The organization formerly known as the ISRI Services Corp. has announced that it will now operate as the Global Recycling Standards Organization (GRSO).
RIOS is an integrated quality, environmental, health and safety system based on ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001 that focuses on aspects relevant to the scrap recycling industry. The six components of RIOS cover general requirements, policy, planning, implementation, checking and corrective action and management.
“RIOS is the global standard for recycling,” says Darrell Kendall, executive director of RIOS. “It is important that the name of the company that oversees the standard reflects that. ISRI created RIOS, but it is now the recycling industry’s standard, regardless of the location of the facility. With facilities in North America, South America, Asia and the Middle East committed to RIOS, the time is now to make it clear that RIOS is the common language for recyclers all over the world. Creating the Global Recycling Standards Organization is the first step in that process.”
Also, GRSO launched RIOS’ new website, www.RIOSCertification.org, which feature a blog, a resources page and a map of certified recyclers. Over time this site will become a go-to resource for all things related to quality, environment, health and safety management system implementation and certification, GRSO says.
Municipal
Departments - Newsworthy
Recent news from the various sectors of the recycling industry
Emmet County, Michigan, receives funding from The Recycling Partnership
The Recycling Partnership, Falls Church, Virginia, had agreed to provide seed money to purchase 7,000 residential recycling carts if Emmet County, Michigan, could raise funds to cover the balance of the cost. Thanks in part to a grant the county received from the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, as well as to funding from 16 other sources, the county was able to meet this requirement, and cart distribution will begin the summer of 2016.
The grant will help Emmet County purchase new recycling carts for Petoskey, Harbor Springs, Bear Creek Township, Little Traverse Township and Resort Township. Additionally, the county will receive assistance with a customized public education campaign and with technical planning to support the cart deliveries to its 7,000 households. The communities will maintain their dual-stream recycling system with the conversion to carts, which will hold paper, boxes and bags, while existing totes will hold bottles, cartons, jugs and jars, according to a news release from The Recycling Partnership.
Jeff Meyers, The Recycling Partnership development director, says, “Emmet County originally applied for a 2015 cart grant to transition two of their five communities with curbside to carts. Though they were not selected in the first round, they still had a great project. When some additional grant money opened up, we approached them with an offer of funding and a challenge to raise funds from local companies that use recycled materials.”
Emmet County joins seven previous communities that have received cart grants through the Recycling Partnership. While the organization says each engagement is unique, they all share the goal of improving access to convenient recycling and strong outreach for residents, resulting in more recovered materials for manufacturing feedstock.
The Recycling Partnership adds funding partners
The Recycling Partnership, Falls Church, Virginia, has announced that Keurig Green Mountain Inc., Waterbury, Vermont, and The Dow Chemical Co., headquartered in Midland, Michigan, have become funding sponsors.
“At Dow, we are collaborating with other industry leaders to harness science, industries and the incredibly powerful human element to transition to a sustainable planet and society,” says Karen S. Carter, North America commercial vice president, Dow Packaging and Specialty Plastics. “From supporting the engagement of best practices in existing local recycling programs to creating new technologies for broader material recovery, Dow is dedicated to finding solutions that increase recovery rates for plastic packaging.”
“At Keurig, we’re taking meaningful steps to transition to a recyclable K-Cup pod well before our 2020 goal of having 100 percent of our pods be recyclable,” says Monique Oxender, chief sustainability officer, Keurig. “We’re also working beyond our product packaging to address challenges related to all small-item recovery in the recycling infrastructure and to improve end market demand for reclaimed materials. These efforts take cross-industry collaboration. The transformative work of The Recycling Partnership is a perfect match for our ambitions.”
Delaware agency accuses WM of recycling violations
The Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control (DDNREC) has sent Waste Management Inc. (WM) a notice regarding its operations in the state as having violated state recycling regulations.
A notice posted online by the agency cites examples in 2015 when WM trucks operating in Rocky Run and Lewes, Delaware, were observed “commingling waste and recyclables,” the DDNREC says.
