The company says the investment will go toward expanding its waste and recycling platform.

Allied Industrial Partners (AIP) LLC, an industrial-focused private equity firm based in Houston, has invested in Atlanta-based Waste Eliminator LLC, a regional provider of solid waste hauling, disposal and recycling services for commercial and industrial waste generators throughout Metro-Atlanta.   

The company will continue to be led by its founder and CEO Wes Turner who, along with others on the management team, will be investing alongside AIP. Together AIP and management have committed more than $150 million in capital to grow the platform. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed. 

Founded in 2006, Waste Eliminator provides turn-key waste management and recycling solutions for large commercial, industrial and government clients. With two material recovery facilities, the company says it is the premier provider of recycling services in Metro-Atlanta and the go-to service provider for assisting clients with sustainability goals.  

"We are thrilled to partner with Wes and his team on the Company's next stage of growth," says Bradford Rossi and Philip Wright, co-founders and managing partners of AIP. "We already have two in-market acquisitions underway, which will add important disposal and treatment infrastructure assets to the platform. We have started to transform Waste Eliminator into one of the largest privately-held waste management companies in Metro-Atlanta, one built around economically dealing with waste streams in ways that maximize beneficial reuse."  

AIP applies a thematic investment approach focused on defensive industrial businesses poised for continuous growth. The company says the critical nature of Waste Eliminator's services, coupled with the tailwinds associated with beneficial waste reuse and corporate sustainability initiatives, make Waste Eliminator an ideal platform for accelerated growth.   

"We viewed AIP as the right partner for our next chapter due to their culture, collective backgrounds and impressive track record," Turner says. "With AIP's resources and relationships, we are confident that we will be able to quickly scale the business and expand our service offering to assist our customers with achieving their sustainability goals." 

The program brings together members from the plastics value chain to provide circularity, tracking and sorting of recycled plastic.

BASF has announced that it is expanding its reciChain program to Alberta in Canada. The program is a technology-enabled ecosystem that brings together members from the plastics value chain to enable circularity, tracking and sorting of recycled plastic.

According to a news release from BASF, several companies partnered to expand the program in Alberta, including Cascades, Layfield, London Drugs, Nova Chemicals, Orion Plastics, [Re] Waste and Waste & Recycling Services from Calgary and Edmonton partnered to expand the program in Alberta.

“Plastics have proven benefits for multiple applications such as food preservation, automotive light-weighting, medical devices and building insulation, among many others. Plastic waste, however, poses a major global challenge,” says Apala Mukherjee, president of BASF Canada, which is based in Mississauga, Ontario. “To solve this environmental issue, we need to build a more circular economy for plastics through innovation and collaboration across the value chain. This is exactly what reciChain brings to the industry.”

BASF says it initially launched the reciChain pilot program in Brazil and later piloted it in British Columbia, Canada. The company says the British Columbia pilot proved circularity by tracking products’ life cycles from pellet to pellet.

With the support of Alberta Innovates, a provincial government corporation responsible for promoting innovation in the province, reciChain is expanding to Alberta to conduct the next phase of the project, which BASF says will bring the solution through to a semicommercial phase.

“Creating a cleaner world starts at the local level in communities all around the country and right here in Alberta,” says Laura Kilcrease, CEO of Alberta Innovates. “Innovative programs like reciChain are creating meaningful changes in plastic recycling. Alberta Innovates is pleased to support this partnership and looks forward to the results that flow from this program.”

The reciChain program includes two technology components—a physical tracer that identifies and follows key plastic features throughout the value chain to enable the connection of plastic to a digital twin and a blockchain marketplace that creates and translates the digital twin to provide a secure, auditable transfer of ownership, assigning incentives to promote participation and offset costs.

The program has several goals, including:

The company says it can configure polyolefin wash plants that can produce food-grade recyclate.

Herbold Meckesheim USA, North Smithfield, Rhode Island, says it can custom configure polyolefin wash plants that can produce high-quality, food-grade recyclate.

While each wash plant is designed around the user’s specific requirements and facility characteristics, they all feature a multistage process usually consisting of preshredding, prewashing and initial separation, granulation, high-density separation and drying.

Preshredding is typically done using a single-shaft shredder, such as the Herbold 60/120. With a 23.5-inch diameter rotor and 60 individual knives, these machines can accept entire bales of plastic scrap, processing up to 13,000 pounds per hour, according to the company.

Washing takes place in a VWE-60 prewashing unit that uses a three-step process of sink/swim to remove heavy materials, a spray wash to loosen and remove embedded sediment and an additional sink/swim to further eliminate remaining sediment, Herbold says.

Further size reduction takes place in a wet granulator, such as the Herbold 80/120. The wet operation provides additional separation of particles and contaminants.

Additional high-density separation of contaminants and recyclate occurs in a Hydrocyclone. The centrifugal force of the Hydrocylcone is designed to provide separation that exceeds conventional methods by a factor of 15, the company says, ensuring purity necessary for food-grade recyclate production.

After final separation, materials are conveyed to a mechanical or thermal dryer for the removal of residual moisture prior to use or storage.

Herbold Meckesheim USA, a subsidiary of Herbold Meckesheim Germany, designs, manufactures and installs size-reduction equipment and wash-line systems for the plastics industry, specializing in the recycling of industrial and postconsumer plastics. 

The label was produced in partnership with SABIC, HHI and Taghleef.

UPM Raflatac, headquartered in Helsinki, has launched packaging label materials marketed under the UPM Raflatac Ocean Action trademark that are made from SABIC certified circular polypropylene (PP) based on ocean-bound plastic (OBP) that is recycled using a pyrolysis process.

