The state’s Department of Environmental Quality is distributing about $500,000 in grants to reduce the state’s dependence on landfill disposal.
The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) has announced that its recycling program has provided $492,937 in recycling business development grants to 16 North Carolina recycling companies.
According to a news release from the department, the grants are projected to create 108 new jobs and generate more than $1.3 million in new, private business investments while reducing the state’s dependence on landfill disposal.
“Recycling businesses provide high quality jobs for North Carolinians and play a unique role in boosting the state’s economy while improving the state’s environmental and carbon footprint,” says Jamie Ragan, director of the Division of Environmental Assistance and Customer Service at the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality. “These grant-funded projects will create jobs and put recyclable materials back into the state’s economy, thereby helping manufacturers make new products, reducing North Carolina’s reliance on foreign markets and ultimately diverting material from the waste stream.”
For the fourth year in a row, DEQ says it gave priority to projects that improve North Carolina’s capacity to domestically process and use mixed paper and nonbottle plastics. According to the North Carolina DEQ, strengthening local markets leads to more resilient recycling programs and better value for these materials when diverted from landfill disposal.
The recycling business grantees are from 13 counties, representing both large and small companies. The North Carolina DEQ says types of grant projects awarded include expanding plastic processing capacity, upgrading material recovery facilities and improving recycling markets for other materials. The following companies received grants:
Grants are offered each year, depending on funding availability, to reduce the flow of solid waste into landfills and continue growing the state’s recycling economy. Recipients are required to provide a minimum cash match of 50 percent of the grant award; however, the level of private investment in 2021 is expected to more than double the total grant funding. The combination of grant and private dollars will result in a nearly $1.8 million investment in the state’s recycling infrastructure.
California-based commercial waste equipment provider increases presence in Pacific Northwest with acquisition.
Emeryville, California-based American Trash Management (ATM), a provider of waste and recycling equipment, chute installation, and repair and maintenance services, has expanded to the Pacific Northwest with its acquisition of Portland, Oregon-based RamCoNW.
Existing RamCoNW customers will continue to receive chute and compaction services but will also now have access to ATM’s “full suite of trash management services,” says ATM.
“Adding RamCoNW to the ATM family is an exciting step for us,” says Steven Seltzer, ATM’s chief operating officer. “Clients rave about the service and quality the company offers its Oregon clients, and we’re thrilled to continue that tradition while also providing additional products and services.”
“This feels like the right next step for our company,” says Lisa Menken, president of RamCoNW. “Our clients are our lifeblood, and being able to not only continue providing top-notch chute and compactor services, but also offer next-generation waste solutions is a dream for us.”
In 2021 and beyond, ATM says it is seeking to partner with other “high-quality, well-established and respected regional trash system service operations.”
On its website, RamCoNW has retained its brand name while also referring to itself as “an American Trash Management company.”
Founded in 1990, ATM says it provides sophisticated, cost-saving trash management products and services to private and public sector customers in North America, including waste and recycling equipment, trash chutes and accompanying installation, repair and maintenance services and—through its SmartTrash subsidiary—ongoing waste management services.
The company invested in technology capable of boosting its recovery rates and reducing its reliance on manual sorters.
Every recycler knows that the success of their operation is wholly dependent on the quality and efficiency of their sorting processes.
Melimax, a construction and demolition (C&D) recycler based in Chateauguay, a suburb of Montreal, had been struggling with efficiency issues at their facility in recent years thanks to lackluster sorting system performance that required several passes for the same material and a large number of manual sorters.
“We had quite a few issues with our old system, but the main pain points were the double and triple handling of the material to bring it up to purity standards, while having an enormous amount of pickers. We were aiming to decrease our number of pickers as much as possible while having a ‘one in, one out’ system where whatever came into the system came out as a final product or trash,” Mario Landry, president and owner of Melimax, says.
