Huge investments have been made in the recycling industry in the last 25 years, and with mixed results, Nat Egosi said in his opening remarks at the second annual MRF & Recycling Plant Operations Forum in Chicago Oct. 10.

Egosi led the one-day forum, which brought together 170 attendees, from plant and regional managers to owners, engineers, equipment suppliers and government officials. The Recycling Today Media Group hosted the event in cooperation with RRT Design & Construction, a Melville, New York-based consulting firm with significant experience in the MRF design sector. Egosi serves as president and CEO of RRT.

“Our focus is on the ‘process’ in the collect, process and ship scenario,” Egosi said.

The sessions at the MRF & Recycling Plant Operations Forum focused on plant processes, from employee safety to separation of materials. Material recovery facility (MRF) operators and equipment providers, among others, discussed ways to improve procedures, best practices for certain sorting equipment, how to effectively manage tipping floors and retrofits as well as using data to improve operations.

The day flowed in a conversational-style format, allowing attendees to ask questions of the panelists or comment during any of the presentations.

This article summarizes the MRF & Recycling Plant Operations Forum’s Separating Do’s and Don’ts sessions. These back-to-back panel discussions, one focusing on fiber and the other on containers, dug into industry best practices for three key equipment classes: screens, ballistic separators and optical sorters.

Separating Do’s and Don’ts

Fiber. Moderator Egosi started the session by noting China’s proposed ban on certain scrap imports, including mixed paper, is mostly because of contaminated loads of imported baled recyclables. Cleaning up quality is a must, he said.

“China is not very nice to us these days,” said Pieter Eenkema van Dijk, CEO of Van Dyk Recycling Solutions, Stamford, Connecticut, and a speaker on the fiber panel.

Van Dijk said he has seen two actions occurring at MRFs that are affecting the way recyclers sort paper: Some recyclers are changing to nonwrapping screens, while others have invested in optical sorting equipment.

“There’s a new way to approach single stream today, a completely different way,” Van Dijk said. “Instead of sending smaller material to screens, send it to an optical sorter. I think, eventually, we’re going away from screens because you can positively sort the paper, and negatives can go to optical.”

In reference to China’s import ban and its proposed 0.3 percent limit on contaminants, panelist Rich Reardon, managing director of Max-AI for Bulk Handling Systems (BHS), Eugene, Oregon, asked, “Who didn’t see this coming?”

Reardon said investing in plants and ensuring the entire system is “commissioned to perform” as it should is important. This includes “making sure the screen is set to the specification provided and that discs are in good shape,” he said.

“We need to rethink our process flow to adapt to what we’re getting in the bin.” – Michael Drolet, Steinert US

As for using screens to collect more old corrugated containers (OCC) from the stream, Reardon suggested operators change screen openings in different zones.

“Should we be focusing on one mixed paper grade and pull out OCC, or can screens be modified?” Reardon asked. “You need to look at the opening on screens by looking at the balance on the system.”

Speakers said plastic film can make up about 5 percent of MRFs’ inbound streams. Reardon suggested using optical sorters and air to remove film. Bypassing a screen also is an option.

Van Dijk said film “is a huge problem” and “it costs a fortune just to sort film.”

Panelist David Marcouiller, executive vice president of sales engineering at Machinex Industries Inc., Plessisville, Quebec, confirmed the difficulty of removing film from the stream. “Film is hard to get out and, when you do, it takes good fiber with it.” 

He said the bulk of labor in MRFs today is spent on the fiber line, pulling out film and OCC.

Regarding fiber quality concerns, Marcouiller said using ballistic separators also can be helpful. “As soon as you separate the material by size, you can really attack the problem in a different way,” he said of ballistic separators.

When collecting material in colder climates—where snow and ice, and therefore wetness, thrive—speakers suggested lowering the incline of screens. Additionally, Marcouiller said agitating the material more often can make a real difference.

“Packer trucks are getting better at packing material. … [You] need to agitate material throughout the system,” he said.

Containers. Speakers on the containers panel said it was a matter of space and capital investments in equipment that would permit MRFs to sort flexible packaging and glass, as well as containers, more efficiently.

