The Baltimore City Department of Public Works (DPW) resumed curbside residential recycling collections Jan. 19. The city had suspended collections Aug. 31, 2020, after facing delays in collecting trash and recycling due to COVID-19 and weather conditions, an increase in the amount of waste generated and a shortage of staff reporting to work each day.

John Chalmers, head of the DPW Bureau of Solid Waste in Baltimore, says the city set up 14 drop-off recycling sites in the 14 city districts to provide a way for residents to recycle during the collection suspension.

“We altered recycling in the city. We didn’t really fully suspend recycling,” Chalmers says. “We had strong participation at these locations. It has been so inspirational to see so much support for continuing recycling during that time. It was a notable improvement in the quality of materials that we were seeing.”

Chalmers says the city also used the drop-off sites to provide recycling education to residents who came with materials. “It was a point of contact with our customers. We were able to explain to them about the recycling process, how [recycling is] managed at our transfer station and taken to a material recovery facility. It was a great experience to be able to touch the residents and walk them through that.”

He adds that in a typical month, about 2,000 tons of recyclables are collected from the curbside; during the months it only operated drop-off sites because of COVID-19, it collected about 700 tons of material per month.

With curbside residential recycling back, the city also is investing $7 million in its program, according to figures reported in the Baltimore Sun. With that $7 million, the city is contracting for one year with two small haulers—Goode Cos. Inc. and Spindler Refuse Inc.—and three workforce development groups—Living Classrooms Foundation, Roca and Lazarus Rite. The city also received an emergency procurement approval to provide Rubicon software to its drivers.

“Rubicon will allow us to optimize our routes and get drivers up to speed,” Chalmers says.

Later this year, Chalmers adds that the city will be working on a recycling education campaign with residents. Baltimore received a Leadership Grant from The Recycling Partnership for this effort in the fall of 2020.

Since bringing back curbside recycling, Chalmers says there have been no hiccups.

“The transition went very smoothly [ Jan. 19],” he says. “The mayor came out to speak with the crews at 5:20 a.m. to thank them for their services and sacrifices they make every single day to make sure Baltimore has a clean environment to live and work in. Recycling was picked up starting at 6 a.m., and the last route was completed on time at 4 p.m. or before.”

Chalmers also advises municipalities that experience labor shortages (as Baltimore experienced last summer) to try to find alternatives to keep as many programs going as possible.

“Instead of suspending a service altogether, try to find ways to augment that service,” he says. “It’s difficult getting people back into the routine of recycling. I think we did an awesome job setting up 14 drop-off centers.”

The Alliance has launched a direct Trans-Pacific Asia service called the East Coast Loop 6, or EC6, via Panama that calls on the U.S. Gulf Coast.

In its service network announcement for 2021, member carriers of THE Alliance, which include Ocean Network Express (ONE), Hapag-Lloyd, Hyundai Merchant Marine (HMM) and Yang Ming Line, say they are launching “the first service within The Alliance network to directly and seamlessly connect the U.S. Gulf with important ports in Asia,” according to a news release from Port Houston.

The EC6 service will call on the ports of Kaohsiung in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Yantian and Ningbo in China, Shanghai, Pusan in Korea, Panama City and Houston on a weekly basis before making stops in New Orleans and in Mobile, Alabama, and returning to Panama and onward to Kaohsiung.

“The new EC6 service will provide a new premium solution to our customers in Texas, Louisiana, Alabama and the southern United States,” says Uffe Ostergaard, president of Hapag-Lloyd, North America.

The new service launched by The Alliance is part of an adjustment of its overall network. The Alliance says it has made changes to offer customers more capacity in trade lanes with the greatest demand. It also has evaluated and reconfigured its network to provide better frequency, more competitive transit times and comprehensive port coverage.

“With the introduction of the EC6, HMM is delighted to add direct coverage between Asia and Port Houston to our expanding global service portfolio,” says Jay Y. Lee, chairman and CEO, HMM (America) Inc. “The EC6 will allow us to better serve our current customers who have voiced their desire for options between the U.S. Gulf and Asia as well as open up a growing market for us.”

“It offers our regional exporters and importers new options,” Port Houston Executive Director Roger Guenther says of EC6. “We look forward to providing them great efficiencies through our modern facilities.”

Loaded imports at Port Houston grew 5 percent in 2019, according to the port, driven by a broad spectrum of companies from sectors including retail, alternative energy, food and beverage and industrial materials.

Among the nation’s top container ports, Port Houston was 2019’s fastest-growing, according to data from maritime sector data vendor IHS Markit PIERS. Port Houston nearly hit the 3 million mark for 20-foot equivalent units (TEUs) in 2019.

Port NOLA President and CEO Brandy D. Christian says of EC6, “This new direct-Asia service highlights the industry’s continued investment in the New Orleans market. We look forward to continuing to work with long-standing partner Hapag-Lloyd as well as newer to Port NOLA carriers, ONE, HMM and Yang Ming to make this service a success for our shipper and carrier partners.”

The additional capacity will support Port NOLA’s growing export business for commodities such as resin, poultry, forestry and agricultural products. While known for its robust export growth, the Port NOLA saw 13 percent loaded import TEU growth in 2019.

Port NOLA says it is currently in the process of a $100 million expansion project at the Napoleon Avenue Container Terminal that will add four new 100-foot-gauge container gantry cranes in the fourth quarter of 2021. This expansion will increase capacity to 1 million TEUs and allows the port to work larger ships more efficiently. Port NOLA also launched the due diligence process for a potential $1.5 billion multimodal container terminal with a 2 million TEU capacity to serve the largest container vessels calling in the Gulf of Mexico.

