C&D News

Larry Horwedel has been named Southwest Regional Manager for Lippmann-Milwaukee, Inc., a Cudahy, Wisc.-based manufacturer of crushing and screening equipment.

Horwedel was formerly vice president of sales and marketing with (and a part owner of) Excel Machinery Ltd., Amarillo, Texas. He has more than 25 years of experience in the sales and marketing of aggregate and concrete crushing machinery to material producers and contractors.

At Excel, Horwedel helped design portable impact crushing plants and set up many stationery and portable custom recycling installations for C&D recycling systems, as well as for broader waste management, tire shredding and other reclamation operations. His career has taken him to installation sites at places ranging from West Africa to Korea.

For Lippmann, he will have territorial sales responsibilities and will help the company develop a distributor and OEM network in the Southwest region. Horwedel will also help represent Lippmann at trade shows on a national basis.

Horwedel, who claims a self-conferred PhD in “crushology,” will be based out of Amarillo, Texas.

CONCRETE RECYCLING FACILITY OK’d

Approval has been reached to build a concrete and asphalt recycling facility in Burton, Mich. According to Neil Martz, co-owner of Zi-MAR Group, the company setting up the facility, the project will take in concrete and asphalt, primarily from contractors working on road projects.

Martz hopes to start putting together the facility as soon as possible, with a hoped for completion date by this summer.

A number of the backers of the company are involved in the construction industry currently and have a good deal of the expertise needed to plan and set up the operation, according to Martz.

Martz says the plan is to recycle the concrete back into material that can be used by road construction firms.

The facility will be located in an area zoned for heavy industrial land use. According to the Flint (Mich.) Journal, the facility will only operate when it has enough material to make operating the equipment cost effective.

An advantage of the facility, Martz notes, is that the operation will provide a legal place for unwanted material to be delivered and recycled into a usable product.

Honeywell Carpet Efforts Awarded

The Infinity nylon carpet renewal process, created by Honeywell International Inc., Morristown, N.J., has been named the first runner up for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Industrial Technologies (OIT) “Technology of the Year” award.

The award was presented in a ceremony in late February at the OIT’s Expo, held at the Washington Hilton and Towers Exhibition Hall in Washington, D.C.

OIT’s “Technology of the Year” award recognizes manufacturing processes that provide exceptional commercialization potential and significant potential for energy efficiency improvement as well as economic and environmental benefits. This is the second recent award for Honeywell’s nylon carpet renewal efforts.

Evergreen Nylon Recycling, Augusta, Ga., the Honeywell joint venture that converts discarded nylon 6 into virgin-quality material, was named “Recycler of the Year” in December 2000 by the Society of Plastics Engineers, Brookfield, Conn.

The Evergreen Nylon Recycling joint venture developed and patented the process that converts post-consumer nylon 6 carpet and other nylon 6 wastes into caprolactam, the raw material used to make nylon 6. Type 6 nylon is used in such applications as residential, commercial and automotive carpet, engineering plastics, automotive parts, sporting goods, films and packaging.

Evergreen’s $100 million facility, which began operation in late 1999, can produce up to 100 million pounds of caprolactam each year while keeping up to 200 million pounds of nylon 6 waste out of U.S. landfills each year.

The Evergreen system allows Honeywell to produce its Infinity Forever Renewable Nylon, which is both recycled and renewable, creating a closed-loop recycling process.

“The judges were extremely impressed with Evergreen’s level of commitment to energy efficiency improvement,” said Denise Swink, deputy assistant secretary for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Industrial Technologies. “By developing this highly useful closed-loop process technology, Evergreen is saving approximately 700,000 barrels of oil that would have been necessary to manufacture caprolactam from petroleum feedstock. That is equal to the amount of energy consumed by 40,000 homes in one year. This revolutionary process is a model for energy efficiency, and it provides significant economic and environmental benefits as well.”