in the evening when people are coming home from work, and I think it’s an invitation for vermin,” she said. “Plus, if you go around the complex in the morning, all of the trash seems to be piled together — trash, recycling and composting. It’s kind of a mockery, and it’s bothersome because it’s not doing anything for the environment.”

Others complain that when they go to empty their compost into the larger collection container themselves, often they are full of items that don’t belong. Resident Stephen Manning has been recycling for more than half his life, and though he was originally excited about the composting program, he’s abandoned it because he heard from a driver making the pickups that many times they end up putting the items removed in the regular landfill anyway because of this problem.

Both Prime Residential and Athens Services disputed this account, and other residents talked favorably about the program on the Park La Brea Facebook page. In a complex this large, there will always be people who aren’t following proper protocol.

“Residents are holding us accountable now, which is great; we want people to get involved and help us if they see something that doesn’t belong in the compost bin,” Thomez said. “Some people make this much more complicated than it needs to be. We just all need to hold each other accountable and we will get there.”

Law of the Land

With California’s SB 1383 now in effect with an aim to reduce organic waste disposal by 75% by next year, properties are required to provide tenants with clear, annual communication and easily accessible, clearly marked containers that show what’s acceptable for recycling and composting.

“Continuous education and outreach from both property management and Athens are critical to driving behavior change, increasing participation and reducing contamination, while also reducing confusion about what belongs in the organics container,” Aldridge said. “Regular reminders keep tenants informed and on track with proper recycling and composting practices.”

Park La Brea goes above and beyond the law, such as by holding an annual Earth Day event where they go over the particulars of the program and provide further tips for composting correctly.

Overall, the complex’s experience demonstrates it’s not just about a given property being “good” or “bad” at recycling and composting, those in the industry say — it often comes down to access to services, getting property managers on board and providing ongoing outreach and communication with tenants.

“Implementing food scraps collection at a multifamily complex may seem challenging, but with the right tools and strong partnerships, we can successfully divert household food waste from landfills and channel it toward more environmentally beneficial uses,” Aldridge said.

For those looking to install a similar program in a multifamily complex, Thomez noted it starts by just “cutting the cord” and going all-in.

“Your residents will follow suit; if they see it’s important to you, it will be important to them,” she said. “And if you share with your residents the ‘why,’ it makes it a much more palatable and easy conversation, and you will see adoption become easier.”

Keith Loria is a freelance writer and can be contacted at  freelancekeith@gmail.com.

Posted in Resource Recycling Magazine | Tagged |

Fossil-free plastic packaging: Pipe dream or realistic scenario?

Published: November 20, 2024
Updated:
by

Courtesy of Neste

This article appeared in the November 2024 issue of Resource Recycling. Subscribe today for access to all print content.

With slight differences across regions, some 30-40% of global plastics demand comes from packaging production. Low cost and functional properties make plastics an intriguing packaging solution. Yet it comes at a price from a climate perspective: With 90% of global plastics being made from fossil resources, our appetite for wrapping things in plastics takes a toll on the environment. In theory, plastics are well-suited for recycling, but there are various hurdles to turn this theory into practice at global scale, including the need to collect and sort, the limits of existing recycling technologies when it comes to impure, multi-material or layered materials, and demanding and sensitive plastic applications.

Considering the highly valued properties plastics offer and the limited availability in many cases of alternatives at scale, there is a wish to continue using them. Yet the question will be how can we make plastics production, use and waste management more sustainable. In parallel to recycling, do we have options to move from fossil-based to non-fossil based solutions?

I am convinced that there is reason for hope.

If it can be recycled, it should be recycled

Our priority should be to recycle whatever can be recycled. On the one hand, existing mechanical recycling has to be expanded. Whenever mechanical recycling can be done, it should be done. However, the aforementioned limitations of mechanical recycling lead to the need for new recycling technologies such as chemical recycling. Thus, whenever mechanical recycling is not feasible, for example due to waste streams being too mixed or impure — or the final products being too demanding quality-wise — chemical recycling can close the gap. A lot is happening in this regard.

At Neste, we are ourselves currently investing in chemical recycling capabilities at our refinery in Finland, focusing on turning liquefied waste plastic into high-quality raw material for new plastics, but other companies are also pushing new recycling technologies. Chances are good that this will enable us to increase recycling of plastics including plastic packaging in the future. But a question will remain: Will recycling be enough? Unfortunately not.

Demand for plastics and packaging is increasing at global scale. Aside from that, collection, sorting and recycling aren’t perfect processes. They come with material losses. Thus, even at a recycling rate of 100% (and we are currently only at some 10% globally!), we wouldn’t be able to meet the demand for new plastics just through recycling. Meeting the demand will require us to tap into other (renewable) material pools — and one of these is biomass.