Nick Davis, senior cost estimator for the CP Group, San Diego, said the industry is learning to adapt to these changes in incoming material. This is especially necessary considering Davis said MRFs’ inbound stream of flexible packaging is expected to increase by 3 percent to 5 percent.

“Flexible packaging is here, and I don’t think it’s going away,” Davis said.

He continued, “There are a lot of different things to consider. It will require rethinking of the MRF and how we recycle materials.”

A decade ago, the containers MRFs sorted were mostly used beverage containers (UBCs), said panelist Michael Drolet, solution sales manager for Steinert US, Walton, Kentucky. Today, inbound streams include UBCs, plastics Nos. 3-7, glass and aseptic cartons, among other containers.

“We need to rethink our process flow to adapt to what we’re getting in the bin,” Drolet said.

He said drum magnets in MRFs started as a trend about five years ago. “The right drum magnet will always be more expensive but will give you cleaner steel.”

However, Davis recognized the reality of accepting any and all materials at the MRF, saying, “We don’t have space to store every possible commodity. There’s market economics and also physical economics.”

Speakers addressed the question, “Can I improve something to better introduce material to optical equipment?”

Panelist Scott Jable, director of North American sales for Stadler America LLC, Colfax, North Carolina, suggested adjusting the angle of the screens. “I always adjust the angle first; the steeper you run your screen, the less contamination.”

He said star screens and ballistic separators have the same idea in mind: trying to get 3D material to go airborne. But for these devices to work properly, they cannot be overrun with material.

“Try to run your system at what it was designed to,” Jable said. “If you overrun your screens, you’ll bury everything.”

He said most of the issues with optical sorters are mechanical. Overrunning the sorter and not cleaning valves or putting them in the wrong place can cause processing disruptions.

Davis said CP Group has seen a number of MRFs add optical sorters as alternatives to using disc screens.

“Optical sorters, fed correctly, can do everything we’re asking them to do; it takes space and money,” he said. “Nobody has really been willing to spend that much money.”

Davis added, “There are a lot of competing issues working on the economic side, but optical sorters are going to continue to evolve.”

As for robotics, Davis said he sees this type of equipment and optical sorters as competing and also complementary to each other.

The 2017 MRF & Recycling Plant Operations Forum was Oct. 10 in Chicago at the Chicago Marriott Downtown Magnificent Mile.

The author is associate editor of Recycling Today and can be contacted via email at mworkman@gie.net.

When markets are tough, ferrous scrap recyclers generally are willing to be open about it and acknowledge that profits are hard to come by. Through most of 2017, few such complaints had to be issued, though October market pricing and demand did create some challenges for recyclers who were tempted to become complacent.

In the first nine months of 2017, pricing for shredded ferrous scrap never ranged too far from $300 per ton as measured by the Raw Material Aggregation Data Service (RMDAS) managed by Pittsburgh-based MSA Inc. (The exception was a slight spike to $323 in March.)

Certain domestic and global market conditions in October, however, brought about substantial price declines of $29 per ton for shredded scrap and $40 per ton for prompt grades as measured by RMDAS.

With the books about to close on 2017, ferrous processors and traders are trying to manage through the turbulence to ideally close those books on what can be a profitable year for the sector.

Tapping the brakes

Strong sales in the automotive market have helped provide prompt scrap and auto hulks to the ferrous scrap market. On the sell side, a healthy auto sector keeps the order books of some steel mills full.

Unfortunately for the steel and scrap sectors, the long-lasting boom in vehicle sales may be ready for a lull. Auto industry analysts cite an expected cyclical decline in demand (many car owners already have purchased recently) and potential changes in lending standards as contributing factors. October 2017 vehicle sales in the United States were forecast to drop versus the September figure, which is typical according to Wards Auto, an auto sector information services provider. However, Wards says, sales could drop by 9.9 percent in October 2017 compared with an 8.8 percent average drop in the same two months in the prior seven years.

Other statistics and forecasts, on the other hand, detect a little more mileage in this decade’s automotive sales bull market.

