Openings and expansions of scrap processing and consuming facilities since Summer 2017 (metals, paper, plastics only) plus relevant new equipment installations (starting with MA18)
September/October 2017
* Morris Iron & Steel Co. (Philadelphia) has purchased a 58-acre site near its primary facility in northeastern Philadelphia, according to media reports. The property, with proximity to Interstate 95, sits along the Delaware River, allowing the company to transport scrap by barge as well as by road and rail. The additional space also will house its stainless processing operations and scrap storage facilities for its ferrous operations and for its joint venture, Northeast Metal Traders. Visit www.morrisironandsteel.com or www.metaltrader.com.
* Aluminum producer Audubon Metals (Henderson, Ky.) will expand its plant and add 39 new full-time jobs, thanks to an $8.3 million grant from the state of Kentucky. A nearly 21,000-square-foot addition will house a fifth reverberatory furnace for aluminum smelting. Audubon, a subsidiary of Koch Enterprises (Evansville, Ind.), uses shredded aluminum scrap to produce aluminum alloy ingots meeting the specifications of automakers, automotive parts manufacturers, and other customers. The company currently has 270 employees and can produce more than 30 million pounds a month, it says. Visit www.audubonmetals.com.
* Composite railway products manufacturer IntegriCo Composites (Sarepta, La.) has received a loan from the Closed Loop Fund (New York) to help complete work on a second manufacturing line by the end of the year. With the expansion, IntegriCo will have the capacity to consume more than 65 million pounds of recycled plastic a year to manufacture up to 250,000 rail crossties a year. Visit integrico.com or www.closedlooppartners.com/closed-loop-fund.
* PureCycle Technologies is opening a new facility in Irontown, Ohio, to test a polypropylene processing method developed by Procter & Gamble. The patented technology removes odor, contaminants, and color from the used PP, restoring it to near-virgin quality, P&G says. The initial small-scale plant to test and calibrate the process will begin operating in January, and the full-scale plant will open in 2020, PureCycle says. Visit purecycletech.com.
* Under a five-year contract, Atlantic Coast Recycling (Passaic, N.J.) will operate and maintain the Ocean County recyclable materials processing facility in Lakewood, N.J., and market all the recyclable materials it produces. The facility processes more than 80,000 tons a year of recyclables it receives from throughout the county. ACR already has nearly doubled the number of employees at the facility, adding line sorters and quality-control workers. ACR also will operate the Southern Recycling Center in Stafford Township, N.J., as part of the contract. Visit www.atlanticcoastrecycling.net.
* Glass recycler Strategic Materials (Houston) has partnered with the Dekalb County (Georgia) Sanitation Division to install 16 new industrial-sized glass recycling bins in the Atlanta metro region for residents to drop off their glass recyclables. Strategic Materials supplies cullet to glass container and fiberglass insulation manufacturers. With numerous glass manufacturers operating in Georgia—including Owens Corning, Owens-Illinois, Anchor Glass, and Warner Robins—the program will help keep locally recycled glass in local markets, potentially creating jobs in the community, the firm says. Visit www.strategicmaterials.com.
November/December 2017
Lewis Clark Recycling and Disposal (Harrisburg, Ill.) has purchased the site of an Omaha, Neb., construction and demolition debris landfill that it will redevelop as a MRF. Lewis Clark says it will install a misting system to provide odor control at the MRF and signage to address potential traffic problems. Visit lewisclarkwaste.com.
* MetalX (Waterloo, Ind.) plans to build a $35 million scrap processing plant in Delta, Ohio. Characterizing the ferrous and nonferrous processing plant as a “mega yard,” MetalX has selected a 60-acre greenfield site across the street from the flat-rolled steel mill owned by Melbourne, Australia–based North Star BlueScope. The company plans to install a heavy-duty shredder and downstream separation system, baler, and mobile shears for its ferrous operations. Nonferrous operations will focus on shredded aluminum recovery and industrial scrap processing. MetalX anticipates the plant will be fully operational within a year, with an initial capacity of 500,000 tons a year and an 80-person workforce, increasing to an annual volume of 700,000 tons a year and more than 100 employees.
MetalX also has acquired M&K Metal Processors in Delta. Its 10-acre facility eventually will focus on community recycling and commercial customers and will serve MetalX’s industrial and commercial scrap generators in northwestern Ohio and southeastern Michigan until the new plant opens. Visit www.metalx.net.
* W Silver Recycling (El Paso, Texas) is expanding its 10-acre facility in Donna, Texas, to 25 acres to provide additional processing space, it says. The company also will add new processing equipment and mobile equipment such as material handlers to bring the facility’s capacity up to 25,000 mt a month of ferrous and nonferrous material. Visit wsilverrecycling.com.
* Real Alloy (Cleveland), a wholly owned subsidiary of Real Industry (New York), is restarting its used beverage can recycling operation in Morgantown, Ky. The facility has been idle since December 2015. Real Alloy expects the plant to process about 50,000 mt of UBCs a year—more than 6 percent of the company’s annual volume in North America—and employ about 30 workers. Visit www.realalloy.com.
