Pricing continues to soften for many commodity grades of plastic scrap.

Pricing for polyethylene terephthalate (PET), high-density polyethylene (HDPE) and polypropylene (PP) bales has continued to soften as the summer advances, despite continued demand for these materials.

“The demand for all plastics continues to be high as PCR [postconsumer recycled] material is still very active in making new products,” says Jeff Snyder, director of recycling at Rumpke Waste & Recycling, headquartered in Cincinnati. Rumpke operates 12 recycling facilities, including two large material recovery facilities (MRFs) in Columbus, Ohio, and Cincinnati. 

He adds that demand for HDPE and PP is particularly strong as new recycling facilities, including PureCycle Technologies’ PP recycling facility in Ironton, Ohio, are coming online in the Midwest. 

PureCycle, in its second-quarter 2022 earnings report, notes that mechanical completion of its Ironton site is expected in the fourth quarter of this year, followed by initial pellet production by year-end. The company says it is in the final phases of construction, with 14 of the 26 modules having been delivered and lifted into place. The Ironton facility will have an annual capacity of 107 million pounds of what it describes as “ultrapure” recycled PP. PureCycle’s technology, which originally was developed by Procter & Gamble, removes color and odor, producing a recycled PP with “virgin-like quality.” 

Other factors that have influenced bale pricing in the past appear to be having less of an effect this year. “One big surprise is seeing pricing coming down when fuel prices are still high,” Snyder says. “Historically, that hasn’t been the case. We usually see PCR plastics prices go up as fuel prices are high, but that didn’t happen in July.” 

Instead, pricing for PCR took a steep decline in July and further softened in August. However, Synder describes pricing as being at “more normal levels” compared with those seen over the last year. “Pricing earlier this year was up by 12 to 15 percent” as compared with pricing at the end of July. 

A contact based on the West Coast for a company with operations throughout the U.S. says some reprocessors were paying $1.20 per pound for natural HDPE bales earlier this year but now are paying 48 cents per pound. 

When looking back at the market in the first quarter of the year, he says “there was a lot more optimism and a torrid pace of demand.” With talk of a possible recession, the West Coast-based recycler says he’s concerned about the strength of that demand going forward. While he says his company's sales don’t necessarily reflect softer demand presently, it is no longer the “go-go period of insatiable demand where we could not keep enough supply.” 

Some of his customers also are taking longer to pay, the West Coast recycler notes. He says companies that customarily paid within 60 days are now pushing out payments to 80 and 90 days. 

He adds that if inflation spurs a recession, it likely will be milder than the one we experienced earlier in the pandemic as most individuals and companies are not as leveraged as they were previously. “Consumers are radically different with less debt, relatively speaking.”

This marks the seventh time Pull-A-Part received this recognition.

The Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM) has presented Pull-A-Part's Indianapolis location with the Indiana Clean Yard-Gold Level award. This marks the seventh time the location has received this designation.

According to a news release from IDEM, the award recognizes Pull-A-Part’s efforts to protect the environment. IDEM partnered with the Automotive Recyclers of Indiana Inc. to develop both its Indiana Clean Yard recognition program to recognize auto salvage yard operators who meet two different levels of requirements: Indiana Clean Yard and Indiana Clean Yard-Gold Level.

According to IDEM’s website, the Indiana Clean Yard-Gold Level award is a higher level of recognition than the Indiana Clean Yard award, which is achieved by using best management practices and having a stormwater pollution prevention plan.

IDEM Senior Environmental Engineer Hani Sharaya presented a commemorative certificate to Pull-A-Part Chief of Production Operations Gabriel Boateng and Pull-A-Part Retail Manager Steve Jones during a site visit July 27.

New York attorney general’s office says auto salvage facility has violated groundwater protection regulations.

The office of the state of New York Attorney General has announced a lawsuit against the owners and operators of LSM Auto Parts & Recycling in the Queens borough of New York City. While the news release announcing the suit does not mention them by name, among the owners of the company or the property on which it sits, according to local media reports, are Carmine Gotti Agnello Jr., a grandson of deceased organized crime figure John Gotti, and Gotti’s daughter, Victoria.