Biogenic carbon is available in large quantities as a more sustainable feedstock

Plastics made from bio-based materials aren’t new, and there is a broad range of different approaches and technologies to turn biomass into polymers. They all share one basic concept and a common advantage, though: using biogenic carbon instead of fossil carbon, and as a result reducing greenhouse gas emissions over the lifecycle of plastics.

So let’s focus on the route of using bio-based waste and residues to achieve that goal, as this is also what we at Neste are experts on. Initially, we used these materials — for example, used cooking oil or residues from vegetable oil production — to produce fuels like renewable diesel or sustainable aviation fuel. We still do so, but the renewable hydrocarbon products our refineries produce can also be used to replace fossil naphtha or propane in the production of plastics. In fact, bio-based waste and residue oils and fats can be used to produce a one-to-one replacement for fossil plastics feedstock that can also be used in a blend with fossil feedstock. The plastics and chemicals produced that way are just the same as those made from conventional fossil raw materials, be it common polypropylene or polyethylene, PET or similar.

This is why we call it a drop-in solution: same performance, same characteristics, different raw material, different carbon footprint. The difference in the carbon footprint can be quite significant. Replacing fossil feedstock with bio-based feedstock may see GHG emissions plummet by more than 85% over the plastics’ lifecycle.

The question of scalability and availability

Plastics made with bio-based materials are not a vision but a reality already today. Neste alone — and we are not the only ones active in this field — has a production capacity for renewable products of 6 million tons, set to grow to 7.5 million tons within the next three years. Other providers are increasing their capacities as well, so there are good chances that bio-based materials can contribute to the defossilization of plastics, and thus plastic packaging, at industrial scale.

While production capacities are one thing, the required raw materials are another. The amount of commonly used waste and residue oils and fats is finite. Experts predict that the global availability of such resources could exceed 44 million tons annually from 2030 onwards. Considering the current global plastics production is somewhere around 440 million tons, this limited supply highlights a significant gap. Furthermore, it’s important to acknowledge that these oils and fats are not solely designated for plastics production; they are also utilized in manufacturing fuels and other products, emphasizing the need to explore alternative solutions. This means that further renewable carbon pools will be required. Research and development efforts are looking at various options for that, including algae, lignocellulosics or so-called novel vegetable oils, which are vegetable oils that do not compete with food and animal feed production and feature regenerative agricultural concepts. Aside from these bio-based options, a long-term alternative is Power-to-X, which converts CO2 and green hydrogen into hydrocarbons.

The time is now to pave the way for defossilization

The next years will be decisive to enable a future for fossil-free plastics and plastics packaging. New recycling solutions like chemical recycling are in a commercialization phase, and now is the time to ramp them up. While already available in large volumes, bio-based materials need to be incorporated at a broader scale throughout plastics production. These will be decisive factors to ensure that alternative solutions, on top of mechanical recycling, can play their role in defossilizing the industry in the long-term. I am confident it can be done.

Maiju Helin is head of market development for polymers and chemicals at Neste. Previously, she was head of sustainability and regulatory transformation and of stakeholder management for Neste’s Renewable Polymers and Chemicals business. Prior to Neste, Maiju worked at UPM Biofuels in various roles.

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 news@resource-recycling.com for consideration.

Posted in Resource Recycling Magazine | Tagged |

Expanding the tire recycling front

Published: November 20, 2024
Updated:
by

24K-Production/Shutterstock

This article appeared in the November 2024 issue of Resource Recycling. Subscribe today for access to all print content.

Tire recycling, by and large, means chopping up tires and doing one of two things with the pieces: using them as-is, such as in mulch or artificial turf pellets, or burning them for fuel. But these traditional markets haven’t been keeping pace with new tire generation, according to the latest data from the U.S. Tire Manufacturers Association, an industry advocacy group. And researchers, public officials and others across the country are working to push tire recycling in new directions, including into the same roads those tires once traveled.

More than 3.8 million tons of used tires were processed into usable products in the U.S. in 2023, a 79% diversion rate, according to the association’s biennial End-of-Life Tire Management Report, the newest version of which was released in October. The figure was an uptick from 71% two years prior but was also the exception topping off a decade of decline from the peak of 96% in 2013, according to the association’s previous data.

John Sheerin, the organization’s senior director of end-of-life tire programs, said the bump was likely from temporary factors. The dip in miles driven at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, meant a dip in used-up tires to manage, and higher natural gas prices resulting from Russia’s war on Ukraine made tire-derived fuel more appealing for furnaces, paper mills and similar facilities.

