Displaying items by tag: US

US: Cadence Environmental Energy has promoted Ted T Reese to Executive Vice President. Cadence provides technology for waste fuel recycling and emission reduction technology to the cement industry and is the exclusive supplier of waste-derived fuels for Ash Grove Cement. As part of the company’s succession plan founder Ted J Reese plans to hand over the presidency to Ted T Reese in 2019.

US: Penn Waste has won the Solid Waste Association of North America’s (SWANA) Silver Excellence Award in the Recycling Systems category.

Penn Waste is receiving the award for its York, Pennsylvania 45t/hr single stream system retrofit. The 2017 retrofit, provided by Bulk Handling Systems (BHS), boosted capacity 130% to 45t/hr. It also added NRT optical sorting technology and a Max-AI Autonomous Quality Control (AQC) robotic sorter to improve container recovery and purity. The improvements resulted in a facility able to process 18,000t/month with more than 98% uptime and capturing 98% of recyclables. Penn Waste said that the company did not lose a single ton during the speedy retrofit and has since been running at 100% capacity with lower operating costs.

SWANA’s Excellence Awards Program recognises outstanding solid waste programs and facilities that advance the practice of environmentally and economically sound solid waste management through their commitment to utilizing effective technologies and processes in system design and operations, advancing worker and community health and safety and implementing successful public education and outreach programs. The award will be presented at SWANA’s annual conference in August 2018.

US: Bulk Handlings Systems (BHS) and its subsidiary National Recovery Technologies (NRT) has launched two new products targeted at Material Recovery Facility (MRF) operators for identifying waste products and tracking the entire recycling process. The Max-AI Visual Identification System (VIS) provides real time material identification in recycling plants. The Total Intelligence Platform provides information to track the entire recycling process.

Max-AI VIS helps operators monitor material composition in the sorting process. The system uses multi-layered neural networks and a vision system to see and identify objects. It can be used to verify the quality of end products, or to monitor the quantity of recyclables in a MRF’s residue as it leaves a system. An operator can compare composition for a specified time period against key performance indicators.

The Total Intelligence Platform monitors and tracks throughput, uptime, downtime events, material composition, motor amperage, and performance data from optical sorters and Max-AI-powered equipment.

“While perhaps not as sexy as robotic sorting, the idea that we can now see and track input composition, residue composition and product quality automatically is something that our customers are really excited about,” said BHS chief executive officer Steve Miller.

US: RePower South, a licensee of Accordant Energy, has started building a municipal solid waste (MSW) processing plant at Moncks Corner in South Carolina. The unit will use Accordant's ReEngineered Feedstock technology to process 50t/hr of MSW to make the company’s ReEngineered Feedstock product, a type of refuse-derived fuel (RDF). ReEngineered Feedstock will be marketed to cement plants and other industrial users.

"The RPS team has decades of experience in the recycling, solid waste, energy, finance, and construction industries, having built, owned, and operated multiple recycling and solid waste companies. We are confident this first commercial facility utilising the Accordant technology will improve recycling performance and landfill diversion while providing a renewable solid fuel for cement kilns and utility and industrial boilers," said Paula A Calabrese, Senior Vice-President and Chief Strategy Officer of Accordant.

Accordant says that its ReEngineered Feedstock product can be engineered for a variety of combustion applications and is physically and chemically designed to mimic the properties of coal. The product also holds a non-waste fuel determination from the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) allowing regulatory benefits for its users.

US: RePower South (RPS) has started building the Berkeley County Recycling and Recovery Facility, a mixed waste processing plant. The turnkey recovery system will be provided by Bulk Handling Systems (BHS) under an engineering procurement and construction (EPC) agreement with Barnhill Contracting Company. When production begins in early 2019, the Moncks Corner, South Carolina plant will process 50t/hr of mixed waste sourced from Berkeley County to recover recycled commodities and a fuel feedstock.

The plant will use a BHS FiberPure system, consisting of BHS screens, NRT optical sorters and Max-AI autonomous quality control units to remove unwanted fractions to produce an end product with minimal manual sorting. Non-recyclable fibres and plastics destined for fuel will undergo further filtering by NRT SpydIR optical sorters equipped with MetalDirector options to remove unwanted contaminants. Max-AI AQCs are also utilised in each sorting position on the container line. In total, the system will use seven NRT optical sorters and nine Max-AI AQCs. In addition, Loesche Energy Systems will provide a Loesche RocketMill for size reduction. The system will also features two Kadant PAAL balers.

US: Essroc Cement’s appeal against the Clark County planning commission decision to stop it burning alternative fuels at its Speed Cement plant in Indian has been blocked. The Clark County Circuit Court ruled the plant did not follow the proper administrative procedures before filing its lawsuit seeking to overturn a local zoning decision, according to the Courier Journal newspaper. Burning waste fuels at the site has been in dispute since the company first proposed the action in 2014.

US: St Marys Cement’s Charlevoix plant has remained open following a fire that destroyed its alternative fuels storage facility on 7 June 2017. No one was injured in the incident and work on the plant’s expansion project is continuing, according to the Charlevoix Courier newspaper. The warehouse containing refuse-derived fuels (RDF) caught fire on the evening on the day and was swiftly extinguished by fire services. The Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) has been alerted about the incident.

US: Lawyers representing the Speed cement plant in Indiana have started taking legal action against the Clark County planning commission for reversing permission for the site to use alternative fuels. The plant’s lawyers say it invested US$1.5m on a fuel conversion project, according to the Courier Journal newspaper. The plant also says that it will lose money as coal is more expensive to burn. The local planning commission reversed a previous decision to let the plant burn alternative fuels in mid-2016 following complaints by the public.

US: Univar, a global chemical distributor, has reached a milestone in its sustainability efforts, by shipping 0.45Mt of alternative fuels from its waste chemical business, ChemCare, to Systech Environmental Corporation, a subsidiary of LafargeHolcim, for use at cement plants since 1989.

"Systech has been reusing industrial waste as fuel and raw material in the cement industry for almost 40 years. Our partnership with Univar and ChemCare is the epitome of matching company assets and expertise with a mutual interest in sustainability to achieve this incredible milestone," said Shawn McMullen, chief operating officer, Systech.

ChemCare provides a waste management service that collects both hazardous and non-hazardous waste products at customer locations in the US and Canada, and then works with partners in the waste disposal business to safely transport these materials to licensed third-party treatment, storage and disposal facilities.