Bruce Bart to serve as North America sales manager.

Eco Green Equipment, North Salt Lake, Utah, a manufacturer of tire recycling systems, has announced the addition Bruce Bart, formally of Cobalt Holdings LLC, as its North America sales manager for the U.S. and Canada. He has a background in the tire recycling industry with experience in rubber material processing, markets and equipment, the company says.

“I am excited to join the Eco Green Equipment team and help them expand their presence in the tire recycling industry,” Bart says. “The innovative ways that Eco Green Equipment develops their machinery will greatly expand the use of recycled tire rubber materials into many new markets.”

“Eco Green is excited to have Bruce on the team and share his expertise in tire recycling and equipment,” says Brad Swenson, president of Eco Green Equipment. “Customers are looking for new areas of processing and secondary uses for rubber material, and Bruce has in-depth, hands-on, experience and knowledge about these applications. His understanding of ways to improve facility operations and proficiencies is superb.”

Eco Green Equipment designs, manufactures and provides customer support and parts for the international tire recycling equipment industry. The company says its full line of modular-designed tire recycling systems is engineered to deliver optimum production for a wide variety of rubber aftermarkets, such as TDF (tire derived fuel), wire-free chips, rubber mulch, crumb rubber and rubber powder. Eco Green Equipment provides the full line of tire recycling equipment, including primary and secondary tire shredders, granulators and the Eco Krumbuster fine grinding mill. 

CEOs at the Waste360 Investor Summit candidly discuss industry issues.

Ronald Mittelstaedt, CEO, Waste Connections, The Woodlands, Texas, told Hoffman, “Fortunately most things have come out a little better than we thought,” of how the acquisition and integration of Progressive Waste is going nearly 11 months later.

He said price is doing a lot better at north of 3 percent and safety has improved by 65 percent in 11 months. “Most things have gotten materially better and gotten better than we thought,” Mittelstaedt said.

As for what was worse than expected, he said, “the condition of the fleet.” Mittelstaedt said the fleet's condition was poor and continues to be a challenge, referencing “a lot of wrong applications.”

He continued, “We gather lot of data, we use a little of it." However, he said Waste Connections shut down 80 percent of the data that Progressive Waste was collecting, saying that people were “gathering data to gather data.”

He added, “You cannot have your front-line people measuring 200 things a day. You need to have incense focus on 10 pieces."

Hoffman asked the Rutland, Vermont-based Casella Waste Systems' team of CEO John Casella,Chief Operating Officer Edwin Johnson and Chief Financial Officer Ned Coletta what they were thinking about the sale of the company. He was informed that two or three paths could be taken, including sale, modest growth or much larger growth.

“For Casella there is a tremendous number of opportunities in terms of direction,” he was told.

Republic Services, Pheonix, rejected an earlier hypothesis posed by Atlanta-based Rubicon Global CEO Nate Morris that “bigger companies are geared toward landfill.”

Where the waste goes depends on the customers needs. “You need landfills, but we are growing recycling faster than our solid waste. It helps meet their needs. I reject this hypothesis,” one of the company's representatives said.

That sentiment was echoed during the CEO panel that included Richard Burke of Advanced Disposal, Ponte Vedra; Steve Jones of Covanta Holdings, Morristown, New Jersey; Mittelstaedt; and Jim Fish of Waste Management (WM), Houston. 

Fish said that if it implied WM was married to its assets, at 30 percent margins, “I am OK with our marriage at this point.” He said WM had experienced volatility with recycling that its landfills did not have.

“Once we de-risk the business, I am agnostic as to whether it goes to landfill or recycling plant,” he said.

Mittelstaedt said, “We are agnostic as well.”

He noted that recycling is not as prevalent in other states as it is in California, New York, Florida, New Jersey, Washington and Oregon. “We’re not seeing the clamoring in Nebraska that we are in California and New York. It is a very state issue and a very local issue. We don’t feel like we have to shape the conversations. We are comfortable or agnostic. We are not as concerned about controlling the conversation. At the end of the day customer decides where volume to go.”

The CEO panel also addressed the topic of safety and trucks equipped with technology. On-board cameras are helping to identify common issues that drivers are experiencing and helping to change bad habits before an accident or injury occurs, according to Burke.

