The board of the Brussels-based Bureau of International Recycling (BIR) Ferrous Division has appointed Denis Reuter, chief operating officer of TSR Recycling GmbH & Co. KG, as new president.

Reuter is a long-standing member of BIR and has been active on the Ferrous divisional board since 2019, the association says. He joined TSR in 2010 and now is responsible for all the trading activities for ferrous and nonferrous metals.

TSR Recycling, with its headquarters in Lünen, Germany, is a major European scrap trading and processing company and has 160 locations, mainly in Germany, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands and Poland. The company provides services for the metalworking trade, large industries and municipalities.

Reuter’s appointment was recommended to the divisional board by the Division’s Nominating Committee. In his capacity as Ferrous Division president, Reuter is a member of the BIR Executive Committee and serves as vice president of the organization.

“I am delighted to welcome Denis to the BIR Executive Committee, and I am certain that he will greatly contribute to BIR’s roadmap for the years to come,” says BIR President Tom Bird. “Having worked with him on the Ferrous board, I am confident that he will prove to be a great asset.”

Reuter replaces Gregory Schnitzer of Sims Metal Management.

The Can Manufacturers Institute (CMI), Washington, has awarded the city of Milwaukee and Waukesha County’s material recovery facility (MRF) with a $65,000 aluminum can capture grant to help the facility recover beverage cans that are improperly sorted. Ardagh Metal Packaging, a supplier of metal packaging solutions with global headquarters in Luxembourg, and Crown Holdings, Yardley, Pennsylvania, both provided funds for the grant.

The single-stream MRF is operated by Republic Services and processes about 65,000 tons of material per year from the city of Milwaukee and 26 communities in Waukesha County.

According to a news release from CMI, the grant will enable the city and county to add an additional eddy current in the MRF. CMI says the new equipment will enable the recycling facility to recover more than 27 million additional aluminum beverage cans annually. CMI reports that those additional cans “will generate more than $400,000 in new annual revenue.”

“This additional eddy current will help us ensure increased capture of aluminum beverage cans, which will deliver significant revenue to help sustain city services as well as enable our residents to make a larger environmental impact from recycling,” says Rick Meyers, sanitation services manager for the city of Milwaukee Department of Public Works.

CMI says this is the fourth MRF to receive funding from the grant program. CMI partnered with The Recycling Partnership to evaluate and select grantees, execute the grant program and provide technical assistance to ensure implementation of the program.

The first three grantees in the program include Curbside Management, Asheville, North Carolina; Gel Recycling, Port Orange, Florida; and Independent Texas Recyclers in Houston.

Additionally, The Recycling Partnership worked with the city of Milwaukee earlier this year to deploy more than 18,600 recycling carts and fund a citywide education and outreach effort to support the transition to universal, every-other-week recycling collection.

According to CMI, the equipment investment “will help make sure that the increased volume of cans collected at curbside due to the cart deployment and education effort is sorted properly and ultimately made into new cans.”

“The city of Milwaukee and Waukesha County are honored that our facility received this generous grant to purchase equipment to capture additional aluminum beverage cans, one of the most valuable commodities in our recycling program,” says Alan Barrows, land resources manager for Waukesha County.

On Nov. 5, Congress passed the much-anticipated and hotly contested infrastructure bill after months of political wrangling. The plan, which boasts a price tag of $1.2 trillion, will help rebuild roads, bridges and rail; expand access to clean drinking water; ensure access to high-speed internet; reduce the impacts of the climate crisis; and advance environmental justice, the Biden administration says.

Additionally, the administration says the deal will add 1.5 million jobs per year over the next decade.

Specific to the waste and recycling sector, the bill contains provisions of the RECYCLE Act, which will help provide grants via the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to help educate households and consumers about their residential and community recycling programs to improve participation and reduce contamination. It also calls for the EPA to develop a model recycling program toolkit for states, local governments, Indian tribes and partners to deploy to improve recycling rates and decrease contamination in the recycling stream.

The bill also contains grants to encourage battery recycling and promotes the DRIVE-Safe Act, which directs the Department of Transportation to promulgate regulations to implement an apprenticeship program for licensed commercial motor vehicle drivers under the age of 21 to help alleviate the driver shortage across industry, including in waste and recycling. 

According to the Biden administration, the infrastructure bill will:

