The company says the Las Vegas facility is the first in the United States and will supply the growing demand for recycled plastics in consumer packaging.
Republic Services Inc., Phoenix, has announced plans to construct an integrated plastics recycling facility in Las Vegas. The company says it will address increasing demand from consumer brands and packaging manufacturers for recycled plastic.
"Packaged goods manufacturers have set ambitious targets to use more postconsumer content in their products, but the current supply of recycled plastics falls short,” says Republic President and CEO Jon Vander Ark.
Dubbed the First Polymer Center, the facility is expected to open in 2023. According to a news release from the company, the facility is expected to produce more than 100 million pounds annually of recycled plastic products. This includes 100 percent postconsumer polyethylene terephthalate (PET) flake delivered to the food-grade marketplace to enable bottle-to-bottle circularity.
“The facility has an inbound design capacity of 160 million pounds,” says Pete Keller, Republic’s vice president of recycling and sustainability. “However, we anticipate processing less than that during initial ramp up.”
The facility will handle material from Republic’s facilities in the West as a result of increased demand for recycled content due to new legislation in California and Washington that requires postconsumer recycled plastic to be used in new products. Both require 15 percent postconsumer recycled plastic content that will gradually increase to 50 percent by 2030.
“Republic will mainly handle material from its recycling facilities in the western part of the U.S. but the site will also have the capacity for third-party volume,” Keller adds.
Engineering work for the facility has been completed and applications for permits for the site were submitted last week, Keller says. The facility will be built on an existing structure that will be expanded and retrofitted.
Keller says the company has purchased a turnkey system from Krones, based in Germany, that includes components from multiple technology providers. The facility will be equipped with optical sorters, bale-breaking equipment, wire-tie removal and recovery machinery. It also will use wet grinding and float-sink tank to separate PET from label and cap materials.
In addition to the First Polymer Center, Republic plans to build up to three more facilities like this in regions that will enable it to provide nationwide coverage. The facilities are expected to be operational by 2025, Keller says.
The company says the centers directly support its long-term sustainability goal to increase the recovery and circularity of key materials by 40 percent by 2030 and will help customers meet their sustainability goals.
The manufacturer added a new machine building with more than 14,000 square feet of production and training space.
Harris, a division of Upland, Indiana-based Avis Industrial that manufacturers equipment for the recycling industry, has announced the expansion of its machine shop at its Cordele, Georgia, manufacturing complex.
The expansion involved the construction of a new machine building, adjacent to the current machine shop, with more than 14,000 square feet of production and training space. The expanded capacity will house CNC machining centers for turning, milling, drilling and shaping. It also will provide a central meeting and training space for the nearly 150 employees on the Cordele campus.
Harris’ Cordele manufacturing complex is a 130-year-old, 22-acre facility served by direct rail access. It encompasses facilities for fabricating, machining, cylinder manufacturing and assembly of Harris’ largest balers and shears, as well as the Harris TransPak units.
“Harris is the only supplier in the industry that manufactures their units ‘from the steel up’ and performs all of that work in the U.S.,” says company President D.J. Van Deusen. “Our renowned design and construction builds machines that operate over generations, and the hydraulics systems at the heart of our machines are what make them fast, productive and efficient.”
He adds, “We are thrilled to provide an upgraded environment for our skilled machinists, excited about the efficiency gains the new layout will provide and proud to be making this substantial investment at home in Cordele and Crisp County, Georgia.”
Harris manufactures a complete line of shears, balers and shredders for the processing of recyclables and solid waste.
The company says it has expanded to meet strong demand for recycled polypropylene and polyethylene.
EFS-plastics Inc., a plastics recycling company headquartered in Listowel, Ontario, has announced that it is opening a new processing facility in Lethbridge, Alberta, which will increase its access to the feedstock it needs to produce its recycled resins.
The 70,000-square-foot facility will increase the company’s processing capacity by 10,000 metric tons, or 20 percent, annually, EFS-plastics says.
Beginning in the first week of April, the company will accept Nos. 3-7 and Nos. 1-7 mixed rigid plastic bales from material recovery facilities (MRFs) in the western United States and Canada, tapping into the strong relationships EFS has developed with these suppliers since China implemented its National Sword Policy that limited the export of postconsumer plastics in 2018. The company will be recovering high-density polyethylene (HDPE) and polypropylene (PP) to produce postconsumer resin (PCR).
“We have been sourcing material from MRFs in the Pacific Northwest and western Canada since 2018,” Eadaoin Quinn, the company’s director of business development and procurement, says. “A facility in Lethbridge, Alberta, solidifies already strong relationships with suppliers and reduces [the] carbon footprint associated with transportation.”