Fish said cameras also can exonerate a driver in some cases. It is also helping with what Fish described as “predictive safety.” By looking at data, you can predict the likelihood that Driver A is going to have a backing accident within 60 days and get him or her some backing training. “If I am wrong, I’m going to have some backing training. If I am right, I might have saved a life. It is good for us and whole industry as we think about safety.”

In light of the number of accidents to date in 2017, Hoffman said, the industry could be the third most dangerous in the U.S. by the end of the year. Hoffman asked, “What is the message we need to get across?”

Burke said, “As leaders we need to make sure nothing is more important than the safety of your people.” He said this should be more important than productivity or a new customer and called it, “Service first, safety always.” He said, “If we don’t have a safe process and well-trained driver, we shouldn’t be putting them out on the street. We don’t want to be ranked where we are ranked; we don’t want to be on that list.”

“At the end of the day, safety is about leadership and what responsibility you have to your people,” said Mittelstaedt. He alluded to Progressive’s previous safety record, saying while the company had safety slogans, it had 31 fatalities in 48 months and 1 in 2 employees had an or injury in 12 months. “We reduced that by 70 percent in 11 months.”

He added, “A lot of times, we as leaders want to try to hold our front line people accountable reality is there is a reason for accidents and injuries.” He said public, private and municipal companies should be held accountable and do a better job. “When something goes wrong in this business it doesn’t go a little wrong it goes really wrong.”

Fish noted WM has been able to renegotiate 90 percent of its contracts to help minimize risk. One reason behind this success, he said, was that not many companies are responding to requests for proposals (RFPs). “If no one shows up, something must be wrong with the model.” He adds, “We think it is a good business for environment but it has to be a good business. We aren’t in it for charity.”

Diminishing TDF and athletic turf markets exist in several regions.

Pictured above, left to right: JD Wang of ReRubber LLC, Kyle Eastman of Liberty Tire Recycling, Elizabeth Hoover of the Arkansas DEQ and Terry Gray of T.A.G. Resources.

Tire recycling has come a long way, says tire processing veteran and current consultant Terry Gray of Houston-based T.A.G. Resource Recovery. However, Gray also remarked while speaking at the Spotlight on Tires session at the ISRI2017 convention, some of the end markets for scrap tires are currently facing difficulties, causing a sense of disruption in the overall market.

Gray said he started in the North American scrap tire processing sector in 1984, when as few as 1 percent of all scrap tires were being recycled. More than 30 years later, the industry can be described as “more mature” he said, with almost 90 percent of scrap tires now being processed for recycling. “That’s a pretty good track record,” said Gray.

The bad news for scrap tire processors are government-related obstacles being faced in several key end markets. Gray said a tax credit that had been available to users of tire-derived fuel (TDF) had expired in some states, “so [energy] plants are failing that had converted to TDF.”

He said officials in one such state, Michigan, are acknowledging they will need to find and boost alternative end markets for scrap tires, but Gray said in many New England states “It’s a real issue and they’ve got their heads in the sand.”

In the ground or crumb rubber markets, the sports field additive market had been emerging as a strong consumer, but that end market is taking a hit from (as yet unsubstantiated) claims that athletes coming into contact with crumb rubber on fields are experiencing health issues, including cancer.

By Gray’s estimate, some 30 percent of sports fields are in regions such as New England and California where regulators are advising turf managers to be wary of using crumb rubber. In 2015, 25 percent of crumb rubber was used on sports fields and another 23 percent as playground surfacing or as mulch, so shrinkage in any of those markets will cause considerable disruption, said Gray.

Gray characterized the rubberized asphalt market for ground tires as often subject to “wait and see” attitudes, but he said the manufactured products sector for molded rubber has been one brighter spot.

J.D. Wang, the CEO of California-based ReRubber LLC, says his company’s investors have been putting most of their R&D resources into the crumb rubber and powder categories, after acknowledging that the firm “has gone through eight years of disruption” itself. “In our first five years, we processed a lot, and failed a lot,” he commented.

ReRubber is now focusing on making rubber powder, researching and opening up end markets for the tire-derived powder to be used in protective and architectural coatings applications. The company is exploring a supply loop that Wang says allows it to “innovate” and conduct research in California, then more rapidly implement the ideas in Asia or “work out the kinks” there, and then bring successful ideas back to the United States.