* Plastics recycler Unifi (Greensboro, N.C.) is adding a fourth pellet extrusion line at its Yadkinville, N.C., plant for manufacturing Repreve brand polyester fiber. Unifi expects the line to be operational in 2018 and boost the company’s domestic recycling capacity from 75 million to 100 million pounds of rPET a year. Visit www.unifi.com.
* Fiberight (Catonsville, Md.) has begun constructing a MRF in Hampden, Maine, with processing equipment from the CP Group (San Diego). Fiberight expects the MRF to begin operation in April 2018 and to recover more than 80 percent of the metal, plastics, and OCC in the municipal waste stream. The remaining material will enter a waste-to-fuel plant scheduled to open later in 2018. Visit fiberight.com or www.cpgrp.com.
Cascades (Kingsey Falls, Quebec), a manufacturer of recycled-fiber packaging and tissue products, has begun construction on an $80 million containerboard packaging plant in Piscataway, N.J. The plant will create 120 new jobs and manufacture corrugated packaging products beginning in the second quarter of 2018, with an anticipated annual production capacity of 2.4 billion square feet, the company says.
Cascades will close its packaging plant in Maspeth, N.Y., which had reached its physical limits, it says. The plant will close no later than Dec. 31, 2018. Cascades will offer assistance for the plant’s current employees, including possible relocation to other Cascades facilities, it says. Visit www.cascades.com.
January/February 2018
Ownership of glass recycler Strategic Materials (Houston) has transferred to private investment firm Littlejohn & Co. (Greenwich, Conn.) from Willis Stein & Partners (Chicago) and Vision Capital (London and New York). Strategic Materials has a network of 47 facilities in North America, producing cullet for manufacturers of glass packaging, fiberglass insulation, flat glass, and other products. Strategic Materials also has opened a state-of-the-art glass processing plant in Devalan, Wis. The 125,000-square-foot facility replaces the company’s East Troy, Wis., facility and retains nearly all of its existing employees, it says. Visit www.strategicmaterials.com or www.littlejohnllc.com.
* Spiegel Scrap Metal (Brockton, Mass.) has opened a new facility in Taunton, Mass., south of Boston. The 5-acre Taunton Scrap Metal features a 25,000-square-foot nonferrous processing facility, rail access, and an 80-foot truck scale, according to its website. Visit spiegelscrapmetal.com or www.tauntonscrapmetal.com.
* Total Metal Recovery (Laval, Quebec) has moved into new space at the Port of Quebec with plans to expand its scrap exports, according to media reports. TMR will use the terminal space, located on the eastern side of the port at Beauport Bay, to store and transship metal scrap. Visit totalmetalr.com.
* Southern Recycling, a subsidiary of Houchens Industries (Bowling Green, Ky.), will invest $6 million in a second facility in Warren County, Ky. It plans to develop 45 acres and construct a 60,000-square-foot scrap processing facility scheduled to open by October. The Kentucky Economic Development Finance Authority approved up to $100,000 in tax incentives for the expansion, and Southern Recycling also is eligible for no-cost or low-cost recruitment, job placement, and training services from the Kentucky Skills Network. Visit www.southernrecycling.com.
* Three companies each earned a $3 million grant from the California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery to increase scrap collection and processing capacity and boost the state’s recycling infrastructure. Revolution Plastics (Little Rock, Ark., and Fresno, Calif.) will develop a facility in Bakersfield, Calif., to clean and process LDPE agricultural film and irrigation tubing, remanufacturing it into plastic can liners, new mulch film, and plastic lumber. Sioneer Stockton, a newly formed subsidiary of Glass Processing Solutions (Richfield Springs, N.Y.), will build a glass recycling plant in Stockton, Calif., to produce a pulverized glass product that can replace fly ash in concrete manufacturing. And rPlanet Earth Los Angeles (El Segundo, Calif.) is building a PET reclaiming facility in Vernon, Calif., to process PET thermoforms and extrude them into new food-grade thermoformed packaging. The 302,000-square-foot facility also will serve as the new company’s headquarters. CalRecycle estimates the grants will allow the three companies to create 234 jobs. Visit calrecycle.ca.gov, www.revolutionplastics.com, or www.sioneer.com.
* Loop Industries (Terrebonne, Quebec) is building a facility in Montreal for processing low-quality PET and polyester feedstocks, such as colored and opaque PET scrap, into chemicals it will then recombine to produce high-value PET resin. Loop has tested its depolymerization process at a pilot plant and anticipates a processing capacity of 53 million pounds a year at the new facility. Visit www.loopindustries.com/en.
* ReVital Polymers’ (Sarnia, Ontario) new plastics recycling plant combines container sorting and plastics processing in the 180,000-square-foot facility the firm acquired in 2016. ReVital’s proprietary technologies, including optical sorters, read and sort the plastic scrap by resin type and process it to its customers’ specifications for products such as new plastic containers, household products, and automotive parts. Visit www.revitalpolymers.com.
* Covanta Environmental Solutions (Morristown, N.J.) has opened a new materials recovery facility on a 13-acre industrial property in Milwaukee, offering twice the capacity of the company’s former site in that city. Services include product depackaging and recycling using Covanta’s UnWrapp technology. Visit covantaes.com.