At the beginning of 2020, Landry began consulting with Sherbrooke OEM about possible solutions for these issues. According to Billy Brasseur, marketing manager at Sherbrooke OEM, the company made the proposition to implement new sorting technology at the Melimax site to increase their recovery rate of both materials exceeding 2 inches in size and fines material, as well as reduce labor costs.
Skeptical at first, the facility’s management quickly became enthusiastic when presented with the first technical sketch and the financial provisions of the project. According to Brasseur, Sherbrooke OEM mapped out the entirety of the project and shared plans in great detail, not only on the technical side, but also regarding the financial implications of the project centered on improved recovery rates.
After initial discussions that allowed the company to see the value in upgrading the site’s equipment, Melimax signed off on a total sorting system overhaul.
Manufacturing and design of the system began in May 2020. Installation commenced towards the end of June and was completed by early October of last year. Melimax began operations with the new system as soon as installation was finished.
According to Brasseur, “The system was built from scratch. We did not use anything from the old system. The core difference between the system’s new equipment, however, was the implementation of optical sorters as well as various equipment to sort the fines portion of the material.”
Up until recently in the C&D universe, only sizeable pieces of wood could be easily recovered, Brasseur says. That has changed along with the advent of more sophisticated sorting methods.
Brasseur says in order to help Melimax better recover its wood, Sherbrooke OEM advocated introducing optical sorters, which had been proven successful at other C&D sites.
Brasseur says optical sorters are ideal for this application because they have the ability to perform hundreds of thousands of ejections every hour. This method of sorting has a capture rate between 95 and 98 percent, the company says.
“Now, every piece that is larger than 1/8 inch in size is recoverable, which represents a huge step forward, as it now allows the recovery rate of wood to exceed 95 percent in C&D facilities,” he says.
According to Brasseur, the ability of optical sorters to differentiate between desirable and undesirable material is one of the main selling points of the system.
“There will always be unwanted material that is ejected with the desired material. We call this the dragging factor, and it is not often considered when talking about sorting, when in fact it has a substantial effect on both capture rate and purity of your material. The dragging factor is caused by the fact that unwanted material is either too close to the desired material or simply attached in some way to the desired material.”
Brasseur says when programming the ejection parameters of the machines used at Melimax, the company made sorting out some of these unwanted materials a priority.
“By replacing quality control done manually with optical sorters, it was possible to increase the quality of the wood, as well as sort out the melamine, embossed panels and plastic, which allowed the production of two distinct wood grades with interesting value,” he explains.
When it came to treatment of the fines material, Sherbrooke decided to design the system in a way it had been doing for years in the southern parts of the United States, which is to remove the 1/8 inch fines from the rest of the 0- to 2-inch portion of material recovered. This was done to recover not only the wood in this fraction, but also the aggregates, which represented a substantial portion of the material.
“The startup of the Melimax facility made us quickly realize that [separating the 1/8 inch fines from the 0- to 2-inch portion] reduced the total volume of the 0- to 2-inch material from 30 percent to less than 15 percent,” Brasseur says. “Furthermore, observations to this day continue to demonstrate that there is just as much aggregate in the 0- to 2-inch fraction than in the 2 inches and above portion, which is not negligible considering that [that portion of the 0- to 2-inch material] is not usually recovered at all.”
Landry says that thanks to the improvements of its sorting system, Melimax is now able to process 50 tons per hour, averaging between 400 tons to 800 tons a day. Not only have improvements at the site enabled better recovery of materials, Landry says the new system has helped the company better market its products.
“The first improvement we saw was that we got our pickers down to five from our initial number of 25—which represented a major expense for us. Not only that, but we get better quality in our products with the Sherbrooke OEM system since it’s fully automated. We’ve also seen an increase in our uptime and our throughput per hour,” Landry says. “Perhaps the biggest benefit we have with this system is that fines materials are sorted. Being able to retrieve both wood and aggregates from that fraction has had a big impact for us.”
This article originally appeared in the March/April issue of Construction & Demolition Recycling magazine. The author is the editor of Construction & Demolition Recycling magazine and can be contacted at aredling@gie.net.
