Forty employees of Liberty Tire Recycling's Atlanta facility have formed a union and gained wage increases, seniority language, stronger benefits and other protections as part of their first contract.

Drivers and helpers at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based Liberty Tire Recycling's Atlanta facility have voted unanimously in favor of their first contract as members of Teamsters Local 728.

The agreement contains significant wage increases, seniority language, a grievance procedure and stronger security for the 40-worker unit.

"We learned a lot throughout this process," 15-year Liberty Tire Recycling Driver Laba Mbengue says. "Management treats us with respect now. A new life has started all because of the Teamsters, and everyone is happy to have won this incredible contract. It's better than we could have ever imagined. We got together and fought for our rights, and now we see the results. It's truly life-changing."

Recycling Today Media Group reached out to Liberty Tire Recycling for comment but has not yet heard back from company officials.

Liberty Tire Recycling employs more than 2,700 workers nationwide and is among the largest tire recyclers in the nation.

Mbengue, one of the lead members of Local 728's bargaining committee, and his co-workers reached out to the Teamsters in early September 2021 seeking improved working conditions, higher wages and better benefits. On Oct. 15, workers voted in favor of representation with Local 728.

Additional highlights in the new agreement include an increase in boot and phone allowance, a Christmas bonus, an increase in vacation and holiday pay and the addition of Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a paid holiday. 

The Recycling Partnership’s Film and Flexibles Recycling Coalition grant will help EFS-plastics increase recycling capacity at its site in Hazleton, Pennsylvania.

The Recycling Partnership’s Film and Flexibles Recycling Coalition has awarded its first film packaging capture grant to EFS-plastics, an Ontario-based company that specializes in plastic film recycling.

According to a news release from The Recycling Partnership, Falls Church, Virginia, the $200,000 grant will pay for new shredding equipment for EFS-plastics’ facility in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, increasing the facility’s recycling capacity by an additional 560,000 pounds per month and laying the groundwork to scale residential film and flexibles plastics recycling. In addition, the grant helps to fund testing at EFS-plastics’ Listowel, Ontario, facility to reprocess material into pellets for new products and packaging.

“Recycling more film will have benefits for the recycling system as a whole,” says EFS-plastics Director of Business Development and Procurement Eadaoin Quinn. “Film is a contaminant for many recyclers, but if we can turn more of it into new products, we can reduce the burden on [material recovery facilities] caused by film while also putting more plastics back into new products rather than into a landfill or incinerator.”

The Recycling Partnership says its Film and Flexibles Recycling Coalition, part of its Pathway to Circularity Initiative, includes a broad group of industry stakeholders seeking to increase curbside collection of film recycling and support end markets for film and flexible products. The coalition’s primary focus is to prove efficient and effective collection through pilot projects as well as infrastructure and optimization grants, complementing The Recycling Partnership’s grant programs for material recovery facilities.

The Recycling Partnership tells Recycling Today its Film and Flexibles Recycling Coalition plans to award up to four additional grants this year, with more to come in 2023.

“We are thrilled to announce this grant to EFS-plastics, an important testing ground and milestone in the coalition’s mission to increase collection of film and flexible packaging,” says Sarah Dearman, vice president of circular ventures at The Recycling Partnership. “The partnership believes that a successful system of the future will address recyclability challenges for all materials, and with so much of this valuable material found in every U.S. household, investments to support scaling film and flexible plastic recycling are important and necessary.”

The mission-driven work of the Film and Flexibles Recycling Coalition is supported by contributions from organizations representing all segments of the material’s value chain, including steering committee members American Chemistry Council, Dow, Hill’s Pet Nutrition, The Kraft Heinz Co., Procter & Gamble, SC Johnson and the Walmart Foundation. Other Coalition members include Amcor, Amp Robotics, Berry Global, Campbell Soup Co., Flexible Packaging Association, Happy Family Organics, Johnson & Johnson Consumer Inc., Kellogg Company, Keurig Dr Pepper, Mars Inc., Mondelez International, Nature Valley and Nestlé. The coalition is advised by industry leaders Association of Plastic Recyclers and Sustainable Packaging Coalition.

