Companies pay a total of $160,000 and replace the diesel engine that powered Connecticut Scrap's auto shredder with an electric engine.
Under the terms of a recent settlement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Connecticut Scrap LLC, Uncasville, Connecticut, and five related scrap metal companies in Connecticut and Rhode Island will pay a total penalty of $160,000 and take important steps to comply with the Clean Air Act (CAA), according to a news release from the EPA.
The EPA alleged that Connecticut Scrap failed to comply with federal standards for large stationary diesel engines designed to reduce air pollution. EPA also claimed that Connecticut Scrap and its five related scrap metal companies—Nichols Auto Parts, Clinton, Connecticut; City Auto Parts, Hartford, Connecticut; Yerringtons, North Stonington, Connecticut; Jordan’s Used Auto Parts, Preston, Connecticut; Ross Recycling, Putnam, Connecticut; and Exeter Scrap, Exeter, Rhode Island—failed to comply with federal standards designed to protect the stratospheric ozone layer, which shields ultra-violet radiation from the sun.
In lieu of complying by installing controls on its large stationary diesel engine, Connecticut Scrap opted to take the engine, which powered its automobile shredder, out of service and connect to the electric power grid, the EPA says. Connecticut Scrap completed this conversion in March 2019. Connecticut Scrap accepts and shreds various postconsumer and industrial metals. The facility collects white goods, appliances, cars, demolition waste and other metals from the public and from scrap yards operated by its related entities in Connecticut and Rhode Island.
Removing this engine and switching to grid power helps reduce emissions of carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds and particulate matter, as well as hazardous air pollutants, such as formaldehyde, the EPA adds. The health effects of these pollutants include a range of respiratory issues, especially asthma among children and seniors.
In addition, the EPA says Connecticut Scrap certified to the agency that it is complying with the regulations designed to limit air releases of chemicals such as refrigerants used in air conditioning systems and cooling equipment that damage the earth's stratospheric ozone layer.
"EPA is committed to protecting public health and clean air by ensuring compliance with laws and regulations that limit pollution from diesel engines," EPA New England Regional Administrator Dennis Deziel says. "EPA appreciates that these companies worked cooperatively to correct the issues raised during this case."
The mill’s second EAF, ladle metallurgical station, thin-slab continuous caster, tunnel furnace and hot mill downcoiler double capacity to 3.3 million tons annually.
Osceola, Arkansas-based Big River Steel (BRS) says it has successfully started up the second phase of its scrap metal recycling and flat-rolled steel production facility. The $716 million expansion will double BRS' production capacity to 3.3 million tons annually.
Originally slated to be commissioned on Jan. 27, 2021, the mill’s second electric arc furnace, ladle metallurgical station, thin-slab continuous caster, tunnel furnace and hot mill downcoiler were brought online more than two months early and are already being used to produce steel, the company says. BRS adds that it plans an aggressive ramp-up to reach rated capacity in less than five months, meaning the company will produce approximately 5,000 tons of steel per employee per year, an increase of almost 66 percent from the 3,000 tons of steel per employee currently produced.
“When describing the success of our Phase Two construction efforts, I am extremely proud to be able to use my five favorite words: ‘ahead of schedule’ and ‘under budget,’” Dave Stickler, BRS chief executive officer, says. “This achievement is a testament to the hard work and can-do attitude of our employees.”
Jim Bell, chief executive officer of BRS Construction Advisory Group LLC, says, “Being able to successfully complete a $700 million construction project in the face of the COVID pandemic is a tremendous accomplishment. The entire Big River Steel family is extremely proud of what we have accomplished.”
The company says this expansion will enhance its product capabilities, further improve the efficiency of its operations and serve as the base for incremental expansion projects targeted at the most demanding steel grades, including those used in hybrid and electrical vehicles.
State regulations regarding the processing of C&D debris can pose unfavorable consequences for recyclers.
As the construction and demolition (C&D) recycling industry grapples with shrinking end markets and a decrease in volumes caused by the coronavirus pandemic, recyclers are now facing another battle with state regulations potentially posing a threat to their operations.
An example of this can be seen in New Jersey’s recent environmental justice bill (S-232) signed by Gov. Phil Murphy Sept. 18, which requires the state Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) to evaluate the environmental and public health stressors certain facilities may pose on overburdened communities when reviewing certain permit applications.
These facilities can include transfer stations or solid waste facilities, recycling facilities that receive at least 100 tons of recyclables per day, scrap metal facilities, landfills, medical waste incinerators and more.