Barring these blips, U.S. tire consumption rises ever upward, Sheerin said, and the tide is against carbon-emitting fuels like TDF and the coal it often supplements. The problem requires development of end markets like rubber-modified asphalt, an association priority that has been gradually drawing more support at the state and federal level.

“We have a ways to go,” Sheerin said. Still, “a lot of things are going in the right direction, and there’s a lot of energy in the field right now.”

Street-level work

Used tires are of course a universal issue, often the biggest class of material collected by weight for the local programs that accept them. States from Alabama to California devote millions of dollars to grants and other programs for tire management, like the $2 million awarded by West Virginia to 22 businesses and local governments early this year. Connecticut in 2023 passed the country’s first statewide extended producer responsibility law for tires, which state officials expect to go into practice next year.

In Tennessee, state officials have taken deliberate steps to grow the used-tire supply chain, said Chris Pianta, an environmental program manager for the Department of Environment and Conservation’s Office of Sustainable Practices.

Since 2015, a small fee on new vehicles has gone into the Tire Environmental Act Program, which awards yearly grants for a mixture of private and public organizations. To build options and lower transportation costs, the first several years’ grants focused on increasing the number of local tire processors, Pianta said. The state has since gone from just one processor to half a dozen.

“I think we’re definitely in a better spot than we were nine years ago,” he said, noting that the grants over their history have contributed more than $10 million to 30-plus projects that diverted 7.6 million tires. “Hopefully we’re starting to make a dent.”

One such processor was Memphis Tire Recyclers, which started in late 2021 after its founders saw an opportunity in addressing hoarded and illegally dumped tires around the city, said Corteney Mack, its chief business officer and co-owner.

Memphis Tire received more than $460,000 from the state grant program in 2022 to buy equipment and facility upgrades, in some cases years earlier than the owners originally planned. The business now has three locations and customers buying all of the crumb rubber, tire-derived aggregate and tire-derived fuel it can make.

“It definitely helped take our business to new heights quicker than we anticipated,” Mack said.

Now Tennessee’s grant program has diversified into more, smaller recipients with projects that directly use scrap tire products, Pianta said. The bulk of this year’s $1.6 million in grants went to tire-rubber trails at state parks and other public areas, for example. Another $147,000 went to a Memphis nonprofit called the Binghampton Development Corporation to install bicycle lane barriers along 6 miles of city streets.

The BDC works to build job skills and work experience for communities in need, such as those with histories of substance abuse or with the criminal justice system, said Andy Kizzee, director of the BDC business hub. The organization has been around for two decades, but over just the past few years it has partnered with the city of Memphis, local professionals and others to recycle a variety of challenging materials. The push all began about three years ago with the confluence of two community problems.

“Memphis has the second-most pedestrian and bicycle deaths in the country, and we’ve got a huge illegal dumping problem,” Kizzee said. So a local urban planner, Laura Murray, partnered with a local industrial artist, Tad Pierson, and with the BDC to try to help both problems at once by converting dumped tires into barriers shaped like camelbacks, upright panels or three-leafed clovers. The barriers are bolted directly to the pavement and alert drivers if they start crossing the line.

Courtesy of Binghampton Development Corporation

Grants from the state tire program, the nonprofit People for Bikes and elsewhere funded a 1-mile pilot in 2022, and now the project is ready for another leap that’ll start in January, Kizzee said. And it will reach beyond dumped tires to make a bigger dent in the tire issue.

“We’ll be sourcing those from tire shops — small mom-and-pop tire shops that wouldn’t necessarily have a contract with a hauler or tire processor,” he said.

Into the asphalt recipe

Tennessee’s approach has also touched on a relatively small but growing trend toward rubber-modified asphalt, a type of pavement that incorporates finely ground tire rubber as an ingredient. The resulting mixture can extend road lifespans, reduce repair costs over time and bring other benefits, according to a state-of-knowledge report released in 2021 by the tire manufacturers association, the University of Missouri and The Ray, a nonprofit pushing for more sustainable transportation.

The technology has been the subject of testing in multiple states, including on several hundred miles of roads in Alabama, Georgia and Michigan. The University of Tennessee-Knoxville received a state grant of about $350,000 in 2023 for similar research.

A small sliver of old tires, about 3%, was used for asphalt applications in 2023, according to the manufacturers association report released in October. But the nation’s highways and roads represent a massive possible end market for the hundreds of millions of used tires generated every year, said Baoshan Huang, a professor in UTK’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering who’s overseeing the tire research project.

“The biggest potential application is to put it into asphalt pavement,” he said. “Our society, our community, does have a need to utilize this waste tire rubber, and also there are technologies that can use it more effectively.”