The new program is aimed at keeping customers operational in spite of service and maintenance interruptions.

Big Truck Rental (BTR), Tampa, Florida, a leading essential services and rental vehicle provider, is launching a new rental program, BTR’s Complete Fleet.

Designed with waste haulers' business needs at the core, BTR’s Complete Fleet is a capital and fleet strategy aimed at meeting the demands of today’s modern collection environment. Complete Fleet is BTR’s most flexible rental option, providing waste haulers and municipalities with immediate access to like-new trucks on a recurring or ongoing basis without service interruptions or costly maintenance fees.

“Big Truck Rental’s Complete Fleet program is a great example of our expansive selection of solutions for haulers of any size,” BTR Canada Vice President Jaksa Panic says. “With BTR’s Complete Fleet, our team is able to provide ongoing and recurring rental solutions to help in a changing environment by delivering a clear and well-defined program.”

The new program helps customers achieve three main goals: reduce service interruptions, preserve capital and reduce maintenance expenditures. Customers are able to select trucks from BTR’s front-line refuse fleet, and the company will work to ensure all units are replaced as needed, keeping customers with a like-new fleet.

Germany-based Vecoplan says modular design and customized components can help recyclers tackle an ever-widening materials stream.

The world’s product and packaging designers are busy introducing new items that eventually will be discarded for recycling. To Germany-based shredding equipment manufacturer Vecoplan AG, that circumstance provides a reason to offer new varieties of shredders.

At the same time, the equipment maker says recycling plant operators can be wary of complications that can add to training or component replacement costs.

Thus, Vecoplan says it has “taken a fresh look” at its shredding machines and standardized the interfaces. Users also now can take advantage of a modular system that will handle a wide range of materials, the company adds.

Manufacturers of shredding equipment have long had to deal with special customer requirements in the recycling sector. That provides a reason, according to Vecoplan, to modify components such as rotors, cutting tips, counter knives and screens to match a given task.

These choices and the relevant combinations are critical to the performance and quality of the shredding process, Vecoplan states. One user may have to process especially tough materials while another might require electric motors that comply with specific standards in its operating region.

The design effort for such diverse solutions can be considerable, and manufacturers must keep an increasing number of different parts in stock in order to be prepared, the company adds.

In response, Vecoplan says it has modified its product architecture and established different system platforms depending on the application and size. It has also classified separate modules according to their specific function.

The interfaces used by operators, though, are standardized and the platforms remain unchanged, says the firm. “Application engineers can put together suitable products according to each customer’s needs, much in the way vehicle manufacturers use a configurator,” states Vecoplan.

A shredder buyer or operator can select appropriate modules for the screen, the rotor and the drive. Each module is available in different variants and can be combined as needed with other assemblies, according to Vecoplan.

Components such as cutting tools, counter knives, screens and rotors have been organized in a grid with uniform module sizes. The Vecoplan grid allows shredders to vary in width by small increments from 800 to more than 3,200 millimeters (31 inches to 10.5 feet).

Vecoplan debuted its modular system on its VIZ shredder line at a trade fair in Germany in 2019. It says it is extending the principle to its entire range of shredding machines and plans to present several platforms in the months ahead. The company also is planning additions at the module level to make its shredders more versatile for buyers to be “perfectly matched to their needs.”

“A wide range of tool sizes and types can be mapped within this grid without the need to change the designs of adjoining components,” says Vecoplan, which also is applying a similar grid idea to other components such as drives.

Thanks to this grid principle, Vecoplan can design custom solutions within the spectrum while at the same time maintaining a manageable degree of complexity, the company says. “There is no need to start from scratch with the design, and no time-consuming special solution is necessary."

When a user decides to purchase a new machine adapted to its requirements, Vecoplan can tailor a shredder faster and manufacture it immediately, claims the company. As the grid concept takes hold, customers also benefit from even faster parts availability thanks to streamlined warehousing, adds Vecoplan.