* Pratt Industries (Conyers, Ga.) plans to build a 470,000-square-foot containerboard mill near Wapakoneta, Ohio, and later construct a large corrugated box plant on the 110-acre site, according to industry reports. The mill will have a production capacity of 181,000 tons a year in the first year, with capacity expected to eventually reach 396,000 tons a year. The Ohio Air Quality Development Authority’s proposed sale of $210 million in tax-exempt revenue bonds will support the $275 million project, according to media reports. Visit www.prattindustries.com.
* Nucor Corp. (Charlotte, N.C.) plans to build two new steel mills in the Midwest to take advantage of “abundant regional scrap supplies” from its scrap business, The David J. Joseph Co. A new full-range merchant bar quality mill at its Nucor Steel Kankakee bar steel mill in Bourbonnais, Ill., will have an expected annual capacity of 500,000 tons. The $180 million project will take about two years to complete, Nucor says. It expects to start a new rebar micro mill in Sedalia, Mo., in 2019 to serve the upper Midwestern and Plains markets, it says. Visit www.nucor.com.
* Packaging and tissue-products manufacturer Cascades (Kingsey Falls, Quebec) is investing $21 million in two of its Canadian plants to increase production of food packaging. It will install a new recycled-PET-film manufacturing line at the Cascades Inopak plant in Drummondville, Quebec. In Kingsey Falls, Plastiques Cascades will get a new extrusion line and two recycling lines, doubling the plant’s internal recycling capacity and increasing its production capacity 25 percent. The plant produces the EVOK brand expanded polystyrene tray made from at least 25 percent recycled material. Visit www.cascades.com/en.
* ReWall (Des Moines, Iowa), which manufactures roofing and construction products from recycled food and beverage cartons, has added new equipment to double its manufacturing capacity. It expects to consume about 600 tons of recycled cartons a month. Visit www.rewallsolutions.com.
March/April 2018
* GLR Advanced Recycling (Roseville, Mich.) is opening a new 5-acre facility in Battle Creek, Mich., that will focus on automobile recycling, according to industry reports. The facility will process about 1,000 vehicles a month, and GLR expects it will add more than $4 million a year in revenue. Visit www.glradvanced.com.
* C&C Metal Recycling (Greenwood, S.C.) plans to build a self-serve auto dismantling yard, shredder, and downstream separation plant on an 81-acre site in Greenwood that it purchased from a former metals recycling facility, according to industry reports. C&C anticipates its Bonfiglioli (Bologna, Italy) Drake 16-hammer shredder will have a shredding capacity of 4,500 tons a month. It purchased the shredder from C&C Manufacturing (Ottumwa, Iowa). Visit www.candcmetal.com.
* Precious metals recycler Metallix Refining (Shrewsbury, N.J.) has opened a new, 4,000-square-foot precious metals analysis laboratory in Greenville, N.C. The new facility is three times larger than Metallix’s previous laboratory and includes new cupellation furnaces for fire assay testing, X-ray fluorescence equipment, and inductively coupled plasma instruments. Visit metallix.com.
* Pace Glass (Long Island City, N.Y.) is planning a glass recycling plant at an 85-acre former quarry in Andover Township, N.J., according to media reports. The facility, designed to process up to 1,500 tons of glass a day, will collect glass from regional sorting facilities, separate it by color, and produce cullet. Pace has additional New Jersey facilities in Jersey City and Andover; the new site offers access to nearby glass and fiberglass manufacturers, the company says. Visit www.paceglassinc.com.
* RePower South (Spartanburg, S.C.) has begun constructing a new 50-ton-per-hour mixed-waste processing facility in Moncks Corner, S.C., to recover recyclable commodities and produce a fuel feedstock from contaminated paper and plastic. Bulk Handling Systems (Eugene, Ore.) is providing the turnkey recovery system, which includes its screens, NRT optical sorters, and Max-AI autonomous quality controls; a Loesche Energy Systems (Düsseldorf, Germany) RocketMill for size reduction; and two Kedant (Westford, Mass.) PAAL balers. RePower expects the plant to begin production in 2019. Visit www.bulkhandlingsystems.com.
* ArcelorMittal Long Products Canada (Contrecoeur, Quebec) says it will invest CA$70 million by 2020 to replace two reheating furnaces at its Contrecoeur-East wire rod mill and Contrecoeur-West bar mill. The company expects the new furnaces to increase its rolling capacity 100,000 mt. Visit long-canada.arcelormittal.com/en.
* Aluminum recycler and rolled products manufacturer Novelis (Atlanta) will break ground this spring for a new $300 million automotive aluminum sheet manufacturing plant in Guthrie, Ky., that will create about 125 jobs. The facility will include heat treatment and pre-treatment lines that prepare aluminum for use in vehicle parts. Novelis anticipates growing demand from the automotive industry and expects the greenfield facility, scheduled to open in 2020, to have a rated capacity of 200,000 mt a year. Visit www.novelis.com.