UTK is partnering with the state Department of Transportation to test the asphalt on sections of roads, developing mixtures and experimenting with such details as how much to de-vulcanize, or essentially cook, the rubber to get the best results.

It’s a common topic of research across the country, since every state sets its own pavement specifications and has its own climates and other concerns, said Sheerin with the manufacturers association.

“You can’t just throw some rubber in there and say it’s good,” he said. “They want to see work on the ground in their state that has lasted for some time.”

Sheerin reiterated the many potential benefits to rubber-modified asphalt, including its durability and its ability to be recycled multiple times as roads are resurfaced. The Tire Recycling Foundation, which works in concert with the association, received $3.8 million from the U.S. EPA in July as part of a round of grants supporting low-carbon manufacturing. The money is meant to help develop robust environmental product declarations that show environmental impacts across the life of a product, which could help spur more widespread adoption of the technology.

“At present it’s a relatively small market,” Sheerin said, “and it needs to grow substantially.”

Posted in Resource Recycling Magazine | Tagged |

E-Scrap Conference 2024 highlights

Published: November 20, 2024
Updated:
by

Big Wave Productions/Resource Recycling, Inc.

This article appeared in the November 2024 issue of Resource Recycling. Subscribe today for access to all print content.

Orlando, Florida, was e-scrap central in late September and early October as around 950 industry leaders attended the 21st annual E-Scrap Conference, one of Resource Recycling’s three annual conferences. Dozens of sessions and an expo hall brought the e-scrap, ITAD and ITAM industries together to discuss how coming laws might affect them and the best ways to build public trust, industry resilience, compliance and circularity.

Untapped potential in plastics

With domestic demand building slowly, U.S. recyclers must look to other industries to absorb their e-plastics volumes, several executives said during a session focused on electronics’ non-metal side on Oct. 2.

Since North America offers little in the way of electronics manufacturers who might buy recycled e-plastics, the automotive sector in Asia and Mexico is a key area of growth, especially for ABS and polypropylene, said panelist Zhan “Bo” Zhang, director of BoMet Polymer Solutions. Japan and South Korea are among the top five countries for automobile production, for example, and they sell to Europe, which has upcoming mandates that new vehicles contain 25% recycled plastics.

Extending U.S. mandates beyond beverage bottles and into other industries could enable processors and recyclers to expand, added Hong Yoon, CEO of Hanil Eco Solutions, based in Southern California.

South Korea has a relatively small and stagnant population and thus a small supply of old vehicles, Yoon said. In addition, Korea does not shred used vehicles, opting instead to sell them to Russia and other countries. As such, Korea has a limited supply of post-consumer resin.

Meanwhile, the U.S. has a vast supply of used vehicles destined for shredding, Yoon said: “I want recyclers to understand that the material you’re shipping to Malaysia and other parts of Asia will be a strategic resource in the future that you have control of.”

As for current recovery streams, the recyclers on the panel agreed that they would like to see cleaner, more segregated e-scrap streams to help improve profit margins as well as yields. Yoon said Hanil also tries to find ways to recover more e-scrap so the onus isn’t only on feedstock suppliers.

In the EU, extended producer responsibility laws have definitely helped clean up recycling streams, said Pablo León, CEO of Spain-based recycler Sostenplas. This has made feedstock volumes more homogenous, though countries vary in collection practices, he added.

Nevertheless, upstream processors may not know what U.S. recyclers are looking for in regards to quality, said Clive Hess, president of ITAD processor CompuCycle.

“What we consider clean material is not clean material,” he said, using the example of printers shipped with paper and ink cartridges still inside. Hess described CompuCycle as a relative newcomer to the industry. It upgraded its six-year-old Houston plant with a float-sink system in November 2023 and in July 2024 added an electrostatic system to separate out ABS, polystyrene, polyethylene and PP.

A major roadblock for recycling of any plastic in the U.S. is the lack of mandates. European EPR schemes have contributed to material getting recycled, Leon said, but in the U.S. demand may lag because end users think there is no supply. But if no one recycles ABS, for example, there will be no demand for it, either.

In addition, in Europe recycled plastics have been available for decades, so the manufacturing industry is accustomed to using PCR, he said. Demand “is not something you build in one or two years.”

Zhang said that in the next three to four years, interest will grow but uncertainty will remain, including upcoming implementation of amendments to the Basel Convention, whose regulatory effects on supply are yet unclear.

Hess said processing e-plastics has to become more economical, with domestic
costs far higher than international. “There’s a very large supply of our product,” he said. “We just need to be able to process it economically.”