Part of the reason October sales dropped as far as they did was because of strong sales in September. U.S. auto sales exceeded analyst expectations in September 2017 with a 6 percent year-over-year increase to 1.5 million units. This marked the first monthly improvement of 2017, according to The Truth About Cars (TTAC), www.thetruthaboutcars.com.

Through August of 2017, auto sales dropped by 3 percent compared with the same period in 2016, according to TTAC. This likely led to some of the analysis that the decade’s bull market may be at an end.

Steelmakers and scrap processors can take heart that heavier “pickup trucks played a major role in September’s improvements, growing at twice the rate of the industry at large,” according to TTAC.

However, that same fact points to the notion that storm damage in the Southeast (where pickup trucks are popular) also played a role in the September figures, TTAC notes. TTAC also posits that automakers provided greater incentives to lure buyers—up to $3,700—in September, giving more ammunition to skeptics.

Another factor weighing on domestic steel and ferrous scrap demand is the lack of progress on federal infrastructure spending. Political analysts saw a major highway and infrastructure bill as a likely early accomplishment for the Trump administration, which could find suitable allies in Congress and up and down K Street (Washington’s industry trade group corridor) for such an initiative.

Instead, the administration has focused on health care and tax reform efforts, while an infrastructure bill that could potentially help steelmakers and scrap processors alike seemingly has been neglected.

Despite worries on the automotive side and stalling on the infrastructure spending side, domestic steelmakers increased their output of crude steel through late October 2017 compared with the year before.

Figures maintained by the Washington-based American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI) show steelmakers in the U.S. produced 74.7 million tons of steel through Oct. 28, 2017. That is a 3.8 increase from the 72 million tons produced in the same time span in 2016.

A little more life

When October 2017 scrap prices dropped, recyclers and industry analysts cited some of the domestic conditions mentioned previously as well as a shortage of electrodes used to melt scrap at electric arc furnace (EAF) mills as factors.

Falling prices in previous years often were attributed to sudden declines in overseas demand for U.S. ferrous scrap; but, thus far in 2017, overseas buyers have been more consistent and, on the aggregate, have been buying more by volume.

Figures collected by the U.S. Census Bureau and tracked by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) show that in the first seven months of 2017, the U.S. exported nearly 8 million metric tons of scrap. The 7.98 million metric tons exported represents a 19.3 percent boost from the 6.69 million metric tons exported in the first seven months of 2016.

Through those seven months, Turkey has purchased 1.65 million metric tons of U.S. scrap, putting it slightly behind the 1.7 million metric tons it purchased in the same time frame in 2016.

Mexico, on the other hand, has strengthened its position in 2017 as the second-largest buyer of U.S. ferrous scrap, having purchased 39.7 percent more scrap through July 2017 compared with the end of July 2016.

The Indian subcontinent has had a split personality in 2017, with Bangladesh (up by 163 percent) and Pakistan (up by 63 percent) increasing their purchases, while India has been quieter. The decline of Indian buying likely is because of two government policies: a demonetization (or currency trade-in) policy that harmed first quarter 2017 industrial output and the rollout of a new goods and services tax in the second half of the year that had a similar impact.

A storyline (in this publication and beyond) has been the status of China’s ferrous scrap market and whether that nation is emerging as a net exporter of this material.

Whether it is a matter of quality, currency values, freight rates or other factors that affect trading patterns, figures in the first seven months of 2017 instead point to an increase of ferrous scrap shipped in the other direction—from the U.S. to China.

That increase is not minor but rather an 84.3 percent boost. That means China purchased 610,000 metric tons of ferrous scrap from the U.S. in the first seven months of 2017, placing it fourth on the overall list of buyers, behind only Turkey, Mexico and Taiwan. If a tidal wave of scrap is heading from China to North America, as of 2017 it appears the undertow of scrap in the other direction is actually stronger.

Other export growth markets for U.S. ferrous scrap in 2017, according to the USGS, include smaller but growing markets, such as Vietnam (from 108,000 to 357,000 metric tons, up 230 percent), Thailand (from 231,000 to 284,000 metric tons, up 23 percent) and Egypt (from 92,000 to 129,000 metric tons, a 40 percent increase).