* Nucor Corp. (Charlotte, N.C.) is building a new minimill in Sedalia, Mo., that will be able to produce more than 350,000 short tons a year of straight rebar products to meet construction application demands. Nucor has selected Danieli’s (Buttrio, Italy) MI.DA micromill technology for the plant, scheduled to be operational by the third quarter of 2019. Visit www.nucor.com or www.danieli.com.
* Braidy Industries (Ashland, Ky.) plans to build a flagship 2.5-million-square-foot aluminum rolling mill in Greenup County, Ky., which will have a capacity of 300,000 tons annually. The company expects to begin construction on the $1.3 billion mill by this fall and open in 2020, creating about 500 full-time jobs. Visit www.braidyindustries.com.
* Potomac Metals (Sterling, Va.) has purchased an MTB Cable Box compact wire-chopping system from Wendt Corp. (Buffalo, N.Y.) for its copper and aluminum products. Potomac initially will process high-grade No. 1 wire through the system and expand to additional wire packages, including high-grade No. 2 wire, insulated aluminum, BX cables, and URD cables. The system features a BDR 1245 shredder, two BAT 800 granulators, air density tables, screens, magnetic separators, integrated electrical controls, and dust collection system, comprising four containers: two 40-foot, one 20-foot, and one 10-foot. The system will be installed indoors, and to accommodate the 30-foot ceiling, Potomac also purchased a custom-built electric crane from Builtrite Handlers and Attachments (Two Harbors, Minn.). Visit potomacmetals.com or wendtcorp.com.
* Construction and demolition materials processor Zanker Recycling (San Jose, Calif.) has purchased artificial-intelligence powered robotic sorting technology from ZenRobotics (Helsinki) through its North American distributor, Plexus Recycling Technologies (Denver). The ZenRobotics ZRR2 AI robot, which Zanker says could increase its diversion of recyclables by 20 percent, will be operational by fall 2018. Visit zankerrecycling.com or plexusrecyclingtechnologies.com.
May/June 2018
* Nucor Corp. (Charlotte, N.C.) will invest $240 million in a new rebar micromill in Frostproof, Fla., scheduled to go online in about two years. The mill will have an annual capacity of about 350,000 tons and employ 250 people, Nucor says. The location in Polk County is a growing market with strong demand and an abundant scrap supply, it says. It expects its scrap recycling subsidiary, The David J. Joseph Co. (Cincinnati), will provide “a good portion” of the facility’s scrap. The company also is building a rebar micromill in Sedalia, Mo. Visit www.nucor.com.
* Huron Valley Steel Corp. (Trenton, Mich.) plans to add a secondary aluminum smelting facility in Alabama. The new furnace will allow HVSC to expand its secondary aluminum alloy production in the South while serving current customers’ aluminum scrap needs, it says. HVSC currently processes shredded nonferrous scrap—ISRI specification Zorba—from U.S. and Canadian automobile shredders at its plants in Belleville, Mich., and Anniston, Ala., delivering secondary aluminum products to the automotive die-casting market throughout North America. Visit www.hvsc.net.
* Ecomelida, a U.S. subsidiary of paper and plastic scrap importer Zhangzhou Sanlida Environmental Technology Corp. (Zhangzhou, China), is building its first North American facility to process postconsumer plastic and paper in South Carolina. The $52 million facility in Orangeburg, S.C., will create 200 new jobs, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster says. The company expects the facility to be operating by the fourth quarter. Visit governor.sc.gov.
* Roy Tech Environ (Decatur, Ala.), a subsidiary of a Shanghai-based plastics processor, has purchased a facility in Grant, Ala., to process scrap plastic to sell to customers in Southeast Asia. The company is investing $1.6 million in an 80,000-square-foot building that initially will contain grinding and shredding operations, with an annual capacity of 44 million pounds, and then it plans to install repelletizing equipment, according to industry reports. The facility is at 481 Firetower Road, Grant, AL 35747.
* Machinex Industries (Plessisville, Quebec) has installed a single-stream processing system at the Southeastern Oakland County Resource Recovery Authority in Troy, Mich. The system, operational since mid-January, can process 15 tons an hour, with sorting technologies that include Machinex’s eddy-current separator, MACH screens for OCC and ONP, a MACH ballistic separator, a magnet, a 3-cubic-yard waste compactor, and a glass-cleanup system. SOCRRA says the new system will allow it to double its annual capacity to 30,000 tons compared with the previous dual-stream system. Visit www.machinexrecycling.com.
July/August 2018
* Commercial Metals Co. (Irving, Texas) has commissioned its latest nonferrous metal recycling plant, in Lexington, S.C., with Wendt Corp. (Buffalo, N.Y.) processing equipment and technology. The new equipment will allow CMC to recover nearly all metals from automobile shredder residue its shredder locations generate, it says.
In other CMC news, it has opened a new electric-arc furnace micromill in Durant, Okla. The facility is CMC’s second micromill, which uses a “continuous-continuous” production process to melt, cast, and roll steel from a single, uninterrupted strand. Visit www.cmc.com.
* Trinity Metals (Indianapolis) has purchased a 70,500-square-foot specialty metals processing facility it had formerly leased. The facility processes 40 million pounds of aluminum and other nonferrous metals a year, as well as processing and trading ferrous and electronic scrap, the company says. Visit www.trinitymetals.net.