“As we increase the amount of recycled resin we produce, we remain focused on keeping our carbon footprint as low as possible,” says Martin Vogt, president and CEO of EFS-plastics. “This new location allows us to cut carbon emissions associated with transportation as we extend the impact of our highly automated, mechanical recycling operations.”
While Quinn says the company will not be sourcing film for this facility initially, “we continue to look for new sources of film to supply our Ontario and Pennsylvania facility from across North America.”
The Lethbridge site will sort the mixed rigid plastic scrap using a process that is almost entirely automated using proprietary equipment, Quinn says. “However, we will make use of some manual quality control, allowing us to handle a broader spectrum of bale quality.”
The company says it sees the opportunity to recover more material from western North America that is lost to landfill or exported overseas. As interest in PCR grows, EFS says it is committed to developing domestic end markets that simplify the work of MRFs and provide customers with the high-quality postconsumer resin they seek.
Quinn adds that EFS is seeing increased demand for its PCR because of higher PE and PP pricing. “More importantly though, we are seeing new interest in PCR from brands that are looking to meet their public commitments and from manufacturers trying to stay ahead of legislative requirements that are popping up around North America.”
In addition to its Listowel facility, EFS operates a facility in Hazelton, Pennsylvania, where it also produces PP repro for injection molding applications, PE repro for injection molding and extrusion applications, low-density PE repro for extrusion applications and HDPE repro for extrusion and blow molding applications. Last summer the company vertically integrated, acquiring Exi-Plast Custom Moulding, which provides custom blow molding of plastic products and components.
Steelmaker, with mills in Canada and the U.S., is partially owned by a wealthy Russian considered an ally of the Putin government.
Russia-based steelmaker Evraz, which has North American operations that include scrap-fed electric arc furnace (EAF) mills in Colorado, Oregon and Canada, has seen the value of its London Stock Exchange-listed stock plummet since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine Feb. 24.
An early March report on the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (CBC) website indicates the company’s stock shares have lost some 90 percent of their value in the run-up to and especially after the Ukraine invasion.
A concerted and united effort by governments in Europe, North America and some other parts of the world to punish not only the Russian government but also banks and corporations considered friendly to the regime of Russia’s Vladimir Putin has caused the value of the nation’s currency and its stock market to plunge in value.
According to the CBC, the damage inflicted might not be over. “Ottawa isn’t ruling out sanctions against Russian-owned companies operating in Canada following the invasion of Ukraine—a list that could include the steelmaker Evraz, one of Regina [Sasketchewan]’s largest employers and whose majority shareholder is a Russian oligarch,” writes the news service.
The wealthy Russian in question, Roman Abramovich, owns a 28.6 percent stake in Evraz, according to the CBC. He has recently made news by offering to sell the Chelsea soccer club in the United Kingdom and donate the proceeds to humanitarian and rebuilding efforts in Ukraine.
According to the 2021 Recycling Today list of steelmaking melt shops, Evraz operates three steelmaking facilities in North America: a 1.1-million-tons-per-year plant in Pueblo, Colorado; an 840,000-tons-per-year plant in Portland, Oregon; and a 1.2-million-tons-per-year plant in Regina, Saskatchewan.
Regarding the near-term future of the Canadian mill, the CBC quotes Canada’s Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland as saying, “Everything is on the table and we are looking carefully at the holdings of oligarchs in Canada.”
Paper manufacturing association’s report spells out growing role of recycling in its sector.
A Paper Sustainability Report in Spain published by ASPAPEL (the Spanish Association of Pulp, Paper and Board Manufacturers) portrays the growing role of recycling in the nation’s paper and board sector.
The report “reflects the Spanish paper sector’s commitment to the circular economy and decarbonization, a road marked by achievements and opportunities such as the use of locally-produced, renewable and carbon-neutral raw materials; very high recycling rates, and having achieved the decoupling of carbon emissions from production growth, as well as the growing process of material substitution in which paper plays a leading role as an alternative to non-renewable and non-biodegradable products,” states Elisabet Alier, ASPAPEL board chair.
Decarbonization and managed forestry receive part of the report’s attention, along with recycling. On the recycling front, ASPAPEL writes, “Every year, Spanish paper mills recycle 5.1 million tons of used paper.”
The association says the recycling rate (paper that is recycled as raw material in paper mills as a percentage of the total consumption of paper and cardboard) in the country stands at 78 percent. In Europe, this ranks Spain behind only Germany by that measure, says ASPAPEL.
The collection effort in Spain, says the association, “guarantees that all paper collected separately and in accordance with European quality standards will be recycled in Spain.” Some 4.4 million tons of paper and board are collected for recycling annually, ASPAPEL adds.
The group continues, “A distinguishing feature of the Spanish paper industry is the use of local raw materials. With regard to paper for recycling, 71 percent of the used paper recycled by paper mills located in Spain is collected here and the rest comes mainly from [neighboring] France and Portugal.”