Pellitteri Waste Systems, which services residential recycling customers in Madison, installed technology to sort paper cups at its facility.
The city of Madison, Wisconsin, has added paper cups to its list of acceptable recyclable materials in its residential recycling program. Pellitteri Waste Systems, which operates a material recovery facility (MRF) near Madison, provides residential and commercial recycling services in and around the Madison community.
According to a joint press release from Pellitteri Waste Systems and the city of Madison, Pellitteri Waste Systems’ MRF recently added sorting technology that would enable it to recycle paper cups along with food and beverage cartons. The company tells Recycling Today that it invested $4.5 million in its MRF to upgrade and enhance sorting systems with optical sorters and robotics. The company says the new technology makes it easier for the MRF to sort 3D paper cups and cartons.
The city and company add that Pellitteri received a grant from the Foodservice Packaging Institute, Falls Church, Virginia, and the Carton Council of North America, Denton, Texas, that mostly helps to support the educational promotion of the newly accepted materials. The company told Recycling Today that it did not want to share how much it received in grant funding.
Pellitteri Waste Systems’ residential recycling customers include the Wisconsin cities of Brodhead, Fitchburg, Middleton, Monroe, Sun Prairie and Wisconsin Dells, along with 16 townships, 10 villages and 29 homeowners’ associations in southern Wisconsin. In addition, Pellitteri’s commercial customers can include paper cups in their single-stream recycling bins.
The new extrusion line and technology will help the New Zealand firm to produce food-contact packaging from rPET.
Amut Ecotech, a designer of plastic recycling plants based in Novara, Italy, has partnered with Austria-based Erema to install and commission Alto Packaging Ltd.’s first extrusion line for food-grade polyethylene terephthalate (PET) sheets in the New Zealand market. Alto Packaging produces rigid plastic packaging from eight plants in New Zealand and four in Australia.
Alto Packaging’s plant in Albany, New Zealand, now processes 100 percent washed postconsumer flakes into 100 percent food-contact grade monolayer thermoforming sheet.
According to a news release from Amut Ecotech, Alto, which is a division of Pact Group, invested in the new food-grade PET sheet extrusion line as a part of Pact Group’s vision to lead a circular economy through packaging in Australia and New Zealand.
The plant features Erema’s Vacurema PET recycling technology as well as the Amut Inline Sheet production technology. Melt goes straight from the Vacurema 1716 T Basic to the Amut plant without the detour of pelletizing, Amut Ecotech reports. The postconsumer PET material is decontaminated and predried prior to extrusion in the vacuum reactor of the Vacurema Basic, which has a throughput of up to 1,500 kilograms per hour. After high-capacity filtration by Erema’s SW-RTF backflush filter and online intrinsic viscosity measurement, the melt goes into the Amut Inline Sheet plant where it is processed into thermoforming sheet from 0.15 millimeters to 1.2 millimeters of thickness. Amut Ecotech says the monolayer thermoforming sheet produced from the pure rPET is 100 percent food-contact compliant. Alto processes that material into trays and food containers.
The presentation will cover how to recover, separate and regenerate cathode material.
The Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, Illinois, has announced a webinar on how to make battery recycling for electric vehicles (EVs) cost-effective. The webinar is free and takes place Dec. 7 at 10 a.m. Central Time.
According to a news release from Argonne, the webinar will be 15-minutes long and presented by materials scientists Jessica Durham and Albert Lipson. The two will discuss how to recover, separate and regenerate the cathode material, a battery’s positively charged electrode, at scale. The process was developed by Lipson and Durham and, once complete, will help pave the way for the large-scale recycling of EVs.
More than 1 million EVs are now driving on U.S. roads. Companies need to start thinking about what will happen when those cars go out of service. Without recycling, their batteries would become 8 million tons of global scrap by 2040, according to Argonne.
Those interested in watching the webinar can sign up here.
The company says the acquisition expands its capabilities for green energy transition by providing integrated solutions for customers with quality control of production units and resilience of the supply chain during manufacturing.
Raven SR Inc., a waste-to-renewable energy company based in Pinedale, Wyoming, has acquired Benicia Fabrication & Machine Inc. (BFM), a fabrication and machine shop based in Benicia, California. The acquisition will help Raven SR meet the increasing demand for green hydrogen and renewable synthetic fuels.
According to a news release from Raven SR, BFM has experience in producing pressure vessels, heat exchangers and other crucial operational equipment for the upstream and downstream oil, gas, power and utility sectors. BFM will fabricate the proprietary reactors of the Raven SR systems to be installed in 2022 for waste-to-energy projects in California and serve Raven SR’s expanding global project pipeline.
“By acquiring an American firm with a record of success in the energy sector, we will reliably deliver our renewable fuels production units to a growing market,” says Matt Murdock, Raven SR CEO. “Companies and consumers are demanding responses to climate change sooner rather than later, and our acquisition of BFM means we can meet the challenge now and mitigate manufacturing disruptions.”
By acquiring a specialized fabricator, Raven SR says it will ensure quality control of its production units, maintain competitive pricing of its retail fuels and manage its equipment supply chain to successfully meet project demand.
Raven SR says BFM will retain its name. Its CEO, Carmelo Santiago, will become vice president of manufacturing at Raven SR and president of BFM as a subsidiary of Raven SR. BFM will also continue to serve its existing customers in the refining and utility sectors.
“Becoming part of Raven SR launches us into renewable energy, giving us the immediate opportunity to join the energy transition,” Santiago says. “By combining our mechanical engineering know-how and Raven SR’s chemical engineering advances, we can serve a broader array of customers across the energy spectrum.”
The BFM acquisition comes after Raven SR announced its partnership with Republic Services to site its first California waste-to-hydrogen production facility at the West Contra Costa Sanitary Landfill in Richmond, California. Raven SR will convert organic waste with its noncombustion process to produce green hydrogen for commercial fueling stations in northern California to power passenger and heavy-duty fuel cell vehicles. Raven SR says it will break ground in early 2022 at the Richmond location.
Collaboration platform now represents entire plastics value chain.
The Canada Plastics Pact (CPP) has announced it is welcoming 15 new partners to the cross-value chain collaboration platform, including consumer goods organizations, municipal governments, recyclers, waste management companies and nonprofits.
“With these new partners, the organizations representing the entire value chain are contributing to the collaborative action under the CPP that will result in addressing plastic packaging waste,” says CPP Managing Director George Roter. “These partners bring a range of expertise … that will allow for the building of a truly circular economy for plastics packaging.”
Since the CPP launched in January to tackle plastic packaging waste and pollution, the organization has doubled in size to include 81 industry, nongovernmental and public sector organizations who, according to a news release, account for over a third of the plastics packaging in the market.
The announcement of the new partners follows the October release of the CPP’s shared action plan, “Roadmap to 2025: A shared action plan to build a circular economy for plastics packaging,” which, according to the organization, represents cross-value chain collaboration toward a circular economy for plastics packaging in Canada to drive tangible change by 2025.
The “Roadmap” establishes three strategic priorities:
According to the CPP, innovation in technology and business models that will be generated through achieving a circular economy for plastics packaging will capture economic value, deliver jobs and position Canadian businesses competitively.
“The partners joining the CPP today are showing that they want to be leaders in creating a circular economy for plastics,” Roter says. “They are contributing their unique voices and perspectives to shared actions and solutions.”