* CarbonLite Holdings (Los Angeles), a producer of food-grade postconsumer PET, plans to build a bottle-to-bottle recycling plant near Allentown, Pa., according to industry reports. The facility will join the company’s two existing plants in Riverside, Calif., and Dallas, which recycle more than 4 billion beverage bottles a year, CarbonLite says. The $60 million plant will reportedly begin operating in late 2019. Visit www.carbonliterecycling.com.
* Pace Glass Recycling (Long Island City, N.Y.) has begun construction on a new, 250,000-square-foot glass-processing plant on 85 acres in Andover Township, N.J., that it claims will be the world’s largest. The expansion will increase the company’s processing capacity from 25 tons an hour to 90 tons an hour, with a cullet-production capacity of more than 15,000 tons a week, the company says. Pace expects the new facility to employ 80 workers, nearly twice as many as its existing facility in Jersey City, N.J., which will remain open. It will hire about 60 truck drivers to deliver material to U.S. manufacturers throughout the Northeast. The Andover plant will also have research and development capability and space for a rail line, Pace says. It anticipates an early 2019 opening for the facility. Visit www.paceglassinc.com.
* Agilyx (Tigard, Ore.) has opened a polystyrene processing plant at its facility, near Portland, Ore. The PS-to-styrene monomer chemical processing system, which Agilyx says allows it to handle commingled, dirty, or contaminated material, will handle up to 10 tons of rigid and foam PS a day, it says. Visit www.agilyx.com.
* Big River Steel (Osceola, Ark.) plans to lease 800 acres of land for a new steel mill and distribution facility at the Port of Brownsville, Texas. The proposed $1.6 billion plant could consume 2 million tons of scrap and produce 1.6 million tons of steel annually, industry reports estimate. Visit bigriversteel.com.
* Catalyst Paper (Richmond, British Columbia) sold its Rumford, Maine, and Biron, Wis., pulp mills to ND Paper (Hong Kong), a wholly owned subsidiary of Nine Dragons Paper Holdings (Dongguan, China), for $175 million. Catalyst’s U.S. operations center in Dayton, Ohio, and its staff are included in the transaction, the company says. The acquisition allows Nine Dragons to diversify its manufacturing base and gain access to virgin fiber, it says. Visit www.catalystpaper.com or us.ndpaper.com.
* Becker Iron & Metal (Venice, Ill.) has installed an Ing Bonfiglioli (Bologna, Italy) Squalo 2000T vertical cut shear, supplied by C&C Mfg. (Ottumwa, Iowa). Visit beckermetal.com, ingbonfiglioli.it, or candcmfg.net.
* Metso Corp. (Helsinki) will deliver a Lindemann EtaRip preshredder this fall to Milliron Recycling (Mansfield, Ohio), its first in North America, it says. Metso says the low-speed, high-torque unit will break down bundles and end-of-life vehicles before they’re fed to a shredder. Visit metso.com or www.millironind.com.
September/October 2018
* Imperial Group (Chicago) has purchased a 37,605-square-foot former manufacturing facility in Franksville, Wis., for $1.63 million, according to news reports. Imperial will likely use the building for its scrap metal processing and metal fabrication operations, reports Milwaukee Business News. Visit www.imperialgp.com.
* Osceola, Ark.–based Big River Steel plans to expand its scrap recycling and steel production facility there. The expansion will double its hot-rolled steel production capacity to 3.3 million mt a year, it says. Visit bigriversteel.com.
* Packaging and tissue products manufacturer Cascades (Kingsley Falls, Quebec) has acquired White Birch Paper’s (Greenwich, Conn.) Bear Island newsprint manufacturing facility in Ashland, Va., for $34.2 million. Cascades will convert the facility to produce recycled lightweight linerboard and medium for the North American market. The converted machine will primarily use OCC as feedstock but also will accept mixed paper, the company says. It expects the new machine to have an annual production capacity of 400,000 mt, with production beginning in 2021. Visit www.cascades.com.
* Ben Weitsman of Albany, a division of Upstate Shredding–Weitsman Recycling (Owego, N.Y.), will add a Riverside Engineering (San Antonio) 3,000-hp scrap metal shredder to its Port of Albany, N.Y., facility. The shredder has a 70-inch mill and a shredding capacity of 80 tons per hour, the company says. The facility plans to add 20 positions to operate the shredder.
Upstate Shredding also recently completed an estimated $5 million renovation of the Ben Weitsman of Syracuse (Solvay, N.Y.) facility. The improvement project included new paving, fencing, landscaping, stormwater management, and new equipment, including Liebherr (Newport News, Va.) cranes and Kawaski (Kennesaw, Ga.) loaders, company president Adam Weitsman says. The Rochester, N.Y., facility is up next for improvements, he says. Visit upstateshredding.com.