Taking it all in

Considering the “scrap is bought and not sold” axiom, 2017 has proven to be a less stressful year for the ferrous sector than several previous years.

With the exception of the unwelcome drop in the October buying period, ferrous scrap pricing largely has held steady in 2017, helping recyclers keep scale prices consistent and luring in stable amounts of obsolete scrap.

Peddler and other across-the-scale activity has been described as “above average” by a recycler in the spring of 2017, while a recycler said sellers were “coming out of the woodwork” in August.

The steady scale pricing and flows have helped the value of prompt grades pull back ahead of obsolete grades. In parts of 2015 and 2016, the steady supply of prompt scrap occurring during a time when obsolete items were barely trickling across the scale virtually eliminated the premium usually enjoyed by prompt factory clips and stampings.

By September 2017, however, RMDAS pricing showed a sizable gap in U.S. average pricing. In that month, prompt grades traded at $395 per ton compared with $308 for shredded scrap. (That gap subsequently narrowed by $11 per ton in October.)

This represents a seeming return to normalcy from inverse conditions that may have peaked in November 2016, when RMDAS showed shredded scrap selling for $2-to-$6-per-ton more than prompt grades in two of its geographic regions.

The lack of flow of material into auto shredder yards that came with a steep price drop in the autumn of 2015 lasted well into 2016, before this year’s more stable situation finally led to conditions more familiar to the ferrous scrap sector.

Heading into the final weeks of 2017 and looking ahead to 2018, ferrous scrap processors, traders and buyers, as usual, have plenty of things for to worry about.

Political turmoil in Washington could rattle investors and further delay policies that could prove favorable to the domestic steel and scrap sectors. China’s potential effects on the global market range from its own economic woes to the fruition of predictions that it will export ferrous scrap.

As is generally the case in the scrap industry, easing into complacency is unlikely to be an option.

The author is editor of Recycling Today and can be contacted at btaylor@gie.net.

Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) around the world are sending a message that the best way to control plastic litter is to cut back on the use of plastic packaging. That growing sentiment ultimately could mean less material is available to plastic recyclers, according to presenters at the 2017 Paper & Plastics Recycling Conference Europe, held in Warsaw, Poland, in early November.

Mike Baxter of U.K.-based RPC bpi Group urged attendees to begin paying more attention to the media’s coverage of plastic’s role in the environment. He characterized such coverage in the U.K. as largely alarmist in tone.

More than 90 NGOs have created an alliance housed at www.breakfreefromplastic.org that aims to hold corporate boards of directors responsible for using plastic packaging that creates litter on land or in the world’s oceans, he said.

Baxter’s call to action included a reminder that the material’s lightweight properties save fuel or energy in almost all of its applications, often making it “the best environmental option,” a message he said policymakers must communicate.

Baxter said trade associations throughout Europe have been “making regular visits” to national and EU legislators, “but we can’t leave it only to the trade associations,” he added, urging CEOs and other executives t0 get involved.

While also noting that critics, including some corporate CEOs, have been bashing plastic, Edward Kosior of London-based Nextek said his firm has been involved in several projects intended to increase the plastic recycling rate.

“It’s out the door before I even have it ground and processed.” – a reprocessor based in the Midwest concerning recycled PE demand

Kosior said many of plastic’s recyclability problems stem from product design that incorporates multiple materials (such as metal springs or paper labels) and multiple layers of different plastics.

He said Nextek has been involved in one major project involving Procter & Gamble, which he described as “a new type of [plastic] recycling that hasn’t been tried before.” The PureCycle project in Ohio has been designed to increase the recycling of polypropylene (PP) packaging. The process uses a solvent to accomplish recycling “at the molecular level.” (For more on this technology, visit www.RecyclingToday.com/article/polypropylene-recycling-game-changing-innovation.)

Regarding recycled PP demand in the U.S., a reprocessor based in the Midwest says lower melt flow material was experiencing sluggish movement, while PP with a higher melt flow index (20 and above) was “moving fairly steadily.”