ReFED outlines seven key action areas to focus food waste reduction efforts over the next 10 years.
In 2019, 35 percent of all food in the United States went unsold or uneaten. That’s $408 billion worth of food with a greenhouse gas (GHG) footprint equivalent to 4 percent of total U.S. GHG emissions. Most of this became food waste, which went straight to landfill, incineration or was simply left in the fields to rot. Businesses, government agencies, funders and others are already making efforts to address this challenge.
Case in point, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced the formation of the U.S. Food Loss and Waste 2030 Champions group in November 2016. This group is composed of organizations that have made a public commitment to reduce food loss and waste in their own operations in the U.S. by 50 percent by the year 2030. While these organizations, and similar entities committed to cutting food waste in half by 2030, embody great ambition, a massive acceleration is needed to achieve such national and international goals to meet this threshold.
Food waste is a systemwide problem, affecting all stages of the supply chain, so solving it will take a systemwide approach. ReFED’s “Roadmap to 2030: Reducing U.S. Food Waste by 50 Percent” guide was designed to provide food businesses, governments and others with a framework around which to align their efforts. ReFED, which was founded in 2015, is a national nonprofit dedicated to ending food loss and waste across the U.S. food system by advancing data-driven solutions.
The “Roadmap to 2030” outlines seven key action areas to focus food waste reduction efforts over the next 10 years. They align with the food recovery hierarchy of prevention (stopping waste from occurring in the first place), rescue (redistributing food to people when it’s at risk of going to waste), and recycling (repurposing waste as energy, agricultural and other products).
This blueprint places a focus on articulating prevention-related action areas, as they typically have the greatest financial and environmental impact compared to the investment required.
Optimizing the harvest means aligning what is grown with what is ultimately harvested. This is accomplished by avoiding overproduction and then harvesting as much as possible. When it comes to wild-caught products—such as fish, some animals and certain types of produce—it means sourcing only what’s needed. Solutions for optimizing the harvest include finding new ways to sell and donate what’s left after harvest, such as developing innovative contract structures that don’t incentivize overproduction, and improving systems of communication that relay forecasted demands back up the supply chain to producers. Additionally, technological innovations that streamline individual, cross-sector and cross-supply-chain data sharing could amplify these benefits. While these solutions manifest in less waste at the production level, the opportunities and responsibility to implement them lie across all supply chain actors.
Enhancing product distribution means maximizing freshness and selling time by harnessing the power of technology to create smart systems that efficiently move products to their destination. Solutions in this action area include embracing technological tools such as intelligent routing and sensors that aid in cold chain management. However, these innovations must be utilized with updated management procedures that prioritize remaining shelf life and intelligent routing practices that shorten transit times. These solutions lead to improved freshness and quality, where both suppliers and buyers benefit.
Refining product management means aligning purchases with sales as closely as possible, and when surpluses arise, finding secondary outlets to accommodate these excesses. It also means building out systems and processes for optimal on-site handling. Solutions regarding product management include employing tactics that simplify inventory management, such as implementing dynamic pricing via artificial intelligence to improve the use of products in stock and using software that enhances future demand planning to ensure that future product orders won’t lead to excess supply and waste. Product management solutions also include diversifying product outlets in case excess arises, establishing markets for last-minute products through alternative sales channels and employing innovative new approaches such as markdown alert apps.
Maximizing product utilization means designing facilities, operations and menus to use the most of each product as possible. It also means rethinking the concept of “waste” by turning surplus and byproducts into food products through upcycling, which has opened new doors for innovation and investment. Solutions in this action area focus on using ingredients and products in their entirety, preventing waste through minimizing losses on a production line, extending product life, designing menus to use all product parts and more. Some of product utilization can be achieved through basic staff training, while other solutions involve the development of new food processing equipment.
Reshaping consumer environments means driving consumers toward better food management behaviors and less waste by creating shopping, cooking and eating environments that promote these behaviors. There’s also a big opportunity to shift the overall culture to place more value on food and to make sure that people truly understand the implications of food waste for our environment and economy. Retail locations, food service establishments and residential homes are environments where the narrative around food purchasing, consumption and management can be shifted.
