Irving, Texas-based Commercial Metals Co. (CMC) was joined by equipment and technology provider Wendt Corp. at a ribbon-cutting ceremony at CMC’s Lexington, South Carolina, facility May 9, 2018. The ceremony was held to commission CMC’s newest shredded nonferrous metal sorting plant.

At the event, guests toured the new recycling plant and participated in the ribbon-cutting ceremony. CMC officers present included Chairman, President and CEO Barbara Smith and the company’s Director of Recycling for the East Region Brian Halloran. Both spoke at the event on the positive impact the new plant will have on the community, according to a Wendt Corp. press release.

Smith and Halloran said the new installation involves creating jobs in the community and protecting the environment by reducing the amount of material that is landfilled. The company estimates that thousands of truckloads of metal will stay out of landfills because it will now be recovered by the metal recovery plant.

The equipment and technology at the facility will allow CMC to recover nearly all metals from the automobile shredder residue (ASR) generated by CMC’s shredder locations in the Southeast, according to Wendt Corp.

“It was a true pleasure to be invited to CMC’s ribbon cutting ceremony,” Tom Wendt Jr. said. “The ability to be a part of CMC’s 100-year history and hearing about the positive environmental and economic impact that the plant we supplied will have on the community is a very rewarding experience for me.”

The ceremony also was attended by CMC employees and the regional management team, plus South Carolina government officials.

Wendt Corp., with headquarters in Buffalo, New York, says it has customized CMC’s nonferrous recovery plant to meet its specific needs using a combination of Wendt and other OEM equipment. The complete system will recover mixed nonferrous metal grades, including zorba and zurik, as well as more difficult to recover materials, such as insulated copper wire and fine metals.

Tomra Sorting Recycling has introduced Tomra Sharp Eye technology, which the company says makes separating single-layer polyethylene terephthalate (PET) trays from PET bottles possible and enhancing the previous capability of Tomra’s Autosort machine to separate multilayer trays. Small but critical differences in the chemical properties of PET food trays and PET bottles mean they must be separated for equivalent-product recycling, the company says. Additionally, artificial intelligence embedded in Tomra systems enables seamless analysis of sorted products, making future plants smarter.

Valerio Sama, Tomra Sorting Recycling Product Manager, says, “We expect our new Tomra Sharp Eye technology to be welcomed by collection-and-sorting plants and by PET regeneration centers. Demand for this is likely to grow because the widening international adoption of on-the-go lifestyles is increasing the use of plastic drink bottles and plastic trays used for fruit, vegetables and other foods.”

According to the company, the key to this technology is an enhancement of Tomra’s Flying Beam technology, a near-infrared (NIR) scan system with point-scanning (eliminating the need for external lamps) that focuses only on the area of the conveyor belt being scanned and allowing a wide range of calibration possibilities. When the Flying Beam Technology is combined with Tomra Sharp Eye technology that introduces a larger lens for higher light intensity, even the most difficult-to-distinguish properties can be detected, Tomra says.

“Tomra Sharp Eye technology allows our customers to achieve higher and more consistent quality for new plastic food-grade packaging,” says Carlos Manchado Atienza, Tomra Sorting Recycling Regional Director, Americas. “Thanks to our new technology, we can recognize molecular properties and differentiate between monolayer and multilayer trays from bottles. It is a definitive step to recover, recycle and reuse.”

A Tomra Autosort machine with the new Tomra Sharp Eye technology is available for demonstrations by appointment at the company’s test centers around the world.

A video of the new application is available at www.tomra.com/en/sorting/recycling/your-application/waste-sorting/pet-bottle-vs-tray.

Tomra Sorting Recycling designs and manufactures sensor-based sorting technologies for the global recycling and waste management industry. More than 5,500 systems have been installed in 80 countries worldwide.

Tomra Sorting Recycling is part of Tomra Sorting Solutions, which also develops sensor-based systems for sorting, peeling and process analytics for the food, mining and other industries. Tomra Sorting Solutions is owned by Norwegian company Tomra Systems ASA.

 

Pictured above, from left: Oliver Campbell of Dell and Kim Holmes
of the Plastics Industry Association, host of Re|focus 2018.

Dell Technologies, headquartered in Round Rock, Texas, says it has committed to keeping plastics in the economy and out of the ocean, creating what it calls the first commercial-scale global ocean-bound plastics supply chain, Nextwave. The company’s Oliver Campbell, director of worldwide procurement and packaging, shared the steps the technology company has taken to process plastics collected from beaches, waterways and coastal areas for use in a new packaging system for the XPS 13 2-In-1 laptop globally during the Opening Plenary session at the Re|focus Sustainability and Recycling Summit.