– by Antoinette Smith

Celebrating Billy Johnson’s life

Industry leaders opened the conference on Sept. 30 with a tribute to the Recycled Materials Association’s chief lobbyist, Billy Johnson, who passed away suddenly the Saturday before. Johnson, who had worked for ReMA for two decades, was “a tireless advocate for the recycled materials industry, and for the well-being of all of our members,” a ReMA statement said. “He was incredibly effective at raising our voice on Capitol Hill and within five Presidential Administrations, ensuring that our industry was known throughout Washington and the interests of all members were protected.”

Others spoke fondly of Johnson during the conference’s opening plenary session. Colleague Cheryl Coleman, ReMA senior vice president of advocacy, safety and sustainability, recalled his kindness, while Craig Boswell of HOBI International emphasized how much Johnson did for the industry and how his presence was a staple at conferences.

Over his years of work, Johnson secured a special accelerated depreciation allowance for qualified recycling equipment through the Recycled Investment Saves Energy Act, challenged the market dominance of railroads on demurrage and accessorial charges, and achieved an essential business designation for the recycled materials industry from the Department of Homeland Security during the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic.

– by Marissa Heffernan

Reuse and recycling not at odds

During the opening plenary session highlighting current key trends in e-scrap and ITAD, industry experts discussed device repair, design regulations and battery fire dangers.

Walter Alcorn, vice president of environmental affairs and industry sustainability at the Consumer Technology Association, which represents OEMs, said manufacturers are seeing a continued focus on device repairability. He projected that will translate less into a mass movement of consumers repairing their own devices and more into more independent repair shops. Manufacturers have begun to open up to this idea much more than in years past, he added.

“That is a Rubicon we’ve crossed,” he said, referring to treating independent repair shops the same as authorized refurbishers. “We’re pretty much there.”

That’s a positive for e-scrap processors, who are dealing with lightweighting in devices contributing to lower volumes of precious metals recovered.

“There’s more value in reusable parts components,” Alcorn said. “The resale markets continue to be an important source of revenue.”

ReMA’s Coleman added that despite how it’s sometimes framed, recycling isn’t really at odds with reuse. Even with far greater adoption of refurbishment and reuse, those devices will still ultimately make their way to the recycling stream, she explained. So it doesn’t take away from commodities recovery in the end.

“Eventually it’s coming our way,” she said. “Maximize its use.”

And it’s an environmental win, said Jim Levine, senior vice president of North American operations for major ITAD firm Iron Mountain.

“We all know that repurposing and reuse is a lot more stress-free on the environment than recycling is,” Levine said.

That said, Levine highlighted room for improvement in device design for repair. He advocated for manufacturers to take an approach that embraces modular design allowing for easily removable and replaceable batteries rather than producing products with a glued-in battery. Alcorn strongly objected.

“The last thing I would want to see is consumers trying to figure out what battery to put in their smartphone,” Alcorn said. “If you put the wrong battery into the wrong phone, sometimes you get a thermal event, sometimes it doesn’t work.”

– by Colin Staub

Certification workshops

A pair of sessions dug into the finer points of e-Stewards and R2, two frequently competing, though sometimes collaborating, certification programs that recognize the safe, responsible reuse and recycling of electronic devices. Earning these certifications brings benefits to the recipient both directly and indirectly, their respective representatives said.

E-scrap and ITAD firms’ customers, for example, more and more insist on such a certification in order to comply with data protection laws where violations can cost tens of millions of dollars. Such missteps by Morgan Stanley in the late 2010s cost that company more than $160 million in settlements and fines, for example.

“It just makes life easier for multinational companies to work with R2,” said Patty McKenzie, education and outreach director at SERI, the owner and administrator of R2 certification.

Certification can also help companies stand out in answering RFPs and going about their business, said Daniel Puckett, business director for e-Stewards — if the recipients show off their certification on websites, in pamphlets and in bids for contracts.

“They shout to the whole market, ‘Hey, we know what we’re doing,’” he said of the e-Steward badges.

The two certifications scrutinize similar business aspects, such as material destinations and Basel Convention compliance, but also differ in important ways, the officials said. R2 certifies individual facilities, for example, while e-Stewards applies to companies.

– by Dan Holtmeyer

Posted in Resource Recycling Magazine | Tagged |

Goodwill sets its sights on recycling

Published: October 15, 2024
Updated:
by

Zsolt Biczo/Shutterstock.

This article appeared in the October 2024 issue of Resource Recycling. Subscribe today for access to all print content.

While Goodwill Industries International has long been associated with the reuse portion of the waste management hierarchy, the nonprofit secondhand store giant is making inroads to being a national heavyweight in recycling textiles, glass and other materials, several of its leaders recently said.