* Machinex (Plessisville, Quebec) is providing a single-stream material recovery system for York County, S.C., that will allow the county to process recyclable material arriving from 16 collection and recycling centers. The new equipment includes a MACH double-deck OCC screen to improve cardboard recovery, a fines screen, a MACH ballistic separator, a PET optical sorter, a magnet, an eddy-current separator, and a two-ram baler. The facility will be able to process 10,000 to 15,000 tons a year of mixed single-stream material, Machinex says. Visit www.machinexrecycling.com.
November/December 2018
* Steel Dynamics (Fort Wayne, Ind.) has acquired substantially all of Kentucky Electric Steel Co.’s (Ashland, Ky.) assets. KES is a wholly owned subsidiary of Specialty Steel Works (Hammond, Ind.). The $5 million purchase includes a rolling mill with an annual capacity of 250,000 tons, which Steel Dynamics planned to reopen in November as part of its Steel of West Virginia operations. Visit www.steeldynamics.com.
* ND Paper (Oakbrook Terrace, Ill.), a subsidiary of Nine Dragons Paper (Dongguan, China), has purchased Resolute Forest Products’ (Montreal) recycled bleached kraft pulp mill in Fairmont, W.Va., for $62 million. The acquisition joins two other pulp and paper mills ND Paper purchased earlier this year in Maine and Wisconsin. The Fairmont mill manufactures and distributes air-dried recycled pulp for packaging, tissue paper, and other products, with a production capacity of about 218,000 mt a year. ND Paper plans to offer employment to all Fairmont mill employees, it says. Visit us.ndpaper.com or www.resolutefp.com.
Zinc Processor Plans to Restart North Carolina Plant
American Zinc Recycling Corp. (Pittsburgh) plans to reopen its Mooresboro, N.C., plant next spring, according to trade reports. The facility, which has been idle since 2016, uses solvent-extraction and electrowinning technology to recover zinc from dust generated in steelmakers’ electric-arc furnace operations, with a processing capacity of 155,000 mt a year. Glencore (Baar, Switzerland), which owns 10 percent of the company, has agreed to purchase all the zinc this facility produces for 10 years. AZR also has facilities in Barnwell, S.C.; Calumet, Ill.; Palmerton, Pa.; and Rockwood, Tenn. Visit azr.com.
* Metal recycler EMR Eastern (Bellmawr, N.J.) plans to use $148 million in tax credits to further develop its My Auto Store auto dismantling operations at its scrapyard in Camden, N.J., according to news reports. EMR says it is investing more than $250 million in its Camden facilities and plans to hire up to 275 more workers, for a total of 400 employees. Its capacity will increase from more than 2,000 end-of-life vehicles a month to 8,000, the reports say. Visit us.emrgroup.com.
* Green Tech Solution, a subsidiary of Tianjin Sheng Xin Non-Financing Guarantee Co. (Tianjin, China), is investing $75 million to build a recycling plant in Blacksburg, S.C., the South Carolina governor’s office announced. The facility will collect and process scrap metal, plastics, electronics, and other materials, with plans to process hundreds of millions of pounds of scrap plastic and nearly 50 million pounds of CRTs a year, Resource Recycling reports. Green Tech Solution says it will begin hiring approximately 200 workers for the facility in February, and it expects to begin operating in the second quarter of 2019. Initially the company will focus on CRT and copper wire processing, adding circuit board and plastics processing later, and potentially metal refining, according to the Resource Recycling report. Visit governor.sc.gov.
* Steelmaker Nucor Corp. (Charlotte, N.C.) has announced plans to expand its production capability at Nucor Steel Gallatin, a flat-rolled sheet steel mill in Ghent, Ky. With an expected startup in the first half of 2021, the expansion will increase hot band annual capacity from 1.6 million tons to about 3 million tons, Nucor says. The $650 million investment complements the company’s previous $176 million investment in a hot band continuous pickle galvanizing line at the Gallatin plant, which it expects to produce about 500,000 tons a year of galvanized hot band steel once operational in the first half of 2019. Visit www.nucor.com.
* McKinley Paper Co. (Albuquerque, N.M.), a subsidiary of paper producer Bio-PAPPEL (Mexico City), plans to reopen its Port Angeles, Wash., mill by September 2019. The newsprint mill has been idle since 2017. McKinley says it will retool the mill to produce a planned 250,000 tons a year of containerboard from recycled cardboard. Visit www.biopappel.com/en.
* ReVital Polymers (Sarnia, Ontario), Pyrowave (Oakville, Ontario), and INEOS Styrolution (Frankfurt, Germany) have formed a strategic partnership to recover postconsumer polystyrene packaging. ReVital will install Pyrowave’s catalytic microwave depolymerization technology to process PS packaging from curbside streams, restaurants, offices, schools, and other sources. INEOS then will further process the resulting monomer liquid to turn it into virgin resin ready for new PS applications. Visit www.revitalpolymers.com, pyrowave.com, or www.ineos-styrolution.com.
* Encore Recycling (Lithonia, Ga.) is installing a new modular 82 heavy shredder and TOMRA Combisense nonferrous separation system from Wendt Corp. (Buffalo, N.Y.). Encore expects the new shredder to increase throughput from 40 tons per hour to 100 tons per hour. Visit recyclingatlanta.com or www.wendtcorp.com.
