The COVID-19 pandemic changed everything, including Americans’ waste disposal habits.

That was one of the big takeaways from two new Pacific Northwest garbage and recycling studies that were released recently. Both showed a serious uptick in the amount of trash people are generating and, in some cases, disposing of improperly.

Continue Reading on AOR Member BRING's Website

Georgia-Pacific (GP), Atlanta, has begun operations at its GP Toledo material recovery facility (MRF) in Toledo, Oregon. The MRF has applied GP’s Juno technology, which is designed to recycle highly contaminated recovered fiber and mixed materials.

Christer Henriksson, president of Juno Technology at Georgia-Pacific, says GP has been piloting Juno since 2013 at a plant in Savannah, Georgia, and began construction on its Toledo MRF about two years ago.

The U.S. EPA’s top environmental justice official has a message for recycling operators: Don’t wait for a conflict to arise to start engaging with the community that surrounds you.

Matthew Tejada, who since 2013 has been director of the U.S. EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice, addressed the recycling sector on April 29 during the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries’ ISRI2021 online conference.

If food scraps from households are composted, should that count in the nation’s recycling rate? What if they’re fed to livestock or processed in anaerobic digesters?

Those are just a couple of the many questions the EPA is grappling with as it seeks to define exactly what “recycling rate” will mean. Last fall, the agency released a national recycling rate goal of 50% by 2030. Using current methodologies, the EPA estimates the U.S. has a 32% recycling rate.

A new paint recycling program beginning in the state of Washington allows households and businesses to recycle leftover paint, stain, and varnish conveniently and sustainably. The program is operated by PaintCare, a nonprofit organization created by the paint industry through the American Coatings Association (ACA) to manage leftover paint in states that have enacted paint stewardship laws. PaintCare will provide more than 200 drop-off sites across Washington, which include paint retail stores and locally managed government facilities.

The California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery (CalRecycle) announced March 30 that the Carpet America Recovery Effort (CARE) will pay the state of California $1,175,000 in penalties for its repeated failure from 2013 through 2016 to meet recycling and landfill diversion goals under California’s Carpet Product Stewardship Law. The settlement agreement follows a California Third District Court of Appeal ruling affirming administrative civil penalties against CARE, which is an organization that represents carpet manufacturers.

International environment consultancy Eunomia, with support from 

A new report developed by the Solid Waste Association of North America’s (SWANA's) Applied Research Foundation (ARF) addresses the issue of increased contamination in curbside recycling programs in recent years and its effect on costs and safety at material recovery facilities (MRFs).

Continue reading at Resource Recycling for the full story.

Municipal governments and the public might strongly support residential recycling, but they might not fully understand how commodity markets work in the recycling industry. They sometimes have misconceptions about the value of commodities processed by material recovery facilities (MRFs).