In dining environments, solutions that encourage less wasteful consumption patterns can include offering smaller portion sizes, using smaller plates or removing trays in an effort to help prevent consumers from taking more than they will eat. In shopping environments, solutions include integrating meal planning support into customer assistance programs or creating promotions that don’t promote over-purchasing. More broadly, awareness and education campaigns are an important solution to help shift the culture towards greater appreciation for food and the resources that went into producing it.
Strengthening food rescue means furthering the rescue of high-quality, nutritious food by increasing the capacity of food relief agencies, addressing distribution bottlenecks and improving communication flow. A stronger food rescue system requires expanded storage, transportation and staffing capacity within food rescue organizations, as well as a consistent flow of goods from food business donations, which can be achieved by implementing solutions like promoting better business education. This can also be achieved by adopting coordination and matching technologies that make food donation easier. The capture and sharing of real- or near-time data can play a key role in enabling more food to be donated and identifying gaps to fill in existing infrastructure. As solutions regarding this action area are implemented, it’s critical to maintain an emphasis on the health and dignity of the end recipients—the more than 50 million Americans currently struggling with food insecurity.
Recycling anything remaining means capturing nutrients, energy or other residual value by finding the highest and best use for any food or food scraps that remain. Solutions in this action area range from mature practices of feeding food scraps to livestock to modern innovations such as insect farming. Solutions that make use of existing food for other creatures are preferable to the next category of recycling, which requires processes including composting, anaerobic digestion and co-digestion at water treatment plants to break down the materials for their more basic nutrients.
Alternatively, innovative markets for waste-derived bioplastics, agricultural inputs and other industrial uses model the development of circular economies that can capitalize on existing wasted materials for new products, fuels, packaging materials and more.
This article originally ran in the March issue of Waste Today. Dana Gunders is the executive director of ReFED. She can be reached at dana.gunders@refed.com.
Curtis Bay is one of the only privately held, vertically integrated medical waste solutions providers in the country.
Summer Street Capital Partners LLC, a Buffalo, New York-based private equity fund, announced April 7 that it has completed the sale of Baltimore-based Curtis Bay Medical Waste Services to Aurora Capital Partners of Los Angeles following a competitive auction managed by St. Louis-based Stifel. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
Curtis Bay is one of the only privately held, vertically integrated medical waste solutions providers in the country. Founded in 1991 to provide a regional solution to medical waste management requirements for Maryland's hospitals, Curtis Bay operates the country's largest medical waste incinerator.
Over the course of Summer Street Capital's ownership period, Curtis Bay completed numerous strategic acquisitions, expanded their service area throughout the eastern United States, and evolved to offer a range of waste management solutions demanded by healthcare providers operating in a highly regulated and complex environment.
According to Summer Street, the organization’s vision to build a vertically integrated medical waste platform required new leadership and systems, capital improvements, acquisitions of collection and transfer assets, and expansion of the overall service offering. With the addition of several autoclaves and a collection network built around an expansive fleet and strategically located transfer stations, the company now provides cradle-to-grave medical waste management solutions to thousands of customers extending along the East Coast.
“Our partnership with Summer Street Capital has been incredibly rewarding thanks to their support of our commitment to invest in developing and growing sustainable waste management solutions that generate the lowest possible carbon footprint,” Curtis Bay CEO Mark Schifani says. “Through investments in both our facilities and our people, we were able to build a tremendous company focused on serving our healthcare providers and our community.”
“Curtis Bay's success is the result of a dedicated and knowledgeable team's commitment to customers, employees, community and environment,” Brian D'Amico, managing partner at Summer Street Capital Partners, says. “It was important to management and Summer Street to find a new partner who would continue to support Curtis Bay's investments in technology and people, especially given the significant pipeline of opportunities in front of them. Aurora Capital's experience, expertise and people-driven partnership model make them a great fit for the Curtis Bay team.”