* Pratt Industries’ (Conyers, Ga.) new
corrugated packaging mill in Wapakoneta, Ohio, will feature Voith Paper’s (Appleton, Wis.) customized BlueLine stock preparation system, which can handle about 425,000 tons of recycled fiber a year. The system includes automatic wire cutting, reject compactors, sludge handling, water clarification, and effluent treatment. Visit www.prattindustries.com or voith.com/corp-en/components-papermaking.html.
* Fiberight’s (Catonsville, Md.) material recovery facility in Hampden, Maine, is installing CP Manufacturing’s (San Diego) trommel screen with bag-opening knives, a steel-disc OCC screen, a nonwrapping auger screen, two screens for 2-D and 3-D separation, an abrasion-resistant glass breaker, and optical sorters. CP Group’s MSS division (Nashville, Tenn.) also is supplying the MRF with CIRRUS PlasticMax and FiberMax optical sorters for recovering plastic, fiber, and scavenger materials. Visit fiberight.com, www.cpgrp.com, or www.mssoptical.com.
* Resource Recycling (Portland, Ore.) has compiled an interactive map showing where Chinese companies have invested or established partnerships in the United States to process scrap material into a form that can avoid China’s scrap import restrictions. The map includes links to articles describing the companies involved. Visit www.resource-recycling.com/recycling/2018/09/25/mapped-out-chinese-money-in-u-s-recycling.
January/February 2019
* CarbonLITE (Los Angeles) has confirmed previous reports that it will build a third bottle-to-bottle PET recycling facility in the Lehigh Valley area of Pennsylvania, primarily to serve the rPET needs of beverage company Nestlé Waters North America. Nestlé Waters has two bottling plants in the Lehigh Valley, and it already purchases rPET from CarbonLITE’s California and Texas facilities, it says. CarbonLITE expects the new 200,000-square-foot processing facility to be in full production by early 2020, with the capacity to produce 80 million pounds of food-grade rPET pellets from more than 2 billion postconsumer PET bottles a year. Visit www.carbonliterecycling.com or www.nestle-watersna.com/en.
* Aluminum recycler and rolled products manufacturer Novelis (Atlanta) is investing $175 million for more land and production capacity at its South American flagship facility in Brazil. Expansion of the Pindamonhangaba plant, between Sao Paulo and Rio de Janiero, will bring its recycled metal consumption to 450,000 mt a year, Novelis says. Visit novelis.com.
* El Segundo, Calif.–based rPlanet Earth has opened a 302,000-square-foot plastics recovery and production facility in Vernon, Calif., which will also serve as its corporate headquarters. The facility has a capacity to produce 80 million pounds a year of food and beverage packaging containing up to 100-percent recovered PET flake, it says. Visit www.rplanetearth.com.
* Steel Dynamics (Fort Wayne, Ind.) plans to construct a new EAF flat-rolled steel mill at a yet-to-be-selected site in the southwestern United States. The company expects to begin construction in 2020, with operations beginning in the second half of 2021. Steel Dynamics anticipates investing up to $1.8 billion in the project, creating 600 jobs in the region. Visit www.steeldynamics.com.
* Ironworks EJ (East Jordan, Mich.) is building a new $125 million, 365,000-square-foot foundry in Warner Township, Mich., according to media reports. EJ uses recycled postconsumer material to manufacture items such as manhole covers and other infrastructure access products, with no coatings or paint that might compromise their end-of-life recyclability. The company is moving one large molding line from its former site in East Jordan and also is installing new casting and molding lines, reports say. Visit ejco.com.
* ND Paper (Oakbrook Terrace, Ill.), a subsidiary of Nine Dragons Paper Holdings (Hong Kong), will invest $300 million over the next two years into its recently acquired pulp and paper mills in Rumford, Maine, and Biron, Wis. ND Paper plans to construct a greenfield recycled pulp facility in Rumford, adding about 1,200 air-dried mt per day of manufacturing capacity. It will also install a shoe press on the R15 paper machine, increasing its production capacity about 20 percent, it says. At Biron, the company plans to construct a two-line greenfield recycled pulp facility that will add about 1,900 air-dried mt per day of manufacturing capacity. It will also convert the B25 paper machine to containerboard products and construct a water treatment and fiber recovery plant. ND Paper expects the projects to create 77 new jobs in the two states. Visit us.ndpaper.com.
* The ReWall Co. (Des Moines, Iowa) plans to expand its production of recycled-fiber building materials with a new facility in Colorado, according to news reports. The company expects to open the facility in April. The new facility will process about 20 million pounds a year of aseptic and gable-top cartons sourced from local material recovery facilities, it says. Visit www.rewallsolutions.com.
* Polystyrene processor Agilyx (Tigard, Ore.) and PS and sytrene monomer producer AmSty (The Woodlands, Texas) have formed a new joint venture to operate Agilyx’s PS recycling facility in Tigard. The companies also will develop a 50-ton-per-day PS recycling facility at a location they have not yet determined. Visit www.agilyx.com or amsty.com.
