On behalf of The Action Environmental Group we want to wish you a happy and healthy New Year!
We wanted to take this time to not only thank you for being a customer, partner or just a blog reader but also inform you of the street closures tonight in Manhattan due to the NYE celebrations.
A crackdown on trash halfway around the world has disrupted the U.S. recycling industry and could cost North Jersey municipalities some of the coveted revenue they earn from selling the paper, plastic and aluminum cans that residents put out at the curb.
STEVE HOCKSTEIN/SPECIAL TO THE RECORD
Alfred DuBois, center, Clifton’s recycling coordinator, pulling out contaminants from a delivery with Steven Rodriguez, left, and Andrew Soboto at the city’s recycling center.
For much of this year, China has rejected bales of recyclables shipped from the United States that are too contaminated by regular trash. China’s effort to erect what’s become known as a “green fence” against contaminated recyclables has prompted recycling companies here to start charging financial penalties to the towns and corporate clients whose recyclables are tainted with too much regular garbage.
“Make no mistake: This is a serious situation that can have major repercussions for the future of the recycling industry in the U.S.,” Chris Riviello, managing partner of Atlantic Coast Fibers, a Passaic-based recycling company, told the municipalities it serves in a recent letter.
It’s not clear how much North Jersey towns stand to lose, but some municipalities make between $300,000 and $500,000 on recycling.
And towns in Bergen County could be especially vulnerable because they use a system in which their recycling hauls are more likely than those in Passaic County to include regular trash.
Given the region’s proximity to the Port of Newark, much of the recyclables collected in North Jersey, particularly paper, gets sent abroad, where mills turn it into new products. Much of it is sold to China, which bought $11.3 billion in scrap metal, plastic and paper from the U.S. in 2011.
China’s action — and the response by recyclers — has come at a time when towns, especially those in Bergen County, have been trying to entice more residents to recycle by embracing simpler single-stream recycling programs. Residents can combine paper, cardboard, glass, aluminum and plastic in one container rather than separating them.
Some experts say single-stream recycling increases the amount of material collected by up to 30 percent and provides more revenue to the towns that sell their recyclables. But given China’s crackdown, some in the industry question the wisdom of having moved to a single-stream system. They say that so much garbage gets mixed in with the recyclables that it significantly reduces its value.
“It’s easier to recycle when you have single-stream. But it’s also easier for residents to throw non-recyclables into the mix,” said Jerry Lobosco, senior vice president with Green Sky Industries, a Clifton-based recycling company with many municipal clients in the region.
Lobosco said his company sends about 95 percent of its paper and cardboard to Asia — principally China, but also to South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia and India.
Nationally, the typical single-stream load of recyclables contains 20 percent non-recyclables, he said. Whether companies sort recyclables by hand or invest in heavily automated sorting facilities, they are sometimes unable to separate out enough regular trash from the recyclables to satisfy the more stringent Chinese requirements.
Waste Management, which has numerous municipal clients in New Jersey, has seen the volume of residue in recyclables go from about 7 percent to 20 percent. “We’ve seen bowling balls, garden hoses, bar bells,” said John Hambrose, Waste Management spokesman for the mid-Atlantic region.
China is taking a hard line on recyclables from America as it tries to clean up its industries’ reputation for lax standards. The rejections are also for economic reasons, said Chaz Miller, director of policy for the National Waste and Recycling Association. “Their economy has cooled down, so their mills aren’t screaming for raw materials right now,” he said.
The trade with China had long been good business for both sides. China sends so many products to the United States that the shipping containers were going back empty. Then shipping companies realized the containers could be filled with cardboard, paper and other recyclables collected in the United States and shipped back to China, where factories in China could buy it and reuse the material.
Because China has been rejecting so many shipments, recycling companies such as Atlantic Coast Fibers, Waste Management and Green Sky Industries are more closely inspecting the loads they receive from municipal and corporate customers and charging them if they find excessive amounts of non-recyclables.
The recycling companies pay the municipalities for a load of recyclables, but then have to sort out the trash, and pay to have the trash disposed in a landfill. Those extra processing and tipping costs reduce their profit. Add to that the increasing amounts of their material being rejected by China, which further reduces revenue.
“Basically recycling companies have to work more to make less money,” Miller said. “Single-stream can cut collection costs, but there are increasing processing costs.”
Marie Kruzan, executive director of the Association of New Jersey Recyclers, agreed. “Single-stream created a problem and China’s green fence makes it more difficult,” Kruzan said. “The green fence is definitely affecting the marketplace. And it’s not going away. The recycling world is changing.” The changes mean municipalities will see changes in their contracts, she said.
