As the construction and demolition (C&D) recycling industry grapples with shrinking end markets and a decrease in volumes caused by the coronavirus pandemic, recyclers are now facing another battle with state regulations potentially posing a threat to their operations.

An example of this can be seen in New Jersey’s recent environmental justice bill (S-232) signed by Gov. Phil Murphy Sept. 18, which requires the state Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) to evaluate the environmental and public health stressors certain facilities may pose on overburdened communities when reviewing certain permit applications.

These facilities can include transfer stations or solid waste facilities, recycling facilities that receive at least 100 tons of recyclables per day, scrap metal facilities, landfills, medical waste incinerators and more.

William Turley, executive director for the Construction & Demolition Recycling Association (CDRA), says this means any of the aforementioned facility proposals will require the preparation of an Environmental and Health Impact Statement (EHIS) and public hearings in the community before operators are allowed to submit a permit application to the state.

RECYCLING ROADBLOCKS

These requirements not only equate to more regulatory hurdles for operators but to increased costs, as well.

“An EHIS can cost between $30,000 to $50,000, which is an investment that virtually no one will make before getting to square one of the NJDEP permitting process. Ironically, preparation of an EHIS is explicitly excluded from being required for recycling facilities by statute, so this is a huge reversal of public policy,” Turley says.

In addition, perhaps the biggest impediment of the bill relates to Title V major air pollution facilities, says Turley. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a Title V major source is a facility that emits, or has the potential to emit (PTE), any criteria pollutant or hazardous air pollutant (HAP) at levels equal to or greater than the Major Source Thresholds (MST).

As stated in the bill, upon the renewal of an existing facility’s major source permit, all Title V facilities also will need to prepare an EHIS and subject the project to public hearings in the facility’s host community.

“There are 260 Title V facilities in New Jersey. They represent all the major pieces of environmental infrastructure in the state, such as landfills, mass-burn incinerators, every power plant and generating station, all wastewater treatment plants, most colleges and universities, etc.,” Turley says. “While this [legislation] is for Title V now, what is to stop the state from expanding to other levels of facilities in the future?”

The bill has been met with direct opposition from businesses and stakeholders, with many expressing that the legislation is vague with unclear impacts and directly targets waste and recycling facilities. 

In July, the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI), Washington, submitted a written testimony to the New Jersey Assembly Environment and Solid Waste Committee in opposition to the bill.

In its statement, Jarred Dorfman, president of ISRI’s New Jersey chapter, offered support of the concept of responsible environmental justice legislation but noted ISRI is concerned that, without amendments, S-232 will harm New Jersey and its recycling goals by imposing onerous restrictions and costs on recycling facilities that need to renew their NJDEP permits.

“For reasons not provided, the legislation specifically calls out recycling and scrap metal facilities while not citing other common industrial and commercial operations,” the testimony states. “Most importantly, by targeting recycling while at the same time promoting the growth of recycling through simultaneous efforts in the New Jersey legislature, such as with S-2515 (which established recycled content requirements for various takeout packaging), the legislature is creating an impossible situation for the recycling industry in the state.”

ISRI also warned that the bill could inhibit facility operators looking to invest in new, environmentally friendly equipment, expanding operations or even developing new facilities that incorporate state-of-the-art technology, including for pollution abatement.

Turley says the bill has the potential to effectively shut down any new environmental infrastructure development in the future at a time when the state economy has taken a beating from COVID-19.

“We agree that no community should bear a disproportionate share of the adverse environmental and public health consequences that accompany a state’s economic growth, and those communities [should] have a meaningful opportunity to participate in the permitting process, but this bill will give them the authority to put companies out of business too easily,” he adds.

ACROSS THE NATION

Similar strains on the C&D recycling industry can be felt in California, with a 1994 California Supreme Court ruling leaving lasting effects on some of the recycling facilities operating in the state.

The landmark ruling between the cities of Rancho Mirage and Palm Springs, and their franchise hauler, Waste Management of the Desert, redefined what materials may lawfully be within a public entity grant of an exclusive solid waste franchise, thus establishing a “fee for service” test of whether material is solid waste or not.

Brock Hill, owner of San Jose-based Premier Recycle Co., says the ruling “changed the definition of what constituted solid waste and what constituted recycling” in the state of California.

“What that bill tried to do was put the intent of the California solid waste collection industry and infrastructure on reducing the amount of landfill waste,” he says. “Now, when the Supreme Court case in California was ruled on, what they did was they imposed something called a ‘fee for service’ tax. So, that means if a piece of material isn’t monetarily worth anything, that then becomes solid waste and is subject to the exclusive garbage hauling franchise [of each municipality].”

According to the Northern California Recycling Association (NCRA), this left C&D recyclers stuck. Since the legislature had declared landfilling harmful to the environment, the association says the grant of a franchise inclusive of mixed C&D could be said to result in more landfilling, and therefore, environmental review under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) would be required.

Premier Recycling, which is a mixed C&D collector with a fully permitted recycling facility in San Jose, experienced the consequences of this ruling firsthand. While San Jose allows open competition for C&D, many of the surrounding cities like Sunnyvale and Mountain View have exclusive franchises that cover C&D.

“Our company would love to expand, but there is no guarantee that when we set up another facility elsewhere, that we’ll still have access to the same material,” Hill says. “For instance, let’s say we wanted to set up a sorting facility in the city of Oakland. Five years from now, we don’t have a guarantee that the city of Oakland won’t become an exclusive franchise city, and we may not get the contract for that material. … It’s a big gamble for a company that wants to set up a sorting facility with no guarantee of access to the material.”

Although the inclusion of C&D materials in municipal waste franchises can be seen across the state, cities like San Francisco are moving in the opposite direction.

