A Word About Recycling with Ollie Maier

Today I’ll cover a few items I found interesting in a recent Resource Recycling newsletter. I hope you find them both interesting and enlightening.

Although Texas Disposal Systems (TDS) is a very popular trash/recycling company in this area, Waste Management is also popular here. Thus this article on Waste Management caught my attention,

“The largest residential garbage and recycling company in North America plans to get a lot bigger with a nearly $5 billion acquisition,” the article starts.

It appears the Houston-headquartered Waste Management has an agreement to acquire the Florida-based company, Advanced Disposal Services for $4.9 billion. Advanced Disposal Services, the fourth largest garbage and recycling company in North America, mainly serves the eastern half of the U.S. This deal, if it goes through in early 2020, will be Waste Management’s largest acquisition ever.

Waste Management is more involved than Advanced Disposal, in terms of recycling. For example, in 2018, Waste Management had 102 material recovery facilities (MRFs) to separate the recyclables, compared to just 22 for Advanced Disposal.

The next item I found interesting has to do with the Cascades company. Because of the changing market conditions, they have started mixing old corrugated cardboard (OCC) and white recovered papers together to create a cheaper line of tissue products. This new line includes paper towels, toilet paper and facial tissue.

The mixed-fiber tissue products were developed by the company’s innovative teams as a strategy to hold down product costs. Otherwise, as Cascades explained, “High virgin pulp prices and shortages of high-grade recovered papers have resulted in record high price increases for customers wanting white paper products.”

The new products will have a distinctive Latte color as a result of combining white recycled fibers and cardboard. Even with a slightly different color, the products are equal in quality to their white products.

“This new product line is not only a green solution but also provides our customers a cost-effective offering that will meet their paper towels and tissue needs,” a company spokesperson said.

Switching yet to another subject – which we hope will also help customers save money – at the Sustainable Packaging Coalition (SPC) Impact conference, held in Seattle earlier this month, hundreds of packaging stakeholders discussed sustainability, including recycling.

At the conference, the 665 attendees heard speakers discuss, among other things, the development of a recycled material standard that would foster new recycling capacity.

“The shifting perception of polymers has fundamentally changed the relationship between the petrochemical industry and recycling businesses,” a speaker said.

Before, petrochemical companies felt recyclers were cutting into their profits. This has changed so the resin companies now realize recyclers are their "lifeline to the future."

One of the speakers felt that in every plastic product made, a certain minimum level of recycled content should be mandatory. Along this idea, it appears some large consumer packaged goods companies have already taken various actions on their own to do this.

To see what these companies are doing, a study was done on more than 90 of them. Of those companies, 55 percent were committed to increasing recyclability and 62 percent had efforts to use more recycled plastic. Next week, we will continue with more what was discussed at the conference.

Till then, do have an enjoyable and safe one.

--Ollie is a local citizen concerned with the environment and helping others. A retired Air Force fighter and instructor pilot, he is a graduate of Leadership San Marcos and received his degrees at Texas State University where he worked on staff before totally retiring. For questions or comments, he invites you to call him at 512-353-7432 or email omaier@txstate.edu.