Environmentalists. Every Day. America's Solid Waste Industry

Congrats to Choice Environmental Services! The Clean Vehicle Education Foundation and Natural Gas Vehicles for America recently announced that Choice has been selected to receive the prestigious 2010 NGV Achievement Award, an honor recognizing outstanding contributions to the advancement of natural gas as a vehicle fuel. Choice is being honored for their commitment to natural gas vehicles, and for being the first refuse fleet in Florida to use natural gas vehicles. (Photo: NGVAmerica President Rich Kolodziej honors Choice Environmental Services Chairman and CEO Glen Miller with 2010 National NGV Achievement Award.)

Now available: recordings from WASTEC webinar about OSHA & NFPA Requirements for Arc Flash Safety (recorded on August 31). Here’s link to QuickTime movie, but MP3, MP4, AVI and PPT files also are available in WASTEC and NSWMA members-only pages on website.

According to a recent report by the U.S. Department of Labor, the number of fatalities by solid waste collection workers declined substantially in 2009 compared to 2008. In its Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that the fatality rate during 2009 for both solid waste collection and landfill employees continued to decline, as it has in recent years.

Institutes of the National Solid Wastes Management Association (NSWMA) recently submitted comments regarding proposed rules by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). NSWMA’s Landfill Institute offered comments on EPA’s proposed rule regarding amendments to the mandatory reporting of greenhouse gases, and NSWMA’s Healthcare Waste Institute recently submitted comments regarding OSHA’s blood-borne pathogens standard. Read full release here.

WASTEC would like to welcome new members Qwik-Tip, Inc. and UTC Overseas, Inc. to the association. To learn more about these members please visit their sites at the following:

Qwik-Tip, Inc.: www.qwiktip.com

UTC Overseas, Inc.: www.utcoverseas.com

Waste handling companies use electrical power for a variety of tasks. This work can be challenging and requires care to avoid injury and remain compliant with safety regulations. In this one hour and 30 minute Webinar, you will learn more about these requirements and the solutions that you must put in place when working with balers, compactors, conveyors and other equipment at your facilities. Employees of these companies are often asked to troubleshoot and test equipment to verify that it is being fed the proper electrical current and voltage or to verify that power has been disconnected.

Specifically,  new regulations and guidelines for electrical arc flash protection from OSHA (29 CFR 1910, Subpart S) and the NFPA (NFPA 70E) require that your employees wear flame resistant clothing, face shields and other arc flash rated protective equipment when they are performing this work at greater than 50 volts.  The NFPA 70E rule also contains requirements for performing arc flash studies, labeling electrical panels and preparing electrical “hot work” permits.

The session will include opportunities for questions and answers.

WASTEC is providing this session at no cost for NSWMA and WASTEC members, but pre-registration is required.

WASTEC would like to welcome new member Inthinc Technology Solutions to the association. For more information on them, please visit them at www.inthinc.com.

Volvo Trucks North America and Mack Trucks Inc. on Tuesday, July 13, announced that orders for Class 8 trucks equipped with U.S. Environmental Protection Agency 2010-certified Volvo Group engines have surpassed the 10,000 mark. Equipped with selective catalytic reduction technology, these vehicles are designed to deliver near-zero emissions and fuel economy improvements of up to 5 percent.

“Passing the 10,000 mark in Class 8 orders is a testament to how well we’ve executed our EPA 2010 project,” says Ron Huibers, VTNA senior vice president of sales and marketing. “The reports we’re getting from customers, particularly when it comes to performance, reliability and fuel efficiency, have been extremely positive.”

Mack MP engines feature the Mack ClearTech selective catalytic reduction system. “We had the trucks in customer hands early and often for testing, and we were ready to go soon enough to start production last fall,” says Kevin Flaherty, Mack senior vice president of sales and marketing.

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As the leaves turn brown this fall, Cincinnati residents will have incentives to turn green when the City furthers its commitment to environmental quality and unveils an enhanced recycling program, slated to begin this October. The City officially announced today that it is partnering with waste hauler Rumpke Recycling, recycling cart manufacturer Cascade Engineering, and rewards program RecycleBank to incent the recycling process. Following a City Council vote in May, Cincinnati is moving forward with a new program that gives residents larger carts and rewards for recycling. Cincinnati is the largest Midwest city to deploy RecycleBank citywide; other Midwest areas with RecycleBank include suburbs of Detroit, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Omaha, Sioux Falls, and a pilot program in three wards of Chicago.

“The City is excited to provide this innovative new service to citizens,” Mayor Mark L. Mallory said. “People are looking for creative new ways to become more ‘green’ in their everyday lives. The larger recycling carts are going to allow people to recycle much more than they do now, and the great part is that they will be rewarded for how much they recycle.”

RecycleBank is a rewards program that motivates people to take greener actions, like household recycling, by rewarding them with points that are redeemable for rewards from local and national retailers, restaurants, pharmacies, grocers, and more. Similar to frequent flier programs, the more a community recycles, the more RecycleBank Points participating households earn. Single- or multi-family residences with Cincinnati curbside trash service are eligible to participate in the program free of charge.

Read full article.

Municipal recycling programs and the processing plants that serve them can both benefit from a larger flow of material—but their interests may diverge when deciding what belongs within that incoming stream.

At a session titled “Meeting Municipal Expectations” at the 2010 Paper Recycling Conference, two material recovery facility (MRF) plant operators and a municipal recycling program supervisor shared their experiences in seeking cooperation on collection program design.

Daniel Lantz of Metro Waste Paper Recovery, Toronto, oversees operations at several MRFs that process materials collected in large Canadian cities. He told attendees that his company has been put in the position of trying to separate and sort an increasingly wide range of materials in MRFs not designed or equipped to handle some of them. “Programs in Ontario are handling a minimum of 15 materials; most programs in Ontario are handling well over 20 materials, including materials you don’t even want to think about handling—but we handle them anyhow,” he stated.

Lantz expressed skepticism about the rush to single-stream collection and noted its effects on material quality. “There are tremendous difficulties on the fiber side,” he remarked. “There’s no such thing as a true No. 8 news grade anymore. I’m not telling anyone anything they don’t already know.”

Read full article.