March/April 2019
* Schupan & Sons (Kalamazoo, Mich.) will invest about $10.1 million to expand its electronics recycling facility and its aluminum and plastic recycling division at two locations in Kalamazoo. The project received a $500,000 performance-based grant from the Michigan Economic and Development Corp.’s Michigan Strategic Fund, which anticipates the expansions will create 80 new jobs. Kalamazoo also provided a brownfield redevelopment incentive for the project. The electronics facility will add 80,000 square feet of processing space, accommodating a second shredder, and 30 more employees. The plastics and aluminum recycling facility will grow by 40,000 square feet and 50 employees, according to news reports. The latter site will receive a new stormwater management system and improvements to the landscaping and parking areas. Visit www.schupan.com or www.michiganbusiness.org.
* Capital Scrap Metal (Pompano Beach, Fla.) has purchased a new facility adjacent to its flagship scrapyard to house its headquarters and provide additional warehouse space. The expansion will allow the company to increase its nonferrous processing and consolidate its administrative staff in one location, it says. Visit www.capitalscrapmetal.com.
* The city of Montgomery, Ala., has reopened its material recovery facility, shuttered three years ago due to financial difficulties. The Montgomery Recycling and Recovery Facility will collect residential mixed waste and recyclables in a single bin, recover scrap commodities, and convert some collected material into fuel. The city’s goal is to reduce landfilling and increase residential recycling participation to 100 percent, it says. Partner RePower South (Charleston, S.C.) says it expects to process 40 percent of the volume the facility receives into salable commodities; convert 20 percent, such as plastic grocery bags and paper towels, into fuel; and landfill the remaining 40 percent. RePower is investing $12 million in new equipment and other improvements, including processing equipment from Bulk Handling Systems (Eugene, Ore.). The approach and technologies are similar to those which the MRF’s previous operator, Infinitus Energy (Plantation, Fla.), proposed, but the effort failed due to low scrap commodity prices, Infinitus said. Visit www.repowersouth.com.
* Zero Waste Solutions (Rochester, Mass.) plans to begin operating a mixed-waste MRF by April, according to media reports. It is installing new sorting and processing equipment, has received commitments from 14 municipalities to supply material, and has obtained permits to handle municipal solid waste, single-stream recyclables, source-separated materials, and construction and demolition materials, Waste Dive reports. ZWS, a sister company of New Bedford Waste Services and ABC Disposal, both of New Bedford, Mass., will feature separate sorting lines for commingled waste and recycling streams and for “dry” single-stream recyclables or source-separated material. The facility no longer plans to convert material such as soiled paper and low-value plastics to fuel briquettes, as it originally proposed, ABC Disposal tells Waste Dive. Visit www.newbedfordwaste.com.
* The United States Steel Corp. (Pittsburgh) plans to restart construction immediately on the electric-arc furnace at its steelmaking facility in Fairfield, Ala. U.S. Steel suspended work at the Fairfield tubular operations in December 2015 due to unfavorable market conditions, it says. U.S. Steel will invest about $215 million to complete the construction, adding about 150 full-time employees. When the furnace begins production in the second half of 2020, it will have an annual capacity of 1.6 million tons, U.S. Steel says. Visit www.ussteel.com.
* Matalco (Brampton, Ontario) plans to build a 110,000-square-foot aluminum billet manufacturing facility in Wisconsin Rapids, Wis., investing $80 million in the project, according to trade and media reports. Matalco sister company Triple M Metal (Brampton) will build a scrap-reprocessing facility at the Wisconsin site. With 80 full-time workers, the new facility will produce more than 230 million pounds a year of aluminum billet, using mostly recycled material, Matalco says. Pending city approval, Matalco will break ground this spring and open the facility by mid-2020. Visit www.matalco.com or www.triplemmetal.com.
* The former Wickliffe Paper Mill (Wickliffe, Ky.) will reopen this year under the name Phoenix Paper Wickliffe after new owner Shanying International completes $150 million in upgrades. Shanying purchased the idled mill from Verso Paper last year for $16 million. The mill, which previously made coated paper, now will produce kraft linerboard and OCC pulp, its website states. Visit www.phoenixpaper.com.
* AeroAggregates (Eddystone, Pa.) has installed and is now operating its second kiln to turn 100 percent postconsumer recycled glass into closed cell foamed glass aggregates for a variety of construction applications. With the addition of the new 60-foot kiln, AeroAggregates can divert up to 32,000 tons, or more than 140 million recycled curbside glass bottles, a year from landfills, it says. The process can take mixed color glass and a small proportion of paper and other contaminants, the company says. Visit www.aeroaggregates.com.
* GLE Scrap Metal (Casselberry, Fla.) will install a high-volume MTB wire-chopping line from Wendt Corp. (Buffalo, N.Y.) at its newly acquired 25-acre facility in Ocoee, Fla. The line will be indoors and fully automated, Wendt says. The components will include MTB’s latest pre-choppers, granulators, air-density tables, and vibratory screens, allowing GLE to process a variety of cables and other materials, including aluminum copper radiators. Visit glescrap.com or www.wendtcorp.com.
Openings and expansions of scrap processing and consuming facilities since Summer 2017 (metals, paper, plastics only) plus relevant new equipment installations