William Turley, executive director for the Construction & Demolition Recycling Association (CDRA), says this means any of the aforementioned facility proposals will require the preparation of an Environmental and Health Impact Statement (EHIS) and public hearings in the community before operators are allowed to submit a permit application to the state.
These requirements not only equate to more regulatory hurdles for operators but to increased costs, as well.
“An EHIS can cost between $30,000 to $50,000, which is an investment that virtually no one will make before getting to square one of the NJDEP permitting process. Ironically, preparation of an EHIS is explicitly excluded from being required for recycling facilities by statute, so this is a huge reversal of public policy,” Turley says.
In addition, perhaps the biggest impediment of the bill relates to Title V major air pollution facilities, says Turley. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a Title V major source is a facility that emits, or has the potential to emit (PTE), any criteria pollutant or hazardous air pollutant (HAP) at levels equal to or greater than the Major Source Thresholds (MST).
As stated in the bill, upon the renewal of an existing facility’s major source permit, all Title V facilities also will need to prepare an EHIS and subject the project to public hearings in the facility’s host community.
“There are 260 Title V facilities in New Jersey. They represent all the major pieces of environmental infrastructure in the state, such as landfills, mass-burn incinerators, every power plant and generating station, all wastewater treatment plants, most colleges and universities, etc.,” Turley says. “While this [legislation] is for Title V now, what is to stop the state from expanding to other levels of facilities in the future?”
The bill has been met with direct opposition from businesses and stakeholders, with many expressing that the legislation is vague with unclear impacts and directly targets waste and recycling facilities.
In July, the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI), Washington, submitted a written testimony to the New Jersey Assembly Environment and Solid Waste Committee in opposition to the bill.
In its statement, Jarred Dorfman, president of ISRI’s New Jersey chapter, offered support of the concept of responsible environmental justice legislation but noted ISRI is concerned that, without amendments, S-232 will harm New Jersey and its recycling goals by imposing onerous restrictions and costs on recycling facilities that need to renew their NJDEP permits.
“For reasons not provided, the legislation specifically calls out recycling and scrap metal facilities while not citing other common industrial and commercial operations,” the testimony states. “Most importantly, by targeting recycling while at the same time promoting the growth of recycling through simultaneous efforts in the New Jersey legislature, such as with S-2515 (which established recycled content requirements for various takeout packaging), the legislature is creating an impossible situation for the recycling industry in the state.”
ISRI also warned that the bill could inhibit facility operators looking to invest in new, environmentally friendly equipment, expanding operations or even developing new facilities that incorporate state-of-the-art technology, including for pollution abatement.
Turley says the bill has the potential to effectively shut down any new environmental infrastructure development in the future at a time when the state economy has taken a beating from COVID-19.
“We agree that no community should bear a disproportionate share of the adverse environmental and public health consequences that accompany a state’s economic growth, and those communities [should] have a meaningful opportunity to participate in the permitting process, but this bill will give them the authority to put companies out of business too easily,” he adds.
Similar strains on the C&D recycling industry can be felt in California, with a 1994 California Supreme Court ruling leaving lasting effects on some of the recycling facilities operating in the state.
The landmark ruling between the cities of Rancho Mirage and Palm Springs, and their franchise hauler, Waste Management of the Desert, redefined what materials may lawfully be within a public entity grant of an exclusive solid waste franchise, thus establishing a “fee for service” test of whether material is solid waste or not.
Brock Hill, owner of San Jose-based Premier Recycle Co., says the ruling “changed the definition of what constituted solid waste and what constituted recycling” in the state of California.
“What that bill tried to do was put the intent of the California solid waste collection industry and infrastructure on reducing the amount of landfill waste,” he says. “Now, when the Supreme Court case in California was ruled on, what they did was they imposed something called a ‘fee for service’ tax. So, that means if a piece of material isn’t monetarily worth anything, that then becomes solid waste and is subject to the exclusive garbage hauling franchise [of each municipality].”
According to the Northern California Recycling Association (NCRA), this left C&D recyclers stuck. Since the legislature had declared landfilling harmful to the environment, the association says the grant of a franchise inclusive of mixed C&D could be said to result in more landfilling, and therefore, environmental review under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) would be required.
Premier Recycling, which is a mixed C&D collector with a fully permitted recycling facility in San Jose, experienced the consequences of this ruling firsthand. While San Jose allows open competition for C&D, many of the surrounding cities like Sunnyvale and Mountain View have exclusive franchises that cover C&D.
“Our company would love to expand, but there is no guarantee that when we set up another facility elsewhere, that we’ll still have access to the same material,” Hill says. “For instance, let’s say we wanted to set up a sorting facility in the city of Oakland. Five years from now, we don’t have a guarantee that the city of Oakland won’t become an exclusive franchise city, and we may not get the contract for that material. … It’s a big gamble for a company that wants to set up a sorting facility with no guarantee of access to the material.”