This is in part because of a 1932 ordinance that permanently awarded the right to collect the city’s garbage to individuals or mom-and-pop operations that held the city’s 97 existing route permits, according to The New York Times.

In short order, the holders of all of the permits banded together. The permits became assets of a company, originally jointly owned by the 97 permit-holders, and that company grew into what is now Recology.

“[San Francisco] is currently the only city I know of where their citizens voted that they can’t have an exclusive city franchise. So, because of that constraint on the city government, they’ve had to be creative in how they achieve recycling rates, so they’ve set up a myriad of programs that I think are working very successfully for the city of San Francisco versus exclusively franchised cities,” says Hill.

This article originally appeared in the Nov./Dec. issue of Construction & Demolition Recycling magazine. The author is the assistant editor for Construction & Demolition Recycling magazine and can be reached at hrischar@gie.net.

The Hamburger Containerboard business unit of the Austria-based Prinzhorn Group has announced the production of “the first tambour [roll] of new PM2 [paper machine No. 2] at Hamburger Containerboard’s location in Spremberg, Germany.”

PM represents a 370 million euros ($438 million) investment, the company says, expanding the Spremberg production site to nearly 900,000 tons per year in packaging grade output. “At full capacity utilization of new PM2, an additional 500,000 tons of high-quality white and brown packaging papers [can be] produced annually,” states the firm.

The company says setbacks tied to COVID-19 and a fire in the stock preparation area earlier in 2020 meant the production startup “was a tough challenge for all parties involved.”

Harald Ganster, managing director of the Hamburger Containerboard Division, comments, “We are extremely happy to get our first tambour of high-quality packaging paper from PM2, and we can’t wait to deliver this great product to our customers.”

The Prinzhorn Group also operates Hamburger Recycling, which collects and processes scrap paper and other recyclable commodities at facilities in several European nations.

The organizer of Plasticity plastic recycling and sustainability events has announced there will be a 90-minute Plasticity “Directors Cut” online event on Wednesday, Nov. 25.

The event, which has “Sea of Solutions” as its theme, will be broadcast online at 1 p.m. China time Nov. 25, which is noon in Thailand and some other parts of Southeast Asia and 10:30 a.m. in India.

Doug Woodring of Plasticity and the Hong Kong-based Ocean Recovery Alliance says the event will be “curated and presented by Plasticity” and hosted online in cooperation with the Nairobi, Kenya-based United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP). It is the 14th Plasticity event and the first virtual one.

Woodring says the current environment for plastics recycling includes “new economics in the plastic circular economy, starting with the corporate commitments that create demand [and] recognize the market failures of supply, to forecast pricing and other market dynamics in the coming five years.”

He says an analysis using data from companies including Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestle, Unilever, Danone and others shows “recycled plastic has become a market category in its own right,” resulting in the decoupling of recycled-content plastic prices from virgin resins.

Writes Woodring in a recent online article, “When the price of crude oil plunged to minus $37.63 a barrel earlier this year, it was viewed as a blow to the fledgling recycled plastics market. After all, when used correctly, virgin and recycled plastics deliver the same quality standard, so why should one pay more?

"Surely, this conventional wisdom remains sound: the use of recycled plastic is tied to the price of crude oil. However, conventional wisdom can be anything but. Consider the introduction of the ‘horseless carriage’ [or] space travel as the sole domain of highly trained astronauts.

"Henry Ford’s cars and Richard Branson’s space travel upended the conventional wisdom by finding a fit between demand and supply. Similar market dynamics are playing out in the recycled plastics space, potentially upending the conventional wisdom that plastic, recycled or virgin is permanently tied to the price of oil.

"Spurred on by consumer sentiment, corporate commitments, anti-pollution regulation, access to funds and new business models demand for recycled plastic has moved from nice to have niche to the new norm – coming in as the No. 2 packaging trend for 2020. As yet, the supply channels for this pent-up demand are far from adequate, but the starter’s gun has fired, signaling recycled plastic has become a market category in its own right.”

These and other topics will be disused Nov. 25, Woodring says. Information on registering for the online event can be found on this web page.

Aluminum producer Alvance, which along with Liberty Steel is part of the United Kingdom-based GFG Alliance, has announced plans to add 40,000 metric tons per year of scrap-fed secondary aluminum production at a plant in Fort William, Scotland.

The company says the 94 million pound ($124.5 million) project will involve the installation of a new recycling and casting facility that will double aluminum production at the Fort William plant from slightly more than 40,000 metric tons per year to 80,000.

The new casting facility will produce billets that Alvance says can be marketed to the U.K.’s domestic construction sector, which it says “currently relies heavily on imports.” To support the Fort William expansion, Alvance also has proposed what it calls “significant upgrades to the nearby port of Corpach [Scotland] to improve [the] efficiency of material flow.”

“By utilizing domestic scrap aluminum that is currently exported, we will nearly double production here at Fort William,” states Sanjeev Gupta, GFG Alliance executive chair. “The new facilities, alongside the Lochaber [Scotland] hydro plant, will create market-leading ‘GreenAluminium’ products that deliver for the environment as well as the economy.”

Regarding regional government cooperation for the plan, a member of the Scottish Parliament, Fergus Ewing, comments, “The Scottish Government is committed to working with Alvance Aluminium to secure the long-term future of the Fort William smelter, grow output and employment through investment in downstream manufacturing capability. We will work with Alvance to consider the new business plan and to secure the earliest possible investment in the Fort William complex.”

Proposals pertaining to the expansion will be submitted to the Highlands Council for approval, and would then replace a previously announced plan to install an aluminum alloy wheels factory. That plan has been shelved, Alvance says, “due to a significant decline in the U.K. automotive sector.”