“Today, our positioning to drive change in circularity is unmatched,” Steve Preston, president and CEO of Goodwill Industries International, said during the Rockville, Maryland-based organization’s first Sustainability Summit, held in mid-August in Washington, D.C.

Goodwill as a brand is recognized by over 90% of the U.S. population, Preston explained, and more than 80% of Americans live within 10 miles of one of its 3,300 stores. In 2023, Goodwill diverted 4.3 billion pounds of products from disposal.

“We have over 135,000 employees, massive logistical networks with warehousing, transportation and technology to support it,” Preston added. “As a result, when we look at what could be, we know that we have the ability to be the most consequential player in our lane, to drive circularity in North America.”

Doing that requires not only collaboration across Goodwill stores but also “increasingly with formidable partners outside of Goodwill,” he said. Those include stakeholders in technology, automation and other fields.

Many of the nonprofit’s recent moves have been the result of a simple fact that much of what’s donated for resale often can only be thrown away — in huge volumes. Nick Carlson, business development director for Goodwill of West Michigan and board chair for the Michigan Recycling Coalition, said his Goodwill organization sees about 30% of the material that comes in head to a landfill because it’s not in a condition to be resold.

“We’re trying to think of ourselves as material managers,” Carlson said.

Other regional leaders shared similar sentiments. Colleen Morrone, president and CEO of Goodwill of Delaware and Delaware County, said three regional Goodwill organizations receive 113 million pounds of donations per year, equivalent to the weight about 25 fully-assembled space shuttles.

“That’s a lot of donations, and when we look around the room and add up everybody else’s donations, we’ve got a lot of space shuttles,” she said.

Besides running a regional Goodwill, Morrone leads Goodwill’s international sustainability committee, and she and her fellow D.C.-area directors over the last few years had a series of conversations about how to increase diversion from their locations.

“I also knew that in order for us to build a successful recycling solution, Goodwill of Delaware and Delaware County could not do it alone,” she said. “Businesses that are interested in using our non-saleable products as feedstock need them at scale.”

Lisa Rusyniak, president and CEO of Goodwill Industries of the Chesapeake, noted that boosting diversion also brings a financial benefit for Goodwill stores in reduced disposal costs. And she emphasized it fits squarely within Goodwill’s mission, both environmentally and fiscally.

“With our commitment to maximize the value of every item donated to us, combined with the pricing volatility of the salvage market, it’s imperative that we find markets for all of our non-sellable donations,” Rusyniak said.

How stores are approaching diversion

Goodwills around the country have embarked on a number of region-specific projects. Morrone described a partnership with Trex, the recycled-plastic composite decking producer that is a major end user of LDPE and LLDPE. The Greater Washington, Delaware and Chesapeake Goodwills have sent Trex nearly 20 million bags, “an important ingredient in the creation of their sustainable decking boards that are used by many of us in our homes across the country,” she said.

She added those Goodwills are also working on a partnership to send glass products to a processor that will pulverize them into sand. The resulting material has “the potential to be used in concrete abrasives, cleaning supplies and maybe even beach restoration,” Morrone said.

At Carlson’s Goodwill organization in Michigan, a project with plastics processor HydroBlox Technologies turns polypropylene and polyethylene into stormwater drainage management systems. Pittsburgh-based HydroBlox uses the plastics to produce 100% recycled-content products of porous plastic that’s used in construction to increase drainage.

In Phoenix, a regional Goodwill organization earlier this year launched a rigid plastics recycling project targeting HDPE and PP. And that pilot effort is gearing up to grow into a self-sustaining commercial operation. Beth Forsberg, senior vice president of sustainability for Goodwill of Central and Northern Arizona, said her regional Goodwill is recovering plastics No. 2 and No. 5 — not only from its own waste stream but from other partnering groups as well.

“We are actually putting them through everything from the shredding process to creating pellets,” Forsberg said.

Housed in a 10,000-square-foot facility, in its pilot stage the project involved installing a wet wash system, drying drum, an extruder, a pelletizer, a sheet press and a molding machine, stakeholders told Resource Recycling earlier this year. At the time, the pilot project anticipated having a capacity to process 500 to 600 tons of scrap plastic per year.

Forsberg announced that the project is scaling up beyond the pilot stage. Within the next four to six months, “there will actually be a product,” she told the summit.

The facility is processing a variety of inbound product types, including materials that are rarely recycled like yard signs.

“All the political signs are clean plastics that can be shredded and made into other materials,” Forsberg said.

Market potential

Goodwill partnering with recycling firms and expanding the types of diversion it does has the potential to rebrand the organization to consumers, Steve Alexander, CEO of the Association of Plastic Recyclers, said at the summit. APR owns Resource Recycling, Inc., publisher of this magazine.