Municipalities can often earn several hundred thousand dollars a year selling their recyclables. And the more people recycle, the less towns must pay in tipping fees to dispose of garbage at landfills. Tipping fees currently run about $60 per ton.
The crackdown in China could cost towns. “There’s certainly going to be a reduction in recycling revenue for municipalities, and of course we’re concerned,” said Guy Picone, director of public works for Paramus.
Like many towns, Paramus has a five-year contract which guarantees the borough a floor price on its recyclables, but if the trend continues, the borough will likely see that floor price drop, Picone said. Paramus has a dual-stream system, which insulates it a bit. Recyclables collected through a dual-stream system, where paper is collected separately from the other materials, are generally less contaminated with non-recyclables than those collected via a single-stream system. Paper can easily become contaminated by food, liquids and shards of glass mixed into the recycling stream.
Though contamination in recycling has increased because more municipalities have switched to a single-stream system, many in the industry say single-stream won’t be going away. “Single-stream is not a mistake,” Lobosco said. “It makes sense for some municipalities. It doesn’t make sense for others. It comes down to how much care residents take — how well a municipality educates its residents.”
Despite the trend toward the easier single-stream system of recycling, recycling numbers remain relatively low throughout the state, according to the latest data from the state Department of Environmental Protection. Statewide, there was a 40 percent recycling rate for municipal solid waste in 2011, down 31,250 tons from the prior year and well below the state goal of 50 percent.
Recycling, however, was up for a second year in Bergen County, which had a 45 percent recycling rate in 2011 — fourth best among the state’s 21 counties. It also ranked first in the total amount of waste recycled — about 525,000 tons. That was 42,000 tons more than in 2010. Passaic County saw a 17 percent decline in municipal recycling in 2011, with 39,000 fewer tons of material collected. Passaic County’s municipal recycling rate was 30 percent, ranking it 18th among the 21 counties.
But looking at recyclables collected by weight can be a misleading way to gauge the rate of recycling, many say.
For instance, many products now get packaged in plastic rather than far heavier glass containers to cut down on shipping costs. And plastic bottles themselves are thinner and lighter than they used to be, said Miller.
“Is it so bad for recycling tonnage to be down?” said Al DuBois, Clifton’s recycling coordinator.
“Not necessarily. It could mean we are succeeding at source reduction. Bottlers and others are eliminating weight, and in the end that’s all better for the environment.”
Email: oneillj@northjersey.com Twitter: @JamesMONeill1
- See more at: http://www.northjersey.com/news/bergen/Changes_in_Chinas_recycling_could_cost_NJ_towns_cash.html?page=all#sthash.Uk9yERNx.dpuf
Watch the video below to see how we can designate certain streams of recyclables like mixed paper, white paper or plastic. You will see the green (designated stream) will be blown in a different direction to separate it from the rest of the waste stream (red).
New York Looks to Cut Emissions by Private Trash Haulers
Robert Stolarik for The New York Times
An Action Carting truck collecting cardboard in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The company is one of New York’s largest haulers, with 80 trucks on city roads every day.
As aging garbage trucks rumble down the streets of New York, their fumes draw protests from residents and environmental advocates and raise concerns about asthma and other health effects.
The administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, which has made cleaner air a priority, has taken steps to modernize the city’s fleet of diesel-powered vehicles — including about 2,000 trucks used for picking up residential waste and recyclables — with newer, less-polluting models. Under a law the mayor signed in September, by 2017 at least 90 percent of these vehicles must meet the tougher emission control standards for diesel trucks that the federal Environmental Protection Agency set in 2007.
But those trucks are not the only ones on the streets. Now the administration wants to impose similar requirements on private haulers who dispose of the city’s commercial garbage and recyclables, as well as construction and demolition debris.
A new proposal would require about 8,300 private collection trucks to meet the same federal emissions standards by 2020, three years after the deadline for the municipal fleet. The proposal, which requires the approval of the City Council, is part of a larger package of revisions to the city’s air pollution control code.
Council officials said on Monday that they were reviewing the plan.
A report released last month by the New York City Business Integrity Commission, which oversees the private haulers, and the Environmental Defense Fund, a nonprofit group, projects that if no action is taken, the private trucks will emit a total of 1,368 tons of particulate matter and 23,198 tons of nitrogen oxides between 2013 and 2030. These substances, found in diesel exhaust, have been linked to respiratory and cardiovascular problems, smog and global warming.
