Municipal

Dr Pepper Snapple invests $5 million in Closed Loop Fund

Dr Pepper Snapple Group (DPS), Plano, Texas, has announced it will work with industry, government and community partners to achieve a U.S. beverage container recycling rate of 60 percent by 2030. As part of this commitment, the company is entering into a new partnership and continuing another to improve access to recycling across the country.

DPS is investing $5 million in the Closed Loop Fund over the next 10 years, joining a growing number of businesses supporting efforts to improve postconsumer recycling by providing critical funding for recycling infrastructure.

In addition, the company is extending its relationship with Keep America Beautiful through a new three-year, $1 million commitment primarily to continue efforts to place recycling bins in public parks.

“Making a meaningful and sustainable reduction in the amount of plastic and other recyclable material in the waste stream requires convenient options for consumers to recycle, as well as the capacity to process those materials at the community level,” says Kelly Smith, director of government affairs and sustainability for DPS. “Our investment in the Closed Loop Fund and our continuing partnership with Keep America Beautiful give us a way to address both of those needs and put us on the path toward achieving a substantial increase in the container recycling rate over the long term.”

DPS joins 10 other companies in the Closed Loop Fund, which was established in 2014 as a social impact investment fund. Over the next 10 years, the fund will invest $100 million via zero-interest loans to cities and below-market loans to companies for recycling infrastructure to prove the market for single-stream expansion and modernization by maximizing recycling profitability.

“Closed Loop Fund members are collectively acting to make significant investments that will improve recycling, save taxpayer money, create jobs and support the environment at scale across the United States,” says Rob Kaplan, Closed Loop Fund managing director.

The Recycling Partnership adds funding partners

The Recycling Partnership, Falls Church, Virginia, has announced that it has added a number of new funding partners since the start of 2016.

The International Bottled Water Association (IBWA), Alexandria, Virginia, signed on in March as the newest funding partner of The Recycling Partnership, joining Kimberly-Clark, Irving, Texas, and the Consumer Technology Association, Arlington, Virginia, which signed on in the first quarter of the year, as well.

“The bottled water industry is actively working to build partnerships that will help increase recycling efforts, and the reliable, scalable results that The Recycling Partnership delivers are hitting the mark for us,” says Chris Hogan, IBWA vice president of communications.

Lisa Morden, senior director of global sustainability for Kimberly-Clark, says, “At Kimberly-Clark, everything we do—from helping communities to caring for the planet—is linked to our mission to make lives better. Sustainability is inherent to this mission and challenges us to innovate in ways that extend the life of product and packaging materials and reduce the pressure on precious natural resources with the development of sustainable alternatives like the use of recyclable materials.”

In 2015, The Recycling Partnership says it leveraged $11 million in new recycling infrastructure, including delivering 165,000 recycling carts.

Florida agency breaks ground on new MRF

Ground has been broken on a new materials recovery facility (MRF) in northern Florida that will process recyclables collected by and for the Emerald Coast Utilities Authority (ECUA), Pensacola, Florida.

The groundbreaking was Friday, Feb. 12, at the future site of the facility, which is adjacent to the Escambia County Perdido Landfill. The new facility is to be known as ECUA’s IMRF (interim MRF).

The Escambia County Waste Services Department and the ECUA say they are “working together toward the achievement of the state of Florida’s 75 percent recycling initiative and the manifestation of a long-term recycling solution.”

The new IMRF will include a 50,000-square-foot fabric building to house sorting equipment capable of handling 165 tons of recyclables per day, or 40,000 tons annually. It is expected to be fully operational in summer 2016.

The ECUA board awarded a $5.5 million contract to Bulk Handling Systems (BHS), Eugene, Oregon, for the processing equipment; a $1.4 million contract to Big Top Manufacturing, Perry, Florida, for the fabric building; and a $1.5 million contract to Brown Construction, Pensacola, Florida, for site work.

Waste Management retains Houston contract

On the heels of a public standoff that involved Mayor Sylvester Turner, the city of Houston and Houston-based Waste Management (WM), have agreed to a two-year extension to the city’s residential recycling collection program.

Houston, led by its mayor, had rejected an earlier offer by WM to charge $3 million or more per year to collect residential recyclables. According to a March 11, 2016, article on the Houston Chronicle website, the two parties have agreed to a two-year contract to use 96-gallon collection carts for “paper, cardboard, plastics and metal cans.”

According to an earlier report by Houston Public Media, Turner had indicated the city would negotiate with other service providers to take over the collection contract when it expired in mid-March and had not anticipated the new contract terms, which involved “an increase of several million [dollars] over the current contract.”

Casella reports increased profits in 2015

Rutland, Vermont-based Casella Waste Systems has reported increased revenue and profits in 2015 compared with 2014.

The company has reported revenue for its 2015 fiscal year (which coincides with the calendar year) of $546.5 million, up $20.6 million (3.9 percent) from its 2014 total. In the fourth quarter, Casella Waste took in $140 million, a 4.9 percent increase from its fourth quarter 2014 receipts.

Casella Waste pegged its earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization, or EBITDA, at $106.1 million for the year, up by $9.2 million (9.5 percent) from 2014. Its fourth quarter earnings of $27.8 represented a 13.8 percent increase from the fourth quarter of 2014. Casella Waste also disclosed operating income of $30.5 million for the year, up $9.2 million (43.1 percent) from 2014.

For the fourth quarter, the company cites “overall solid waste pricing for the quarter [that] was up 3.6 percent, mainly driven by strong residential and commercial collection pricing up 5.6 percent.”

Chairman and CEO John W. Casella says, “During fiscal year 2015, we continued to execute well against our key strategies of increasing landfill returns, improving collection route profitability, creating incremental value through resource solutions, reducing financial and operational risks and improving our balance sheet.”

He also refers to changes in the company’s recycling division as a boost to the 2015 bottom line. “We have worked hard over the last year to reshape our recycling sales model in the face of rapidly declining recycling commodity prices, with the average commodity revenue per ton down 19 percent in fiscal year 2015, resulting in an $8.8 million decline in recycling commodity revenues,” Casella says. “We have offset this decline in recycling commodity revenues through a combination of our newly implemented Sustainability/Recycling Adjustment (SRA) fee applied to residential and commercial hauling customers, lower rebates or higher tipping fees to recycling processing customers and efforts to reduce operating costs at our materials processing facilities. Through these efforts, we offset nearly all of this commodity price headwind and held operating income flat in the recycling line of business.”

The company says it sees its recycling business in 2016 as providing “overall revenue declines of between 2 percent and 7 percent, driven by lower commodity pricing, partially offset by higher volumes.”