Nonmetallics

Noble Recycling Inc. has opened a 20,000-square-foot plant in West Pompano Beach, Fla., with the intention of aggregating plastic scrap collected by smaller recyclers throughout Florida.

In a news release, the company’s CEO Joseph Miceli says Noble’s goal is to assist in the recycling and consolidation of plastic scrap from local and statewide vendors. "Noble, in conjunction with Allied Van lines, has the capability to pick up small batches of material throughout the state of Florida," the news release states.

Noble sees itself as filling a niche for small plastic processors throughout the state of Florida that do not have outlets other than waste haulers for some of their recyclable materials.

"Currently, small processors that don’t have the room or patience to recycle their scrap plastics simply don’t," says Miceli. "Essentially, what that means is that millions of pounds of recyclable plastic is never given the chance to be recycled, and ultimately it is our environment that suffers. Our partnership with a major trucking company allows us the flexibility to hopefully reverse this trend of throwing away plastic that is 100 percent recyclable," he adds.

Noble Recycling Inc. is a recycler and exporter of plastic, metal and paper scrap as well as some electronic scrap. The company is based in Boca Raton, Fla., and exports approximately 4,000 metric tons of plastic per month.

LEHIGH, MTR TEAM UP TO RECYCLE TIRES

Lehigh Technologies Inc., based in Naples, Fla., has announced an agreement with MTR Inc., the Southeast’s largest collector and processor of scrap tires and other scrap rubber with facilities and operations in Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee and Mississippi processing more than 15 million tires annually.

With this agreement, Lehigh will source its raw materials from an ISO 9001 processing facility, giving the company complete accountability and assurance over feedstock consistency and quality. In addition, Lehigh and MTR will also offer customers closed-loop recycling/reuse programs, enabling manufacturers to use their own overstock to feed new products. The MTR strategic relationship marks another cornerstone in Lehigh’s long-term, global strategy.

Under the terms of the agreement, Lehigh will host a crumb rubber feedstock processing facility at MTR’s Jackson, Ga., tire collection and recycling plant. The crumbing facility will have enough capacity to supply 100 percent of Lehigh’s fine powder plant’s feedstock requirements.

In addition, the closed-loop recycling/reuse programs are designed to address significant disposal and raw material challenges, especially where it pertains to non-degradable rubber tires. These programs will meet corporate ISO 14001 and environmental stewardship goals and objectives for tire manufacturers. Together, Lehigh and MTR will offer customers the ability to collect and process their factory discards into reusable raw materials, thereby lowering disposal and raw material costs under the same system.

Lehigh expects to spend about $5 million dollars at the Jackson site. Upon completion of the Jackson crumbing facility, Lehigh will have the capacity to process more than 100 million pounds of scrap tire material into high quality crumb rubber feedstock.

A company in Jefferson County, Mo., that failed to properly dispose of thousands of scrap tires after being cited a number of times by the Missouri Department of Natural Resources is being sued by the Missouri’s Attorney General.

The state of Missouri’s Attorney General Jay Nixon has filed the suit against the company for failing to properly dispose of thousands of scrap tires. The threat of a lawsuit follows the company’s repeated failure to resolve the situation. The company, Midwest Scrap Metal, had been cited several times by the Missouri Department of Natural Resources.

Nixon says the defendants entered into a settlement agreement with his office and DNR in December 2002 to correct violations of the Missouri Solid Waste Management Law. The agreement stemmed from six DNR inspections of the site between 1992 and 2001 that resulted in the department issuing six violations related to the storage of scrap tires at the site. As part of the agreement, the defendants agreed to remove all the scrap tires from the property within one year.

DNR inspections of the site in September 2003 and July 2004 determined that although the defendants had removed some tires, about 1,000 still remained in violation of the agreement. In August 2005, the defendants stated that only 350 tires remained at the site and that it would be completely cleared by October 2005. However, a DNR inspection Dec. 19, 2006, revealed that about 1,000 scrap tires were still present at the site.

"Scrap tires can pose an environmental and health hazard and they need to be properly and promptly disposed of," Nixon says. "The defendants’ unlawful acts in this case are of a continuing nature and represent a deliberate disregard of our environmental protection laws."

Nixon is asking the court to issue an injunction that orders the defendants to comply with the Missouri Solid Waste Management Law, properly and legally dispose of all scrap tires at the site within 90 days of the court’s judgment and submit proof of the disposal to the DNR. The lawsuit also calls for the court to assess a civil penalty against the defendants for violating state environmental laws and to order them to pay all costs and fees associated with the case.

Tire recycling company GreenMan Technologies Inc., Savage, Minn., has announced results for the three months ended Dec. 31, 2006, the first quarter of its fiscal year.

The company’s revenue was up a reported 14 percent compared to the same quarter in 2005, and inbound tire volume also increased by more than half a million tires thanks to several tire pile cleanups in Iowa.

Net sales from continuing operations for the three months ended Dec. 31, 2006, increased $611,000, or 14 percent, to $4.89 million as compared to the first quarter of last year’s net sales from continuing operations of $4.28 million.

In addition to the 18 percent increase in overall inbound tire volume, the tipping fee GreenMan charges to collect and dispose of a scrap tire increased 2 percent compared to last year’s rate.

Gross profit for the three months ended Dec. 31, 2006, was $1.48 million, or 30.4 percent of net sales, compared to $1.3 million, or 30.5 percent of net sales, for the three months ended Dec. 31, 2005.

The company’s net loss for the first quarter decreased $1.44 million, or 99 percent, to $9,000 ($0.00 per basic share) as compared to a net loss of $1.4 million, or $0.07 per basic share, for first quarter of 2006.

ARKANSAS HOUSE COMMITTEE PASSES POLYSTYRENE RECYCLING BILL