WestRock Company, Atlanta, announced results for its fiscal second quarter ended March 31, 2019. The company reports that net sales increased $603 million compared with the prior year quarter, primarily attributable to $599 million of increased corrugated packaging segment net sales (mainly due to the acquisition of KapStone Paper and Packaging Corporation), higher selling price/mix across the segment and strength in its North American container business. 

“Our WestRock team delivered outstanding results in the second fiscal quarter,” says Steve Voorhees, chief executive officer. “We’re responding to changing market conditions by focusing on organic growth opportunities, maintaining a focus on productivity, operational excellence and debt reduction, while continuing to return cash to stockholders. With the advantages of our diverse portfolio and the multiple levers in our control, I remain confident in our ability to create long-term value for our customers and for our stockholders.”

WestRock reports that the increased sales were partially offset by the absence of recycling sales in the current year quarter as a result of conducting the operations primarily as a procurement function beginning in fiscal 2019, lower containerboard volumes and unfavorable foreign currency compared with the prior year quarter. Net sales, adjusted to exclude recycling net sales in the prior year quarter for comparability, increased $713 million. 

Segment income increased $23 million compared with the prior year quarter primarily attributable to $48 million of increased corrugated packaging segment income, $16 million of decreased land and development segment income and $9 million of decreased consumer packaging segment income. The increase in segment income primarily included the contribution from acquired operations, higher selling price/mix across its segments and productivity. WestRock reports that these items were offset by higher levels of cost inflation, lower containerboard volumes, economic downtime, the scheduled strategic outage at the company’s Mahrt mill and lower land and development segment income due to winding down of sales. 

Pittsburgh-based American Zinc Recycling Corp.’s facility in Mooresboro, North Carolina, caught fire on April 28. The facility removes and refines metals to make special high-grade zinc and continuous-galvanizing grade. Last fall, the company announced plans to restart the facility in April of this year.

According to American Zinc Recycling, the fire was contained, and no injuries were reported. Authorities are currently investigating the cause of the fire.

According to reporting by WSPA-TV, numerous fire crews responded to the blaze and residents within half a mile of the facility were evacuated. 

“We applaud the courageous efforts of the fire departments in fighting this blaze,” American Zinc Recycling states regarding the fire. “They have successfully contained the fire, with no injuries to any of our employees, who have all been accounted for. We are cooperating fully with state and local authorities to investigate the causes of the fire. Our highest priority at all times is to protect the community, our employees and the environment and we are grateful to the quick action by the local first responders. We are unable to comment further at this time.”

American Zinc Recycling reports the situation at the facility was stabilized by April 30. 

"Based on tests performed by emergency officials of air pollutants, including sulfuric acid, we understand that exposure of sulfuric acid emissions at the monitored levels does not pose a health risk to citizens in the community," the company states. "As a consequence of this monitoring, the evacuation order has been lifted and affected residents are permitted to return to their homes. [American Zinc Recycling] continues to work cooperatively with emergency officials and to ensure the safety of citizens int he community."

More than 100 Maine communities began a search 10 years ago to find a new opportunity that would provide a solution to their municipal solid waste (MSW) and recycling issues.

Maine municipalities formed the Municipal Review Committee (MRC) in 1991 to help restructure waste disposal contracts and address MSW challenges on behalf of its members. MRC partnered and facilitated waste disposal contracts between 187 Maine communities and waste-to-energy facility Penobscot Energy Recovery Company (PERC), Orrington, Maine, for the past 30 years. However, MRC developed different views recently of how waste should be handled. Before its contract ended with PERC in March 2018, the committee set out to find “new opportunities and technologies” to process their MSW and recyclables “other than combustion.”

“Ten years before the end of our contract, MRC started planning for the end,” says Karen Fussell, MRC vice presidentand finance director. “We knew we had to do something radically different. In the end, we ended up choosing Fiberight.”

Unlike a traditional material recover facility (MRF) where materials are collected, baled and shipped for processing, materials are processed on-site at Fiberight’s Hampden, Maine-based Coastal Resources of Maine facility, which keeps costs low for the municipalities. 

In what it calls the “next generation of recycling,” the facility combines traditional waste and recycling methods with technology to recover organics, paper, plastics and glass from residential waste stream. Organics, for example, are recovered, processed through anaerobic digestion and fed into a natural gas pipeline, which generates electricity for half of New England. Glass is processed into aggregate for public works projects. The facility also uses a pulping and briquette process.