The report projects that if private haulers retire their older trucks by 2020, particulate matter emissions would be reduced by 796 tons during that time period; it would be the equivalent of removing 341,829 cars from city roads every year between 2014 and 2030, the report said. Nitrogen oxides would also be reduced by 12,054 tons, or the equivalent of removing 862,704 new cars or 143,784 old cars from the roads every year.
Under the proposal, a refuse collection company would be given several options, including retrofitting older trucks with new engines that meet the 2007 federal emission standards, or replacing them entirely with new vehicles that do. Shari C. Hyman, the commissioner of the Business Integrity Commission, called the proposed mandate “a balanced approach that will help achieve the air quality goals of the administration without unfairly burdening private industry.”
The report, which was written by M. J. Bradley & Associates using city data, estimated that the overall cost of the proposal to the private haulers would be $484 million, on top of the $571.4 million they would be paying to replace trucks through normal turnover. However, commission officials said this figure could be significantly lower if trucks were retrofitted instead of replaced. The report also noted that with more new trucks and fewer old ones, savings on repairs and maintenance could be as much as $15.5 million.
Several companies’ representatives said they supported the proposal. “With or without legislation, we support cleaner emissions for our industry and, frankly, every industry,” said Ron Bergamini, chief executive officer of Action Environmental Group, the parent company of Action Carting, one of the city’s largest haulers with 80 trucks on city roads every day. He said he expected that half of those trucks would have to be replaced or retrofitted by 2020 — at a cost of about $270,000 for each new truck, and $25,000 to $35,000 for each retrofit.
But others said that while they supported the concept of reducing emissions, they remained concerned about the proposed legislation.
“Companies that collect waste and recyclables in New York City typically operate on very narrow margins and are limited as to their ability to raise prices,” said David Biderman, general counsel for the National Solid Waste Management Association, a trade group that represents more than 750 waste and recycling companies nationally, including 75 in the New York region. “This proposed legislation as well as other legislative proposals pending before the City Council are likely to increase carters’ costs significantly over the next few years if they are enacted.”
Patrick Hyland, executive director of the New York Metropolitan Trucking Association, an industry group for more than 50 heavy construction truck companies, said that he had initially resisted the proposal but that the commission’s willingness to adopt a 2020 deadline after considering an earlier date had made it “more palatable” to his members, who typically spend $160,000 to $190,000 on each new truck.
“I voiced my concerns about hitting them with something like this while some of them were still digging themselves out of the economic downturn, coupled with Hurricane Sandy,” Mr. Hyland said. “They need to prepare themselves financially.”
Jim Tripp, senior counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund, said he saw the proposal for private haulers as an “innovative” step in the Bloomberg administration’s efforts to improve air quality, which have included banning smoking in public places and phasing out the use of certain kinds of home heating oils. “I think it will have a citywide benefit since we all have garbage picked up and these trucks are everywhere,” he said.
A version of this article appears in print on November 12, 2013, on page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: Private Trash Haulers Are Now Focus in Quest for Clean Air.
New York, New York (September 26, 2013)
Joe Burke, Action
Environmental Group, Inc’s Director of Sales, publicly announced the
company’s recycling business, Action Environmental Solutions, opening of their
new state of the art recycling facility in the Bronx at NYC’s GoGreen
conference. This recycling center will ultimately change the way New York City
recycles. This new recycling facility called The Optical Sorter uses RedWave
optic technology to automate the recycling process and extract more waste from
landfills.
An optical sorter uses infrared
technology to detect and separate all seven grades plastics, white paper from
mixed paper and cardboard from the rest. This allows Action to extract higher
quality recyclables out of the waste stream. This will also allow the customer
to single stream their recycling. Single stream is when all recyclables go into
one bin, no longer needing to separate. The Action Environmental Group
philosophy behind the purchase of this vast and innovate recycling center is to
lead NYC into the future of recycling.
“This technology allows us to
extract recyclable material from what would otherwise be land filled. The goal
of recycling has not changed but the method now has greatly improved.”- CEO of
Action Environmental Group, Ronald S. Bergamini
Action is a proud sponsor of the Susan G Komen foundation and every year we like to participate in the big NYC 5k Race for a Cure. This was especially exciting this year for the Action team as we asked our newest employees from the recent Interstate Waste Services acquisition to participate. Coming together for the first time and participating in a cause that effects us all in one way or another.
Some employees raced for the women in their family, a mother, sister or a friend. We are so proud of all the employees that participated in this years race. We got to have a lot of fun too!