“Dell is thinking circularly, not linearly,” Campbell said, adding that sustainable materials are the foundation of the company’s circular economy approach. “Recycled plastics factor largely into our manufacturing.” (For a 2017 article on Dell’s use of recycled plastics in its products, see “Recycled content computes.”)

In 2017, Dell used 8 metric tons of ocean-bound plastics in its packaging.

Ocean plastics have “quite a bit” to do with computers, he said, noting population growth and technology preferences in developing countries such as Southeast Asia, which is a large contributor to the ocean-bound plastics problem. “It is very much in our business interests to address these issues,” Campbell added.

Eight million tons of plastics enter oceans annually, he said, with 60 percent originating from South Asia. That figure is expected to increase to 18 million tons by 2025, Campbell added.

While other companies have used ocean plastics to create new packaging, these projects largely were intended to raise awareness of the issue and did not scale economically, he said. Dell and Lonely Whale, with locations in New York and Seattle, formed a collaborative and open-source initiative called NextWave, convening General Motors, Trek Bicycle, Interface, Van de Sant, Humanscale, Bureo and Herman Miller, to address this scalability issue. NextWave assembled leading technology and consumer-focused companies to develop the first-ever commercial-scale ocean-bound plastics supply chain. Additional supporting members of the group include UN (United Nations) Environment, 5Gyres Institute, Zoological Society of London and New Materials Institute at the University of Georgia.

To create a sustainable solution for ocean-bound plastics, Campbell said, the cost point must be at parity or less than virgin options for Dell.

“Dell’s strategy is to leverage strengths in innovation and supply chain to create an open, scalable, economically viable solution,” he added.

To that end, the company is intercepting plastics before they reach the ocean by addressing mismanaged waste within 50 kilometers (30 miles) of the coastline that would otherwise end up in the ocean without improved management infrastructure. “Once it gets to the ocean,” Campbell said, “plastic is very difficult to retrieve and degrades.”

Dell has made a United Nations commitment to increase its use of ocean-bound plastics tenfold by 2025, creating an open-source supply chain for others to follow, he added.

While Dell began by using ocean-bound plastics from Haiti, Campbell said the supply chain will shift to Southeast Asia for improved costs. The company’s research revealed that Indonesia and India were preferred sourcing locations with capable processors. Dell identified three processors in these countries as potential suppliers of ocean-bound plastics.

Campbell said the breakthrough for commercial scalability came when Dell identified that the cost of Indonesian ocean plastics was below the cost of postconsumer resins (PCR) and virgin material from China.

Dell’s use of ocean-bound plastics in its packaging is increasing to the rest of the company’s XPS NB line this year. In 2019, Campbell said the company plans further expansions.

As the use cases expand beyond Dell, he said, the consortium’s volume will increase “dramatically,” greatly increasing the impact on ocean health as well.

Dell is currently blending 25 percent of its ocean-bound plastics into its packaging, with Campbell saying the company wanted to do better than the 10 percent most other companies using ocean plastics were incorporating but giving the company room to grow, as well. “We never want to be decreasing our use; we always want to be increasing it,” he added.

Re|focus was May 8-10 in conjunction with NPE 2018 in Orlando, Florida.

The American Forest & Paper Association (AF&PA), Washington, has announced the paper recovery rate in the United States reached 65.8 percent in 2017.

This is a drop from the reported 2016 paper recovery rate of 67.2 percent.

U.S. paper recovery rate statistics are available at www.paperrecycles.org/statistics.

“Paper recycling brings continued economic, environmental and social benefits to communities across the country,” says AF&PA President and CEO Donna Harman. “We thank the millions of Americans who choose to recycle every day for their essential contributions to paper recycling’s success.”

Paper recovery for recycling helps extend the useful life of paper and paper-based packaging products, AF&PA says, making it an integral part of the industry’s sustainability story. The industry has a goal to exceed 70 percent paper recovery for recycling by 2020 as part of its Better Practices, Better Planet 2020 sustainability initiative.

“Paper is one of the most successfully recovered and recycled commodities in the U.S. because of our strong, market-driven voluntary system,” adds AF&PA Board Chairman John Rooney, who also serves as CEO of GEC Packaging Technologies. “Our industry will continue to support and implement education programs and initiatives that drive awareness and increase access to paper recycling.”

For more information about paper recycling and AF&PA’s commitment to sustainability, visit www.paperrecycles.org.