Don Ross will replace Ben Harvey as chairman of the board of trustees for the organization.

The National Waste & Recycling Association (NWRA), Arlington, Virginia, has elected Don Ross to serve as chairman of the board of trustees and reelected Dave Call as its treasurer. Their terms will commence at the conclusion of the board meeting being held at WasteExpo in May.  

“I am excited to be working with Don in his new role as chairman with the enthusiasm and ideas that he brings to everything that he tackles,” says Darrell Smith, NWRA president and CEO. “Likewise, I am pleased that Dave will continue to serve as our treasurer. I look forward to working with Don and Dave as they both bring tremendous experience and I appreciate their perspective.” 

Ross is the vice president of McLaughlin Family Cos., Scranton, Iowa.

Call is the senior vice president for business development at Republic Services, Phoenix.

NWRA says it has traditionally alternated the chairmanship between its services and suppliers members.  

Ross will replace Ben Harvey, who is completing his sixth consecutive one-year term as chairman. Harvey will continue to serve as a member of the board.

“I congratulate Ben on his successful chairmanship during which he has led NWRA to unprecedented heights in financial performance, advocacy and safety,” Smith says. “His continued service on the board of trustees will help ensure a smooth transition.” 

The partnership offers additional, complementary system solutions to meet application needs in organics and construction and demolition.

ML Environmental Group, a Denver-based supplier of equipment and systems for processing solid and organics waste, has announced a partnership and exclusive United States distribution agreement with Scott Equipment Co., a New Prague, Minnesota-based manufacturer of the Turbo Separator and GypStream product lines.  

"When we consider a company and brand as a potential solution partner, the most important characteristics we look at are that our company cultures, values and visions align," says Brandon Lapsys, ML Environmental Group president. "Scott Equipment Co. checks all of those boxes and so many more. They have a world-class product that has been proven in the marketplace for nearly three decades."  

ML Environmental Group, the parent company to Komptech Americas and Plexus Recycling Technologies, says the patented Turbo Separator depackaging technology is a natural fit for Komptech customers in the food waste and organics recovery market. In addition, MLE customers have a new solution to process gypsum wallboard or drywall in the construction and demolition recycling market.  

According to the companies, benefits of this strategic partnership include:  

Komptech Americas customers gain the ability to implement preprocessing and separation systems for food waste depackaging into their organics waste processes.  

The Turbo Separator and GypStream systems effectively complement Komptech Americas' equipment technologies, giving a broader audience reach to both companies, regionally and nationally.  

ML Environmental Group is the exclusive dealer for Turbo Separator organics systems for composting and Gypstream drywall recycling systems in the United States, excluding California.   

"Our recycling systems, including both the food waste organics recovery system and the gypsum wallboard separation and recovery machines, position nicely with ML Environmental Group's vision to offer their customers an end-to-end solution," says Kevin Pedretti, business development and product marketing manager at Scott Equipment Co. 

WB Waste & Recycling boosts capacity to 25 tons per hour.

Machinex, headquartered in Plessisville, Quebec, with North American offices in North Carolina, helped WB Waste & Recycling upgrade its Capitol Heights, Maryland,  Olive Street Recycling Facility, adding two Mach Ballistic separators and the dual-eject Mach Hyspec optical sorter to eject polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and mixed paper, increasing the facility’s overall material recycling facility performance.

The system processes residential single-stream and commercial materials. The Olive Street material recovery facility was awarded several new contracts for processing additional tons of residential single-stream (RSS) material, so the company needed to improve its recycling capacity to meet these requirements. As a result, it contacted Machinex to retrofit the recycling system.

On the container line, a magnet removes ferrous metals (tin cans), and an eddy current removes the nonferrous items, which are sorted to make a used beverage can- (UBC-) grade aluminum.

As it does in many cases, the Machinex engineering team had to cope with a tight existing building with a low roof to add several pieces of equipment. The result is an increase from 10 tons per hour (TPH) to 25 TPH of sorting capacity.

Dave Taylor, director of recycling at WB Waste and Recycling, says the company experienced six weeks of total downtime while Machinex upgraded its Capitol Heights facility.

“Working with Machinex, with their customer service, it was incredible how quickly we were able to get this project off the ground and completed,” he says.

New report backs deconstruction and recycling as beneficial in the cleanup process.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has released a report highlighting what it calls “the importance of resiliency and effective planning for management of debris from natural disasters.”

The Resiliency and Natural Disaster Debris Workshop Report provides what EPA calls “key takeaways” from two virtual workshops held in 2021. The workshops were attended by people with different core focuses, including disaster debris planning and management, disaster response, environmental justice, zero waste, circular economy, deconstruction and green building according to the agency.

“The report published today has important implications for our Pacific Southwest region, especially for communities in coastal areas in California and Hawaii and the Pacific Islands,” says EPA Pacific Southwest Regional Administrator Martha Guzman. “Planning now to reduce disaster debris through resilient design, reuse, recycling, and composting can better protect vulnerable communities, support equitable disaster recovery and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

Recycling and landfill diversion are mentioned frequently in the EPA press release announcing the report. EPA says priorities in a disaster cleanup should include reusing materials that can safely be recovered, which reduces the embodied carbon from the greenhouse gas emissions used to produce, transport and dispose of new materials; advance planning and designing for adaptation to “empower communities to reuse, recycle and compost materials safely” following disasters; and deconstruction  (reusing building materials instead of demolition and landfill disposal), which “creates local disaster recovery jobs, construction industry job training and low-cost materials for rebuilding,” while also potentially reducing “the spread of lead-based paint dust and other toxics materials from post-disaster demolition of some older (pre-1978) homes and buildings.”

Disaster cleanups in recent years that led to considerable recycling activity include those following California wildfires and the cleanup in Texas and other Gulf Coast states after Hurricane Harvey.

Access to the full EPA report summarizing the workshops can be found on this web page.

The company says AI technology advances the company’s goals of designing and developing technology to move the waste industry forward.

Dodge Center, Minnesota-based McNeilus Truck and Manufacturing Inc., an Oshkosh Corp. company, has acquired the CartSeeker curbside automation product from Eagle Vision Systems Inc., Kitchener, Ontario.

CartSeeker curbside automation is a patented AI-based recognition technology that identifies and locates curbside waste carts and helps automate the operation of the truck’s robotic lift arm without joystick manipulation. The CartSeeker product will complement McNeilus’ ongoing work with autonomy by providing more potential for solutions that bring operational simplicity and high performance to customers.

McNeilus says it is focused on designing and developing technology and other heavy-duty truck advancements that move the waste industry forward. This investment in refuse collection vehicle automation drives that strategy forward.

“We put a priority on bringing our customers innovations that advance their business, and this strategic investment in autonomy boosts our product capabilities and future offerings,” says Jeff Koga, vice president and general manager of refuse collection vehicles for McNeilus.