• Deliver clean water to all American families and eliminate the nation’s lead service lines. Currently, up to 10 million American households and 400,000 schools and childcare centers lack safe drinking water. The infrastructure deal will invest $55 billion to expand access to clean drinking water for households, businesses, schools and childcare centers all across the country.
• Deliver $65 billion to help ensure that every American has access to reliable high-speed internet through a historic investment in broadband infrastructure deployment. The legislation will also help lower prices for internet service so that more Americans can afford internet access.
• Repair and rebuild roads and bridges with a focus on climate change mitigation, resilience, equity and safety for all users. In the United States, one in five miles of highways and major roads and 45,000 bridges, are in poor condition. The legislation will reauthorize surface transportation programs for five years and invest $110 billion in additional funding to repair roads and bridges and support major projects. The deal makes the largest investment in repairing and reconstructing U.S. bridges since the construction of the interstate highway system. It will help rebuild the most economically significant bridges in the country as well as thousands of smaller bridges. The legislation also includes the first “Safe Streets and Roads for All” program to support projects to reduce traffic fatalities, which claimed more than 20,000 lives in the first half of 2021.
• Improve transportation options for millions of Americans and reduce greenhouse emissions through the largest investment in public transit in U.S. history. America’s public transit infrastructure is inadequate, with a multibillion-dollar repair backlog representing more than 24,000 buses, 5,000 rail cars, 200 stations and thousands of miles of track, signals and power systems in need of replacement. The transportation sector in the United States is now the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions. The legislation includes $39 billion of new investment to modernize transit, in addition to continuing the existing transit programs for five years as part of surface transportation reauthorization. In total, the new investments and reauthorization in the deal provide $89.9 billion in guaranteed funding for public transit over the next five years. The legislation will expand public transit options across every state; replace thousands of deficient transit vehicles, including buses, with clean, zero-emission vehicles; and improve accessibility for the elderly and people with disabilities.
• Upgrade U.S. airports and ports to strengthen supply chains and prevent disruptions that have caused inflation. According to the Biden administration, this will improve U.S. competitiveness, create more and better jobs at these hubs and reduce emissions. The legislation invests $17 billion in port infrastructure and waterways and $25 billion in airports to address repair and maintenance backlogs, reduce congestion and emissions near ports and airports and drive electrification and other low-carbon technologies.
• Make the largest investment in passenger rail since the creation of Amtrak 50 years ago. The legislation will invest $66 billion in additional rail funding to eliminate the Amtrak maintenance backlog, modernize the Northeast Corridor and bring better rail service to areas outside the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. 
• Invest $7.5 billion to build out a national network of electric vehicle (EV) chargers in the United States. This is a critical step to fighting the climate crisis and creating good U.S. manufacturing jobs, the Biden administration says. The legislation will provide funding for deployment of EV chargers along highway corridors to facilitate long-distance travel and within communities to provide convenient charging where people live, work and shop. This investment will support the president’s goal of building a nationwide network of 500,000 EV chargers to accelerate the adoption of EVs, reduce emissions, improve air quality and create quality jobs across the country.
• Upgrade U.S. power infrastructure to deliver clean, reliable energy across the country. According to the Department of Energy, power outages cost the U.S. economy up to $70 billion annually. The deal’s more than $65 billion investment includes the largest investment in clean energy transmission and grid in American history. It will upgrade U.S. power infrastructure by building thousands of miles of new transmission lines to facilitate the expansion of renewables and clean energy while lowering costs.
• Make communities safer and infrastructure more resilient to the impacts of climate change and cyber-attacks with an investment of over $50 billion to protect against droughts, heat, floods and wildfires and weatherization.
• Deliver the largest investment in tackling legacy pollution in American history by cleaning up Superfund and brownfield sites, reclaiming abandoned mines and capping orphaned oil and gas wells. In thousands of rural and urban communities around the country, hundreds of thousands of former industrial and energy sites are now idle. The bill will invest $21 billion to clean up Superfund and brownfield sites, reclaim abandoned mine land and cap orphaned oil and gas wells. These projects will remediate environmental harms, address the legacy pollution that harms the public health of communities and create jobs. According to the Biden administration, this investment will benefit communities of color, as it has been found that 26 percent of Black Americans and 29 percent of Hispanic Americans live within 3 miles of a Superfund site, a higher percentage than for Americans overall.
  

More than 2.75 million Michigan households can now recycle food and beverage cartons and paper cups as a result of a partnership between Denton, Texas-based Carton Council of North America and Falls Church, Virginia-based Foodservice Packaging Institute.  

According to a joint news release, the two groups collaborated with local recycling facilities in Michigan to recycle paper products in the metro Detroit area as well as 70 other cities in the region. The recycled paper cups and food and beverage cartons will be used to make new paper products, such as paper towels, toilet paper, napkins and paper. These products will primarily be made in the Great Lakes region.

Detroit residents can recycle paper cups and cartons in their curbside recycling carts. According to the Carton Council of North America and the Foodservice Packaging Institute, Detroit as well as some other area communities will participate in a joint outreach campaign this month to notify residents about the ability to recycle paper cups and cartons in curbside recycling.

“Paper cups and cartons are items our residents use a lot, and they have a desire to recycle. We are excited to provide the opportunity now for them to be recycled,” says Mike Csapo, general manager of the Resource Recovery Recycling Authority of Southwest Oakland County (RRRASOC).

RRRASOC and Green For Life Environmental Recycling and Resource Recovery’s (GFL Environmental’s) facility in Southfield, Michigan, will sort paper cups and food and beverage cartons from area communities, including the city of Detroit. According to the Carton Council of North America and the Foodservice Packaging Institute, these facilities join other recycling facilities in Michigan that already accept these materials, including Southeast Oakland County Resource Recovery Authority, Emterra and Kent County.

Once the recyclables are received at these recycling facilities, they are sorted and then sent to paper mills in the Great Lakes region to be made into new recycled-content products.

To help this process, GFL Environmental says it has installed technology at its New Boston, Michigan, facility to sort paper cups and food and beverage cartons. The technology was paid for through a grant from the Foodservice Packaging Institute and the Carton Council of North America as part of ongoing initiatives to increase recycling paper cups and food and beverage cartons in the country.

“Michigan is a valuable location for adding paper cups to its recycling stream due to its proximity to end markets in and around the state,” says Natha Dempsey, president of the Foodservice Packaging Institute. “The state is committed to growing recycling and end markets to meet its goals.”