Per the notice, issued April 22, 2016, Houston-based WM had 20 days to provide recycling collection service in those communities where it was deemed lacking and to ensure that its methods to collect recyclables separately had been put in place in the communities where it was observed to have been commingled with solid waste.
The DDNREC issued an accompanying penalty amounting to more than $43,000 for the violations. WM has the right to appeal the findings and penalty.
Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio cancels Columbus-area recycling facility plans
Plans for a recycling sorting facility located next to Franklin County, Ohio’s landfill have been cancelled, a report from the Columbus Dispatch says.
The Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio (SWACO), Grove City, has canceled a contract with Team Gemini, Orlando, Florida, which was supposed to build the facility, after the company failed to pay rent on its leased land next to the landfill, according to the Dispatch. The company was late on its rent payments the previous two years as well, the report indicates.
SWACO was to have owned and operated the landfill recovery facility, while Team Gemini was to own and operate its Center for Resource Recovery and Recycling (COR3).
All municipal solid waste (MSW) was to be delivered to the receiving facility. From there, the waste would have been directed to either COR3 or to the landfill. Plans also called for waste conversion technologies such as anaerobic digestion and plastics to oil as part of an industrial research park.
“The project is done. By virtue of our letter, we’ve terminated the contract. We’ve taken possession of the property,” Ty Marsh, SWACO executive director, told the Columbus Dispatch.
Team Gemini was supposed to pay SWACO about $350,000 as an annual rent payment two months ago, but it missed that deadline, the report says. SWACO gave the company a 60-day extension, which passed April 5.
SWACO had leased about 350 acres to the Florida-based company, which was supposed to build a $100 million facility where garbage trucks would dump trash for recyclables to be removed. Team Gemini then would pay SWACO for the materials, sell them on the open market and dump the rest of the trash at the landfill.
The project was supposed to be completed in June 2016, but work at the site never started.
SWACO signed the agreement with Team Gemini in 2013, when the authority was led by Ron Mills, who resigned that year. Now the agency is working with Battelle to figure out how to make money off its waste.
“The failure of the Team Gemini project in no way diminishes our interest in leveraging the waste that’s generated in Franklin County for greater economic opportunity,” Marsh said in an interview with the Columbus Dispatch.
The Seattle-based Basel Action Network (BAN) has retained its role as a leading player in the effort to restrict the export of electronic scrap from OEDC (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) nations to countries considered to have less developed or emerging economies.
In May BAN announced some of the results of its e-Trash Transparency Project, which entailed the placement of tracking devices in 200 obsolete printers and liquid crystal display (LCD) monitors that were taken to selected recycling facilities or collection centers.
As BAN and its Executive Director Jim Puckett likely anticipated, several of the devices were found to have been loaded into export containers and sent to nations where certified recycling facilities are few and far between.
BAN was founded when cathode ray tube (CRT) monitors, which contain significant amounts of lead, were a much larger part of the e-scrap stream. In 2016, with CRTs diminishing in the scrap stream, BAN has shifted some of its focus to the dust in printer cartridges and the mercury in LCD panels.
The nonprofit organization also is in the certification business, having developed the e-Stewards certification process that BAN describes as “the industry’s most rigorous environmental and social standard.”
Not all of Recycling Today’s readers are fans of BAN or its persistent opposition to the export market. The organizers of the Vermont-based Fair Trade Recycling association say they “differ from the so-called e-waste campaigns [that] ban trade with technicians, recyclers and reuse businesses in rapidly developing countries” and instead “defend and champion African, Asian and Latino reuse technicians.”
“The viewpoints of people on either side of the issue could not be more different, with one portraying developing nations as full of victims, the other as full of entrepreneurs.”
The creators of the Responsible Recycling (R2) certification have long held that lifting the standards of the recycling industry in developing nations is a better long-term goal than banning all exports, and in late 2015 the first e-Stewards certification of a facility in Asia was issued.