He made a case to attendees that Goodwill has “an opportunity to expand your reclamation footprint, that will reposition you along with what you’re doing on textiles, as the consumer sustainability organization.”

Alexander pointed to extended producer responsibility laws that are increasingly passing in U.S. states. Some of those laws, such as Oregon’s, include a mechanism to provide funding to collection depots for the materials covered.

In Oregon, nine Goodwill locations are on the approved depot list, meaning they’ll receive funding from Circular Action Alliance, the producer responsibility organization managing Oregon’s system. And Alexander noted there is also the material commodity value on the back end.

“Essentially, you can double-dip: You get paid to be a repository, and then you get paid when you sell and market the material,” Alexander said.

Additionally, while only a handful of states have currently passed EPR for packaging — California, Colorado, Maine, Minnesota and Oregon — Alexander said it’s only a matter of time before it’s a “de facto standard,” albeit likely not through federal legislation. That means more opportunities on the horizon to take advantage of Goodwill’s sizable footprint.

Alexander said he sees a particularly strong opportunity for Goodwill to become a leader in film and flexible packaging recovery, a stream that has had significant challenges in collection of late.

“Industry has spent millions, hundreds of millions of dollars trying to force film and flexible material into existing collection programs, curbside programs,” he said. “It doesn’t work, because it doesn’t go through the sorting process.”

Having dedicated drop-off locations, and an organization like Goodwill that is deepening its involvement in sorting and grading inbound materials, could be a significant opportunity for film recovery, he said.

In pilot, hub model shows promise

Widely known for its secondhand clothing, Goodwill has taken a particular interest in boosting textile recycling.
For the past two years, Goodwill’s national organization carried out a $1.3 million textile recycling pilot project funded by the Walmart Foundation. The organization released some of the takeaways from that project during the summit.

The goal was to “transform usable textile donations into feedstock for textile recycling,” said Preston, the Goodwill Industries International CEO, and it focused on developing an infrastructure to aggregate and sort textiles in preparation for either reuse or recycling at scale.

“As part of the research, we analyzed fiber composition of post-retail textiles and learned that approximately 60% of the material was found to be suitable for existing recycling technologies,” he said. “That finding reinforces our position as a key player and a feedstock supplier in the emerging textile recycling ecosystem.”

The grant also went towards testing a system of four regional textile hubs in Canada, Michigan, the Northeast U.S. and Southeast U.S. At each hub, Goodwill tested methods of sorting and grading textiles to identify what could be reused or recycled.

“As part of the grant, each of the four regional hubs developed business plans and advanced sortation models that can be replicated across the Goodwill network and adopted by other social enterprises for the advancement of textile circularity,” Goodwill added in a statement.

On the heels of that project, the Walmart Foundation granted Goodwill another $2 million for a project “to follow the global journey of secondhand textiles,” the organization stated.

The focus on textile recycling comes against a landscape of daunting statistics. By 2015, there were an estimated 92 million tons of textile waste generated globally each year, according to Boston Consulting Firm, which produced a widely cited Pulse of the Fashion Industry report in 2017. The consulting firm projected that number would expand to 148 million tons per year by 2030.

According to the most recent U.S. EPA figures, in 2018 the U.S. produced 17 million tons of textile waste. Of that amount, 2.5 million tons were recycled, for a diversion rate of 14.7%. Globally, the number is lower than 1%, said Patrik Frisk, formerly CEO of Under Armour and current CEO of emerging textile recycling firm ReJu, during a summit panel discussion.

And the bulk of that material is PET — polyester — which makes up about 56% of all fibers produced globally each year, Frisk said. One factor complicating recovery is that clothing is made from a combination of different materials.

“The reason we’re not recycling more is because the technology to be able to separate the chemistry that exists when you combine things, is so difficult that it’s taken a long time for somebody to innovate their way there,” Frisk said. That technical challenge comes alongside a lack of regulation requiring such a system to develop, of collection networks and of scaled sortation technology specific to textiles.

ReJu launched in 2023 and began planning what it calls a “regeneration center,” which it anticipates will take three years to complete. The company, which has been closely following Goodwill’s efforts in textile grading and preparation for recycling, also launched a demonstration plant in Germany at the end of August.

“Can you imagine, we’re going to space, we’re driving electric cars, but we’re not sorting apparel even in a semi-automatic way anywhere in the world today?” Frisk said. He noted that textile sorting is traditionally done by product type, not by the type of base fiber material. While sorting by product type can be done manually, sorting by fiber composition requires additional equipment.

Frisk dismissed the idea of moving away from polyester in favor of natural materials for textile production, saying it’s simply “not possible.” Its attributes like water resistance, light weight, machine washability and durability are just too useful.