Offering a point of view from state government, Elizabeth Hoover of the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) said in that state in the 1990s, TDF used at cement plants represented “about the only markets” for scrap tires.

She remarked that emissions concerns about zinc levels had harmed that market, and now the health questions surrounding the field turf market are presenting a new disruption. Unless scrap tire processors have diversified markets, “you have problems on your hands,” warned Hoover.

Her message to scrap tire processors was that states can provide help in the form of loans for equipment, workshops and conferences and assistance in identifying and developing end markets. She also remarked, however, that because of tight state budgets, “a lot of that [potential assistance] is beginning to dry up.”

ISRI2017 was in at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans April 22-27, 2017.

Reverse vending machine for batteries is being placed at select Obs! stores.

Retailer Coop Norway and battery maker Energizer have agreed to try out reverse vending machines for batteries that were developed by Sweden-based Refind Technologies.

The companies estimate that some 2,000 tonnes of household batteries are used each year in Norway, with many of them collected as “special waste.” However, a survey performed by YouGov for Coop Norway and Energizer found that as many as 26% of the country’s residents say they sometimes throw used batteries out with household waste.

“We are happy to try out this reverse vending machine in our Obs! stores in cooperation with Energizer,” says Geir Inge Stokke, concern manager of Coop Norway. He adds, “Coop is owned by its customers and we want to make it as simple as possible to make environmentally conscious choices. Norwegians are good at recycling, but can be better. Awareness is good as a motivational factor, but further incentives as a financial reward can be even more important.”

The reverse vending machine being deployed in the second quarter of 2017 is being tested in select Obs! stores around Oslo. The Refind Technologies machine allows customers to return “all types of household batteries in a similar way as a reverse vending machine for bottles,” says Refind in a press release. Customers will receive a discount of one Norwegian krone (€0.11) per battery in the form a discount coupon that can be used when buying new batteries.

“We are proud of the cooperation with Coop Norway about this great initiative enabling the awareness of and consumer motivation for battery recycling,” says Richard Podevin, head of Northwest Europe marketing at Energizer. “As the largest battery manufacturer in the world, we look at the entire life cycle of a battery, from production to waste.”

Comments Johanna Reimers, CEO of Refind Technologies, “This is one of the most fun and exciting projects we have been working with. We have worked with battery collectors and recyclers within the recycling chain, using our automatic recognition technology, but this is the first time we are working with a large producer. We hope that this can be an inspiration for everyone within battery recycling.”

Reimers says the reverse vending machine can have a positive effect, since the Norwegian population survey also found half of the participants answered that a payback structure would influence the amount of batteries they return.

Austrian shredder maker adds Ryohshin Co. Ltd. as its distributor in Japan.

Austria-based shredding equipment manufacturer Lindner-Recyclingtech has entered into a sales partnership with Ryohshin Co. Ltd. of Toyama, Japan. Ryohshin will assume responsibility for selling Lindner single-shaft shredding equipment to the Japanese waste management industry.

“The Japanese shredder market is characterised by high demand and fierce competition, with a focus on replacing older systems, upgrades and expanding existing capacities,” says Ryohshin CEO Osamu Kono. “To succeed in this environment in the long term, we choose our partners worldwide according to very strict criteria. We had been searching for a manufacturer whose products would be an ideal complement and addition to our extensive line of waste management solutions – and in Lindner we found exactly what we had been looking for.”

Says Manuel Lindner, the owner and CEO of Lindner-Recyclingtech, “We are very proud that we were able to stand out against such strong competition and that Ryohshin opted for Lindner. This success validates our dedication to providing sustainable and reliable industrial shredding solutions. Together we will have a strong presence in this market, whose highly advanced attitude towards recycling has long been established.”

Lindner describes itself as a provider of innovative and successful shredding solutions, including stationary and mobile crushing and shredding machines for waste recycling, systems for plastics recycling and the processing of substitute fuels and substrates for biomass equipment.

Ryohshin Co. Ltd. refers to itself as a specialist in shredding technology that owns numerous patents and sells crushers, shredders and peripheral systems to the waste management sector.