Despite that sliver of hope for future compromise, the viewpoints of people on either side of the issue could not be more different, with one portraying developing nations as full of victims, the other as full of entrepreneurs. Advocates on one side of the issue say the global “free and fair trade” of preowned computers and smartphones helps stretch out the life cycle of devices and can introduce repair and recycling best practices to non-OECD nations. Advocates on the other side of the issue ask, “What is fair about hiring ill-informed workers to dismantle devices that may contain mercury or other toxic elements?”
At Recycling Today, we strive to give each side a hearing and differing voices access to the wider recycling community we serve. It seems likely these conversations will continue well into 2016 and beyond.
Celebrating 25 years of building the WORLD’s STRONGEST MOST DURABLE Balers in the Industry
EUROPEN calls for strengthened protection of the internal market in waste proposals
Ahead of the European Union Environment ministerial debate 26 February 2016 on the Circular Economy Package and its waste proposals, EUROPEN, the European Organisation for Packaging and the Environment, called on EU policymakers to ensure national packaging waste measures do not disrupt the internal market because of differences in interpretation and implementation.
“The Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive (PPWD) provides for the economies of scale for private investment and innovation towards a resource-efficient circular economy,” EUROPEN Chairman Martin Reynolds says. “However, the ambition of a competitive circular economy would be undermined if the internal market does not function properly. National measures that may be permitted under the Waste Framework Directive (WFD) might lead to trade barriers and fragmentation of the internal market for packaging and packaged goods. Therefore, the protection of the internal market should be strengthened by replicating the WFD’s EPR (extended producer responsibility) legal framework in the PPWD, which has the internal market as its legal base.”
Virginia Janssens, managing director of EUROPEN, adds, “A strengthened legal framework for EPR as proposed in the WFD should also be introduced into the PPWD. This would help member states to achieve current and future packaging recycling targets and separate collection obligations.”
EUROPEN says it is urging EU policymakers to clarify the proposed harmonised method for calculating the combined ‘preparing for reuse’/recycling targets in the context of packaging. In particular, the definitions and variables of the methodology in the PPWD should be clarified to ensure that reported data are “robust and comparable.”
The European paper industry was invited to collaborate with the World Economic Forum, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and the McKinsey Center for Business and Environment on Circular Economy to produce a white paper with guidelines on design and management for circularity in the industry. The new publication provides guidance to all actors in the supply chain through simple eco-design rules for paper products, without limiting innovation and the introduction of new techniques, Brussel-based CEPI (Confederation of European Paper Industries) says. This is a product of the three pilots under Project MainStream, launched during the 2014 summit in Davos.
“We trust helping circular thinking in all steps of the complex value chain will help reach higher in what is already a high recycling performance,” says CEPI Sustainability Director Jori Ringman, a drafter of the guidance, in a panel discussion on the feasibility of higher recycling rates at the Packaging and Sustainability event in Brussels, Wednesday, 2 March 2016. “In circular economy, your downstream is your upstream, and what you pass on into the loop will have an impact on your own business.”
Although highly recyclable, paper usually is converted by industries that add chemicals to it through printing inks and other auxiliary materials, CEPI says. This can lead to problems in subsequent circular chains, as these chemicals cannot easily be removed from the paper before re-entering the mill. Furthermore, the recycling process cannot follow the speed of the evolution of inks and toners, the organisation says.
The publication summarises key choices to be made by direct and indirect stakeholders. More specifically, it identifies the choices that can influence businesses ordering fibre-based products.
UK government revises packaging recycling targets
The U.K. government plans to reduce packaging recycling targets in 2016 and 2017, according to the details of its 2016 budget. The government also will set new recycling targets for glass and plastic packaging for 2018, 2019 and 2020.
The government says it is making these adjustments “to reduce the burden on business.”
For plastic, the existing target will be reduced to 49% for 2016 and then increased by 2% each year to 2020, when it will reach 57%.
For glass, the existing target of 77% will be maintained until 2017 and then increased by 1% each year to 2020, when it will reach 80%.
Brian Taylor