Ferrous scrap prices have been climbing since November, with the prompt industrial composite price reaching a U.S. average of $499 per ton in January, according to Management Science Associates’ Raw Material Data Aggregation Service (RMDAS). This was a gain of $186 from November. Rising ferrous scrap prices tend to draw out nonferrous scrap, too, but higher aluminum and copper scrap prices also deserve some of the credit.

The London Metal Exchange (LME) copper cash settlement price Jan. 15 was $7,979.50, compared with $6,231 one year earlier, while the aluminum alloy price was $2,000.50 Jan. 15 compared with $1,778 the previous year.

“As pricing has increased, so has the volume of scrap available,” says Randy Goodman, vice president of the brokerage firm Greenland (America) Inc., Roswell, Georgia. “I’m pretty amazed at how much red metal scrap was available when the markets took a jump” in late 2020.

Mitchell Goldberg, CEO of Northeast Metal Traders in Philadelphia, says copper scrap is flowing well in historical terms. However, he adds, “There seems to be a cash crunch for a number of our suppliers, leading them to focus less on traditional pricing considerations and more on the quickness of payment terms.”

"Some consumers are in and out of the market very quickly. Others are consistently strong, and others are consistently out. It’s the same with export.” -- a trader with a scrap processing company that has operations in the Midwest and Southeast says of copper scrap consumers

A trader whose company has processing operations in the Midwest and Southeast says supply and demand have been “spotty” for copper scrap. Regarding demand, he adds, “It depends on the day. Some consumers are in and out of the market very quickly. Others are consistently strong, and others are consistently out. It’s the same with export.”

While most domestic buyers of copper scrap are in the market, he says they are conservative in their buying and are avoiding going too far out in their purchasing. “With the market run-up, they are working down their inventories and keeping deliveries to just in time.”

“Everyone is running a pretty full book right now,” Goodman says of domestic consumers of red metals. “A lot of orders are on the books.”

Despite this, many mills are full and not taking deliveries until late February or early March, he adds.

“Most places are already full for February,” the trader for the company with operations in the Midwest and Southeast says as of mid-January. “We’re selling March already. We sold February in December or the beginning of January. It’s perpetually further and further out.”

He says aluminum scrap supply seems tighter than that for copper scrap, and he predicts that it will get tighter. “It seems they need the metal,” he says of aluminum scrap consumers.

The trader says primary mills are more aggressive than secondary producers in terms pricing and demand, with spreads tightening for primary grades. He adds that delivery appointments are readily available with mills.

Michael Diehl, a senior vice president based in Southern California for Coremet Trading Inc., based in New York City, also mentions strong demand for secondary aluminum grades. “Auto sales are surprising automakers that are short” on inventory because of shutdowns related to the pandemic in the early part of 2020.

“Also, we are starting to see a small increase in aerospace materials as we see Boeing getting back on track,” Diehl adds.

Goldberg says supplies from scrap dealers were severely reduced early in the pandemic but are now approaching prepandemic levels. “We are readily able to sell our metal, but transportation restrictions make production and scheduling more difficult than we’ve ever experienced before. High commodity prices should keep the nonferrous metals flowing in, and we feel business momentum will continue to grow with pent-up demand from manufacturers and consumers.”

Machinex has been selected as the preferred bidder by Coventry City Council in the United Kingdom to help equip what the Quebec-based firm is calling “the most advanced material recycling facility (MRF) of its kind within the U.K., and potentially one of the most advanced MRFs around the world.”

The system is being designed to sort up to 175,000 metric tons of mixed dry recyclables per year and is scheduled to be operational by the summer of 2023. The MRF will be operated by Sherbourne Recycling Ltd., which Machinex calls a wholly owned local authority company being established to manage the facility on behalf of eight partnering government councils from the surrounding region.

‘’Machinex employs a sales process that promotes close interaction and collaboration with the customer, creating the ability to develop sincere partnerships with them,” says Ian Smith, U.K. business development manager at Machinex. “This approach allowed Machinex to accurately understand the needs of the project team, and therefore design the ideal future-proofed facility. We have a team of experts who will manage this project from engineering right through the commissioning period, with the added commitment of local ongoing support for the client during operation.’’

Machinex’s design uses 14 SamurAI sorting robots and 14 optical sorters (including 13 MACH Hyspec optical sorters). The company says the MRF will be “one of, if not the first, facility in the world that integrates, at this scale, artificial intelligence at the core of its system, allowing real-time interconnectivity between the main sorting equipment.”

The system will be processing a throughput of 47.5 metric tons per hour of recyclables with an extremely minimized level of human labor, estimated at five people. ‘’This will be a great achievement for Machinex; the culmination of years of research, development, and hard work in incorporating artificial intelligence at the heart of our sorting solutions,” remarks Jonathan Ménard, an executive vice president at Machinex.

Adds Ménard, “This means that the operations management of this facility will be based, among other things, on the data collected by the AI. The industry has been talking for a few years about the MRF of the future, but this time we can really say that we will make it happen. This will be a game-changer and a loud statement within the market.”

Grant McKelvie of Coventry City Council comments, ‘’We are really pleased to have reached this important milestone. We anticipate the new facility will push recycling performance in the region. This has been an exciting project to be involved in, and I look forward to seeing how it continues to develop.’’

Councilor Patricia Hetherton, Cabinet Member for City Services, says, ‘’This facility looks set to be really impressive – a real leader in the U.K., and in the short term it’s going to help us make sure our waste and recycling service is as efficient as it can be. In the long term, it’s going to enable us to raise our recycling rates.’’

Machinex, which celebrated its 50^th anniversary in 2020, describes itself as a developer of cutting-edge sorting, waste management and recycling technology.