“We can’t live without it, unfortunately, for the foreseeable future,” Frisk said. “It’s an amazing product that we need to understand how to live with in a much smarter way.”

Posted in Resource Recycling Magazine | Tagged , |

Building and reaching: EPA opens grant applications

Published: October 15, 2024
Updated:
by

Rawpixel.com/Shutterstock.

This article appeared in the October 2024 issue of Resource Recycling. Subscribe today for access to all print content.

If you missed the chance to grab a slice of the $198 million federal recycling grant pie last year, your second chance has arrived.

More than $100 million is available to local governments, Native tribes and other organizations for either recycling infrastructure on one hand or public education around the topics of food waste and composting on the other, the U.S. EPA announced in September. The announcement came as recipients of the first round in 2023 began hiring staff, collecting data, buying equipment and launching local outreach campaigns.

All of those millions came courtesy of the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which allocated hundreds of billions of dollars to transportation, energy and other sectors.

“Thanks to President Biden’s Investing in America agenda, EPA is deploying unprecedented resources to improve recycling services and increase educational outreach to communities,” EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan said in a written statement. “When we work together to prevent waste that contributes to climate change, we support local economies, create jobs that pay well, and better protect the health of everyone in the community.”

As in the first round, the new grant program prioritizes proposals that would benefit “communities that are marginalized by underinvestment and overburdened by pollution” while bolstering a more circular economy nationwide, according to the announcement. It’s available in three buckets:

  • Solid Waste Infrastructure for Recycling grants for federally recognized tribes and intertribal consortia: $20 million total for individual grants ranging from $100,000 to $1.5 million, to establish, grow or otherwise improve recycling collection and management systems. As of this writing, applications are due March 14, 2025.
  • SWIFR grants for political subdivisions of states and territories, such as cities and counties: $58 million total for individual grants from $500,000 to $5 million, for the same purposes as the tribal grants. Applications are due Dec. 20.
  • Recycling education and outreach: a single $39 million grant for a coalition project that would implement a national consumer food waste reduction campaign, increase the market for compost and boost education and outreach about composting. Applications are due Dec. 20.

Applying for federal grants can be an intimidating process, requiring meticulous documentation and detailed planning. But it’s also an arena where even small organizations that have never received a federal grant before can succeed, said Jill Buck, founder and board member of the Go Green Initiative. The California-based nonprofit received $1.1 million last year, its first EPA grant ever, to work with school district staff and high school students in Camden, New Jersey, to spread understanding and participation in recycling programs.

“It’s not for the weak of heart, I will tell you that,” Buck said of the application process, adding that applicants should start early and take advantage of EPA’s informational sessions and other technical assistance. “This is the ultimate reading comprehension exercise; you really have to be fastidious and have tremendous attention to detail when it comes to the instructions.”

Fitting all of the needed information within the page limit can feel “like squeezing a watermelon into a Coke bottle,” she said. “Then you need to demonstrate that you can handle the money.”

A clear and compelling purpose also helps, said Susan Caswell, sustainability director for Florida’s Osceola County. The county received about $750,000 for an education and demonstration effort with a particular focus on glass, which the county had to give up in its bids for county-wide recycling and trash pickup service in 2019 — “every single potential vendor asked us to remove glass,” Caswell said. Yet why the county doesn’t recycle glass is still one of the most frequent questions she hears, and some residents pay a private service to collect it.

The education campaign will work with local schools and feature a mobile glass pulverizer, not only to process the material right in front of residents’ own eyes but also to harness the latent interest in glass to inspire recycling initiatives in the area, Caswell said. The area is full of hotels and restaurants, for example, which generate “just a tremendous amount of glass.”

“We went for the education and outreach kind of as the first step in rethinking glass recycling for the county,” Caswell said. “It allowed us to tell that story in an effective way.”

Projects such as these also highlight how the EPA grants can have ripple effects, both in their targeted communities and in others that might follow their example. Buck said the New Jersey plan — particularly environmental clubs, internships and leadership development for high school students — already proved itself in Pleasanton, California. Since the Go Green Initiative launched a similar project almost a decade ago, the city has seen recycling rates and collections rise while contamination fell by 27%, according to a letter from the city to the EPA.

“They were getting out to businesses and church groups and civic organizations,” Buck said of the Pleasanton students. And as Caswell put it, when it comes to the youth, “if you get them engaged in it, then they start getting on their parents’ case to do better.”

Posted in Resource Recycling Magazine | Tagged , , |
BESbswyBESbswyBESbswyBESbswyBESbswyBESbswyBESbswyBESbswy