The reprocessor says he’s having a hard time keeping recycled polyethylene (PE) in stock. “It’s out the door before I even have it ground and processed.” Demand for injection molded PE was especially healthy, the reprocessor adds.

He says brokers have been reaching out to his company more frequently as they try to find homes for scrap that normally would have gone to China before the country started cracking down on plastic scrap imports at the start of the year. However, the reprocessor says this is material his company is not interested in processing.

He says his company has experienced elevated transportation costs and has struggled to book trucks because of the hurricane recovery efforts, but he is hopeful that will change soon. “Winter will slow things down and work it back out,” the reprocessor says.

Chinese demand for U.S. recovered fiber has bounced back, and export prices have jumped considerably as a result for old corrugated containers (OCC) and sorted residential papers and news (SRPN) in November. Mixed paper prices to China also increased.

In addition, in the domestic market, pricing for all the major secondary fiber grades had sizable gains on the West Coast. OCC saw substantial price surges of $45 per ton out of Long Beach/Los Angeles and of $50 per ton out of the Pacific Northwest, according to the Nov. 6 PPW Yellow Sheet from Boston-based research firm RISI.

Sources say shipping to China is still “risky.” Yet, OCC prices to China increased by $53 to $58 per ton FAS (free alongside ship, meaning the seller must deliver goods to a named port alongside a vessel the buyer designates), while prices for SRPN exported to China grew by $25 to $28 per ton FAS, RISI reports. The OCC price hike nearly made up for the price decline the grade saw in the export market in October when it dropped by $70 to $73 per ton. This price drop was the largest decline OCC has ever recorded.

In other record-setting scenarios in October, mixed paper hit its lowest-ever price of $28.06 per ton. This has been followed with the second-lowest price for the grade, which sold for an average of $30 per ton in November. (In the December 2016 issue, Recycling Today reported that at $73.06 per ton, mixed paper reached its highest price for the second time since we began publishing RISI’s pricing in July 2014. Mixed paper pricing topped $73.06 for the first time in August 2016.) Beyond the West Coast, recovered paper prices in the U.S. dropped across the board in the South and Midwest for most grades, with some flatness being seen in pricing for SRPN and mixed paper in these regions.

A Midwest-based recycler says with pricing for the West Coast tied to export demand, it’s no surprise pricing for both grades bounced back. Export, he says, is rebounding.

“Competition for materials was sloppy in September and most of October,” says the Midwest-based recycler. “This has turned around in November and will accelerate through the new year. Domestic mills on the West Coast need to be competitive with export to obtain materials.”

On the other hand, the recycler says some mills don’t believe there will be a fiber shortage and “are behaving as if export will not be a factor.” He reports that one mill he works with has limited its recovered fiber purchases to contract tons. Another mill, which has bought his company’s material for years, cut back on its buying because of quality issues.

While domestic demand is good, sources say many U.S. mills are full and limiting orders.

A buyer based on the West Coast says it is a “wait-and-see situation” as to how the news coming out of China will play out. In the meantime, he says, other overseas markets have ramped up their buying of recovered fiber. The recovered paper trader says having alternative markets to sell to, notably Southeastern Asia, has been helpful.

“Dollar for dollar, I’d rather ship it to a different market and keep my fingers crossed than ship it to China,” says the buyer. “China is still going to be an important market for mixed, but it’s nice we now have some alternatives.”

Demand from other Asian markets, including India, remained firm to strong, reports Ranjit Baxi, president of the Brussels-based Bureau of International Recycling (BIR), in the organization’s October 2017 BIR World Mirror on Recovered Paper.

“Exporters are now looking forward to 2018 and asking where the economy is heading and how to mitigate the looming fiber export risks,” Baxi writes. “Exporters want to know whether Chinese mills’ import allocations for 2018 will be maintained at 2017 levels or reduced. Most markets believe a 25 percent reduction to be a possibility, which would make 2018 a very trying and testing year for fiber exporters to China,” he adds.

For a free trial of RISI’s PPW Yellow Sheet pricing, please visit www.risi.com/rt.