“We are proud to offer our customers another more-sustainable choice through the advanced recycling of used plastic that could otherwise end up in our rivers and oceans,” says Lada Kurelec, general manager of the PP, PET, PS, PVC, PU & Elastomers Businesses for Petrochemicals at SABIC. “These labels containing ocean-bound plastic connect with our Trucircle program of circular solutions designed to help reduce plastic waste, mitigate fossil depletion and protect our planet.”

Ocean-bound plastic is defined as abandoned end-of-life plastic found in areas up to 50 kilometers inland from waterways that could eventually be washed into the ocean by rainfall, rivers or tides. Zero Plastic Oceans, a nongovernmental organization working to address plastic pollution, has estimated that OBP from uncontrolled waste disposal accounts for 80 percent of marine plastic litter.

“The new innovative Ocean Action label material is the latest step in our beyond-fossils journey,” Eliisa Laurikainen, business development manager from UPM Raflatac, says. “It does not only help prevent the plastic waste from ending up in the oceans but also offers brand owners the possibility to meet their recycled-content targets for packaging.”

She adds, “The Ocean Action label material is an easy-to-use drop-in solution created especially for food and cosmetics end-uses as it has exactly the same performance as the current fossil-based labels.”

The OBP used in the project is recovered by local partners of Heng Hiap Industries, or HHI, a Malaysia-based recycling company. The sustainable sourcing, proper collection and management of the OBP is certified by Zero Plastic Oceans and Control Union. HHI converts OBP into a pyrolysis oil by using a form of advanced, or chemical, recycling, and SABIC uses this oil as an alternative feedstock to produce certified circular SABIC PP polymer for further processing into film by Taghleef, Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Then, UPM Raflatac produces the label material.

The OBP used to make Ocean Action label material is certified under the Zero Plastics Oceans program, and the final label material under ISCC Plus, which means the material flow is controlled and tracked from its point of origin to the final packaging following a set of predefined and transparent rules, SABIC says.

The Ocean Action label material is available as white and clear top-coated PP films and is designed for fast-moving consumer goods, such as household goods, personal care, packaged foods and beverages. Because the certified circular PP from SABIC, headquartered in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, performs the same way as comparable fossil-based virgin PP, the switch to the OBP material solution required no changes to the film and label material manufacturing processes, SABIC says.

At the early pilot stage, the process will be able to recycle 6 to 10 metric tons of lithium-ion black mass per month.

Aqua Metals Inc., a metals recycling company based in McCarran, Nevada, has announced it is deploying its AquaRefining technology in a lithium-ion battery recycling pilot at its Innovation Center in Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center that will begin operations later this year.  

Additionally, the company has plated high-purity cobalt and produced manganese dioxide from lithium-ion battery black mass using this technology. With the production of these two materials, the company says it has successfully recovered all the high-value metals from used lithium-ion batteries, including lithium hydroxide, copper and nickel at bench scale.  

“With the successful completion of all of our metals recycling proof points at bench scale, we are rapidly deploying the fully integrated pilot at our Innovation Center located in the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center [in Sparks, Nevada] this summer and we expect to commence operations in the coming months,” says Steve Cotton, president and CEO of Aqua Metals.   

At the early pilot stage, Cotton says the process will be able to recycle 6 to 10 metric tons of lithium-ion black mass per month. The company plans to scale to commercial demonstration quantities each month throughout the year to scale to 1,000 metric tons of annual production by the end of 2023. However, Cotton says the process can handle various outputs depending on the scale of the operation.  

The company’s AquaRefining technology takes about a day to process material. The AquaRefining technology is a room-temperature, water-based process that is nonpolluting and uses an electroplating process that builds metal by plating one atom at a time. The company says its process uses 95 percent fewer chemicals than traditional methods, and those that are used get reused instead of going to waste.   

The process, first used on lead-acid batteries, allows Aqua Metals to separate and selectively plate copper, cobalt and nickel plus lithium and lithium hydroxide form, according to the company. These metals can be sold immediately or be processed into battery cathode precursor materials for lithium-ion batteries using proven methods currently in use.   

Cotton says 140 million electric vehicles (EV) are predicted globally by 2030, creating a massive demand for lithium-ion batteries and the critical minerals used to make them. Additionally, by 2025, he says he expects about 400,000 lithium-ion batteries will reach their end of life.  

Cobalt is one of the most expensive materials found in many lithium-ion batteries. Market research from IDTechEx, Cambridge, England, estimates cobalt shortages and supply challenges for lithium and other materials in the next few years.  The company says future materials shortages could increase the cost of these metals and potentially decelerate the transition to electric vehicles and energy storage.  

Aqua Metals says because of higher costs, geopolitical risks and environmental issues, mining won’t meet the demand for electric vehicles made by companies like General Motors, Toyota and Volvo.   

“We have proven at bench scale that we can extract high-quality metals with what we believe is the lowest environmental footprint of any lithium-ion battery recycling technology under development,” says David Regan, vice president of commercial at Aqua Metals. “Any company looking to partner with a battery metals recycling leader will appreciate that our fundamentally nonpolluting Li AquaRefining process is expected to recover all the high-value materials in lithium-ion batteries sustainably and more cost-effectively than other recycling methods and mining.”   

Right now, the company is working on scaling the process at its facility in Sparks. However, if the process is scaled successfully, Cotton says Aqua Metals will look to commercialize the process at a smaller operation, then bring it to a bigger operation and then implement it at several facilities. Cotton declines to say what businesses Aqua Metals is considering but says the company is identifying where to take its refining process next.  

Last year, the company partnered with LiNiCo Corp., a cleantech innovator and aggregator focused on closed-loop lithium-ion battery recycling, in working on the AquaRefining process.