New York Attorney General Letitia James and Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) Commissioner Basil Seggos describe LSM as an automobile salvage yard and accuse it of “releasing dangerous automobile chemicals and oil into the environment.”

“If you make a mess, you clean it up,” James says. “Most learn this old adage before they speak their first words, but it’s clear LSM never did. Instead, LSM flouted our environmental protection laws and mismanaged toxic chemicals and pollutants which pose a serious, long-term threat. LSM will not get away with knowingly jeopardizing the health and safety of our communities. It’s time they clean up the dangerous mess they have made.”

Sagos says, “The daily operations at LSM Auto Parts and its unremedied oil spills led to contaminated runoff that threatens the environment and the community. Despite DEC’s ongoing outreach to take proper steps for cleanup, the owners are unresponsive and continue to operate with blatant disregard for the environment and the local community.”

The two agencies say LSM is responsible for multiple unremedied gas and oil spills, petroleum and other fluids “pooled in several areas throughout the salvage yard.” They also contend LSM employees “often drained vehicle fluids directly onto the ground instead of into a waste container, thus allowing the chemicals to directly permeate the soil and groundwater. Gas, oil and antifreeze regularly spilled out of the salvage yard and into the street, running down sidewalks and into storm drains.”

The defendants in this matter are LSM and Liberty Scrap Metal Inc., which have operated the salvage yard, and Three Sons Real Estate Group LLC and its subsidiary, BGN Real Estate LLC (BGN), which own the property on which LSM sits.

A different member of the Agnello family has been involved in the auto recycling industry in Cleveland, where he faced prosecution for allegedly weighing down auto bodies sold to shredder yards.

U.S.-based maker of EcoCortec films and bags is building a reprocessing plant near its existing Croatia facility.

United States-based Cortec Corp. has announced the expansion of its EcoCortec plant in Croatia. The company describes EcoCortec as an environmentally safe vapor corrosion inhibitor (VCI) anti-corrosion film and bags material.

The Croatian plant’s management is now investing in a new polymer processing plant to be located near the existing facility. The “new investment will incorporate all the principles of the circular economy,” Cortec says.

The new 10,600-square-foot facility, scheduled to open this November, will include new reprocessing equipment to recycle scrap into new VCI material. “This will result in minimizing the disposal of potentially useful materials and reduce the consumption of fresh raw materials as well as energy usage,” the company states.

Cortec says its planned regranulation facility “will set new standards in recycling materials that are difficult to process, such as heavily printed films and very moist material.”

The company says it also has purchased a new blown film extrusion line to produce biodegradable electrostatic dissipative (ESD) films for the electric vehicles (EV) market.

EcoCortec anticorrosion films, bags and papers are used to protect metal parts and equipment from corrosion.

Shell business unit using recycled-content polymers made by chemical recycler Nexus Fuels.

The Pennzoil brand of global petrochemical firm Shell says it is working with the Bradenton, Florida-based National Lubricant Container Recycling Coalition (NLCRC) to use recycled-content plastic in its oil and lubricants packaging.

Houston-based Shell Lubricants says it is replacing the nylon component in its Ecobox bladder bag, which it calls nonrecyclable, with EVOH (ethylene-vinyl alcohol copolymer), which it says is a recyclable material. Shell Lubricants says it also is exploring process technologies “that transform postuse plastic into useful liquids that could be used as a source of energy, as chemicals or as new products.”

Shell says it now is using a liquid feedstock made from plastic scrap in its chemical plant in Norco, Louisiana, to make “a range of chemicals that are the raw materials for everyday items.” The liquid, supplied by Atlanta-based Nexus Circular, is made from plastic scrap via a pyrolysis process.

Pennzoil and the NLCRC describe pyrolysis as “a chemical recycling process of heating plastic waste without oxygen such that it breaks down the longer chain polymers into shorter chain materials. These products can then be further processed into chemicals feedstocks or fuels.”

The industry-led NLCRC coalition was established in 2021 by lubricant and associated plastic packaging manufacturers focused on creating programs for postconsumer plastic recovery and recycling of plastic lubricant containers.