“We are establishing something that’s first of its kind,” says Shelby Wright, Fiberight’s director of community services. “We have to talk to people about what that really means. I’ve been having a lot of communication with municipalities to further the understanding that Coastal Resources of Maine has been designed to recover materials in the waste stream.”

She adds, “We’re doing that all on-site, which cuts down on transportation, emissions, overhead and cost to municipalities."

Maintaining recycling programs has been difficult for the rural Maine communities because of the costs, Fussel says. Before Fiberight, her community sent recyclables more than 100 miles away to be processed at a cost of $175 per ton. The MRC didn’t want to mandate recycling for communities that couldn’t afford it, but “it was important to our members that recycling be an option,” Fussel says.

With Fiberight, “they know even if their community has stopped their recycling programs, the facility is going to be pulling recyclables from the waste stream. Making use of all of these materials helps mitigate that feeling of maybe I should still be separating,” she adds.

MRC purchased the site in Hampden and worked with Fiberight to acquire needed permits and licenses for construction and put arrangements in place to support financing, construction and operation. The $70 million facility began accepting residential MSW April 22.

For the past 30 years, Wright in one way or another has educated the public about the proper way to recycle, whether with her college environmental group or for Fiberight. She says with the amount of material on the market today, from No. 3-7 plastics to different types of cardboard, recycling has “become more and more complicated.”

“Folks who are committed to recycling do the best they can, but that’s about 30 to 35 percent of the population,” Wright says. “Fiberight was designed for the other 65 to 70 percent of people. Fiberight meets the market where it’s at and provides a solution with little or no change to consumer behavior.”

Fiberight will ramp up production in the next few months, with plans to begin all waste disposal and single-stream recycling contracts with the MRC communities and commercial waste processing by July. The facility has capacity to process 180,000 tons of materials per year.

“There is room for expansion to take in more commercial and specialty waste,” Wright says. “We’re focused on serving the communities. Maine has a small population. We don’t feel we built a plant that was too big to serve the area nor to small.”

A late April downwardly revised economic forecast for Brazil points to the economic uncertainties in that nation, which has been characterized in another recent report as having a history of boom and bust cycles.

A Bloomberg news item says a survey of analysts conducted by Brazil’s central bank shows the average forecaster predicting a 1.71 gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate for the South American nation in 2019. Bloomberg says that rate would represent “the lowest [GDP growth rate] level ever in a signal of mounting investor pessimism in Latin America’s largest economy.”

The previous survey just one week earlier led to 1.95 percent forecast, while one year ago the same analysts were predicting, on average. 3 percent GDP growth for 2019.

Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro, who took office in January, is the latest in a line of presidents who will try to govern the nation in a way that will usher in stable economic growth.

A 382-page report prepared by the Washington-based International Monetary Fund (IMF), also released in April, characterizes the nation’s economy with a report titled “Brazil: Boom, bust and the road to recovery.”

A foreword to that report written by an IMF deputy managing  director reviews the ups and downs of Brazil’s economy since World War II and adds, “Brazil now faces a moment of opportunity, with the economy emerging gradually from the recession, albeit with significant domestic and external downside risks.”

Deputy Executive David Lipton adds, “Brazil can turn the corner by pursuing much-needed reforms to place the economy on a stronger footing.” He also notes, however, that many stakeholders are likely “fatigued” by earlier reform efforts.

Within the lengthy report, its editors Antonio Spilimbergo and Krishna Srinivasan write, “over the past 40 years or so since the recession of 1981, Brazil’s economic performance has been mediocre, marked by more downs than ups, with annual GDP growth averaging 2.6 percent.”

The co-editors acknowledge reform efforts have been attempted, but write that “poor growth in recent years reflects backpedaling on some of these reforms, owing largely to the role of an activist state and its distrust of markets; riskier macroeconomic policy choices; and, most importantly, structural factors, including, but not limited to, fiscal malaise and the closed nature of the Brazilian economy.”

Spilembergo, Srinivasan and their colleagues stress that reforms aimed at opening up the economy, closing infrastructure gaps, improving the efficiency of credit allocation, and improving the functioning of the government and its institutions “hold the key to improving the economy’s productive potential.”