Although the inclusion of C&D materials in municipal waste franchises can be seen across the state, cities like San Francisco are moving in the opposite direction.
This is in part because of a 1932 ordinance that permanently awarded the right to collect the city’s garbage to individuals or mom-and-pop operations that held the city’s 97 existing route permits, according to The New York Times.
In short order, the holders of all of the permits banded together. The permits became assets of a company, originally jointly owned by the 97 permit-holders, and that company grew into what is now Recology.
“[San Francisco] is currently the only city I know of where their citizens voted that they can’t have an exclusive city franchise. So, because of that constraint on the city government, they’ve had to be creative in how they achieve recycling rates, so they’ve set up a myriad of programs that I think are working very successfully for the city of San Francisco versus exclusively franchised cities,” says Hill.
This article originally appeared in the Nov./Dec. issue of Construction & Demolition Recycling magazine. The author is the assistant editor for Construction & Demolition Recycling magazine and can be reached at hrischar@gie.net.
PM2 in Spremberg, Germany, designed to produce up to 500,000 tons per year of packaging board grades.
The Hamburger Containerboard business unit of the Austria-based Prinzhorn Group has announced the production of “the first tambour [roll] of new PM2 [paper machine No. 2] at Hamburger Containerboard’s location in Spremberg, Germany.”
PM represents a 370 million euros ($438 million) investment, the company says, expanding the Spremberg production site to nearly 900,000 tons per year in packaging grade output. “At full capacity utilization of new PM2, an additional 500,000 tons of high-quality white and brown packaging papers [can be] produced annually,” states the firm.
The company says setbacks tied to COVID-19 and a fire in the stock preparation area earlier in 2020 meant the production startup “was a tough challenge for all parties involved.”
Harald Ganster, managing director of the Hamburger Containerboard Division, comments, “We are extremely happy to get our first tambour of high-quality packaging paper from PM2, and we can’t wait to deliver this great product to our customers.”
The Prinzhorn Group also operates Hamburger Recycling, which collects and processes scrap paper and other recyclable commodities at facilities in several European nations.
Conference organizer describes 90-minute Nov. 25 broadcast as a “conversation” about plastic recycling dynamics heading into 2021.
The organizer of Plasticity plastic recycling and sustainability events has announced there will be a 90-minute Plasticity “Directors Cut” online event on Wednesday, Nov. 25.
The event, which has “Sea of Solutions” as its theme, will be broadcast online at 1 p.m. China time Nov. 25, which is noon in Thailand and some other parts of Southeast Asia and 10:30 a.m. in India.
Doug Woodring of Plasticity and the Hong Kong-based Ocean Recovery Alliance says the event will be “curated and presented by Plasticity” and hosted online in cooperation with the Nairobi, Kenya-based United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP). It is the 14th Plasticity event and the first virtual one.
Woodring says the current environment for plastics recycling includes “new economics in the plastic circular economy, starting with the corporate commitments that create demand [and] recognize the market failures of supply, to forecast pricing and other market dynamics in the coming five years.”
He says an analysis using data from companies including Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestle, Unilever, Danone and others shows “recycled plastic has become a market category in its own right,” resulting in the decoupling of recycled-content plastic prices from virgin resins.
Writes Woodring in a recent online article, “When the price of crude oil plunged to minus $37.63 a barrel earlier this year, it was viewed as a blow to the fledgling recycled plastics market. After all, when used correctly, virgin and recycled plastics deliver the same quality standard, so why should one pay more?
"Surely, this conventional wisdom remains sound: the use of recycled plastic is tied to the price of crude oil. However, conventional wisdom can be anything but. Consider the introduction of the ‘horseless carriage’ [or] space travel as the sole domain of highly trained astronauts.
"Henry Ford’s cars and Richard Branson’s space travel upended the conventional wisdom by finding a fit between demand and supply. Similar market dynamics are playing out in the recycled plastics space, potentially upending the conventional wisdom that plastic, recycled or virgin is permanently tied to the price of oil.
"Spurred on by consumer sentiment, corporate commitments, anti-pollution regulation, access to funds and new business models demand for recycled plastic has moved from nice to have niche to the new norm – coming in as the No. 2 packaging trend for 2020. As yet, the supply channels for this pent-up demand are far from adequate, but the starter’s gun has fired, signaling recycled plastic has become a market category in its own right.”
These and other topics will be disused Nov. 25, Woodring says. Information on registering for the online event can be found on this web page.