Retrofitting remains an option for “the various modules,” according to Vecoplan, allowing the machine’s functionality to be adapted to changing requirements.

J&B Recycling's most recent upgrade further improved quality and increased capacity.

Altshausen, Germany-based Stadler designed and built a dry mixed recyclables sorting plant in Hartlepool, United Kingdom, for J&B Recycling in 2008 and has since supported the company in a continuous improvement of the plant.

“We continually improve the plant, and our focus is producing the best quality material possible,” says Matt Tyrie, operations director at J&B Recycling.

The composition and density of the material stream are evolving constantly. “Over the years, the amount of cardboard has significantly increased,” says Benjamin Eule, director at Stadler UK Ltd. “Sorting plants are receiving bigger volumes of packaging generated by the growth of online shopping and deliveries. Another change that is having an impact is the switch to different printing techniques in magazines, which makes it more difficult to separate the ink from the fiber. Plastic packaging is also changing, with multilayers, and bottles with different types of sleeves resulting in detection becoming more challenging. Metals have also evolved since we first designed the plant in 2008, with a shift from aluminum to ferrous metal in drinks packaging, and the increasing volumes of coffee capsules which contain aluminum.”

For this reason, sorting plants must be able to process multiple materials flexibly while delivering the consistently high purity rates demanded by the recycling industry, Stadler says. The plants’ designs also need the flexibility to accommodate subsequent upgrades and modifications to meet the changing requirements.

Eule says, “The J&B Recycling plant was originally designed to process 12 [metric tons per] hour, with Stadler trommel screens, conveyors and ballistic separator taking care of the mechanical presorting, preparing the material flow for effective downstream processing. Conveyors make sure that the material is sent efficiently to the next sorting process and bunker storage conveyors hold the product before being baled.”

In 2017, J&B Recycling and Stadler worked together on a concept to remove paper and aluminum, adding a Tomra Autosort optical sorter and an eddy current separator.

Since then, six additional upgrades have further optimized the plant to meet evolving market demands. The latest upgrade, completed in March, aimed to achieve even higher paper purity and to increase capacity to 15 metric tons per hour.

“We installed a further optical sorter, the latest Autosort sorter, to remove film, plastic bottles and cardboard from the PAMS (newspapers, periodicals and magazines) fraction to achieve a 95 percent purity paper,” Eule says. “We recirculate the materials we removed into the plant to be reprocessed into their respective streams, increasing the recovery of the plant.”

“The upgrade has hit the targets we outlined, that is improve quality, reduce labor costs and increase throughput,” says Matt Tyrie, operations manager at J&B Recycling. “We have increased the quality of our hard mix grade by adding a laser object detection (LOD) system to the Autosort optical sorter to remove more nonfiber contamination. This technology allows each shift to run with reduced labor, and it has allowed the throughput to increase, as the quality of the hard mix was a bottleneck on the plant.

“In all the years we have worked with Stadler, the quality of their product and their ability to hit deadlines on the install stand out,” Tyrie adds. “We really appreciate the excellent planning of the projects and their ability to turn ideas and drawings into reality.”

A dosing drum feeds the material, which goes through a presort platform for the manual removal of old corrugated containers (OCC) and large film. A Stadler screening drum separates the remaining material into three fractions: fines, midsize and oversize.

The oversize materials, measuring more than 170 millimeters, or 7 inches, go through a quality control cabin and an Autosort to remove mixed paper, cardboard and plastics and produce a PAMS fraction.

The midsize fraction, smaller than 17 millimeters, or 7 inches, is separated into fines, 2D and 3D fractions by the Stadler STT2000 ballistic separator. The 2D flat fraction is processed through eddy current separators and Autosort optical sorter before a final quality control check to produce two streams: mixed paper and metals. The 3D rolling fractions follow a similar process, which begins with and overband magnet, to produce mixed plastic, high-density polyethylene and polyethylene terephthalate fractions. Fines are being processed to remove contaminants to create a glass product. All the output fractions, with the exception of glass, are baled and sold, according to Stalder.