Prosecutors accuse Evans Landscaping of open dumping of solid waste and illegal disposal of C&D debris at three facilities.

Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost has filed a complaint on Evans Landscaping, a landscaping company based in Anderson, Ohio. The company is accused of open dumping of solid waste and illegal disposal of construction and demolition debris at three facilities in Hamilton County, Ohio, since at least 2014, according to reports from WCPO-TV Cincinnati.

Prosecutors handling the case accuse the company and owner Doug Evans of illegal dumping at three sites in Anderson Township, according to court records.

“Defendants have been aware of the majority of these violations for over five years and have not corrected them,” the prosecutor’s complaint states. “Since 2014, the Hamilton County General Health District conducted over 20 compliance inspections at the sites, issued 17 notice of violation letters to defendants and met with defendants on numerous occasions to try to resolve the solid waste and construction and demolition debris violations at their sites.”

Evans could be fined up to $10,000 per day for the alleged violations, according to the complaint.

This isn’t the first time Evans has faced legal issues. In 2014, he had to pay $300,000 in fines to settle a complaint with the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency over air pollution violations and had to lead a tree-planting project to serve as a windbreak for the dust emissions produced at the company’s operations in Hamilton and Clermont counties. The total cost of the project was $100,000.

In 2018, Evans was convicted of using a shell company to win millions in state and government demolition contracts during the recession meant for minority and small businesses. He served about two years in prison, according to a report from WCPO-TV.

With the acquisition of Hungry Buzzard, DTG will increase the size of its container and trucking divisions.

DTG Recycle, a Mill Creek, Washington-based recycler of commercial, industrial, construction and demolition waste, has announced its acquisition of “substantially all assets” of Hungry Buzzard.

Hungry Buzzard, based in Bothwell, Washington, operates a fleet of prominent recycling containers throughout the north end of Puget Sound.

With this acquisition, DTG Recycle will increase the size of its container and trucking divisions, and further strengthen its position as the premier construction and demolition (C&D) recycler in the Pacific Northwest.

According to a news release, DTG Recycle plans to continue providing Hungry Buzzard customers with the customer service they have grown to expect. The company says it is excited to offer them the full suite of DTG Recycle products and services, including sweeper trucks and portable toilets.

Ohio oil re-refining firm now part of U.K.-based environmental group.

Canton, Ohio-based Hydrodec of North America, a naphthenic oil treatment and re-refining company, has been acquired by United Kingdom-based Slicker Recycling Ltd. for an undisclosed amount.

Slicker, which is headquartered near Birmingham in the U.K., says the acquisition increases its global footprint following the 2020 opening of its $95 million base oil re-refinery in Denmark through a joint venture with its German partner, Avista AG.

The Hydrodec transaction sees a team of 19 employees at the Canton refining business becoming part of Slicker, with the Slicker’s managing director, Mark Olpin, pledging to grow the business further. “Hydrodec is a well-respected, technologically advanced and successful business with customers across the United States and global energy sector,” says Olpin.

He continues, “The SUPERfine transformer oil the company produces is essential to run electric grids and the carbon credits the process generates is a global first for this type of activity. That’s a really exciting opportunity for us and not only does the acquisition allow us to enter the north American market for the first time, but it is a perfect fit in terms of our future plans and green credentials.”

Hydrodec received carbon credit approval from the American Carbon Registry in 2016 enabling its product to be sold with a carbon offset and creating an incremental revenue stream, according to Slicker.

The U.K. firm also cites a recent U.S. study it says estimated the global transformer oil market reached a value of $1.5 billion in 2020 and is expected to grow by a further 11.5 percent by 2026.

“This fantastic opportunity has come when the spotlight has been on the COP26 conference with world leaders agreeing [to] a series of environmental and net-zero commitments,” adds Olpin. “The circular economy and the private sector are vital elements of that jigsaw, so we are delighted to be playing our role, expanding further, and taking our green credentials to new customers here in the United States.”

The Hydrodec oil re-refining process allows transformer oils to be re-refined into SuperFine transformer oil, which has specifications equivalent or superior to that of new transformer oil, says Slicker. The technique is designed to allow the electricity industry to reduce its exclusive reliance on new oil supplies without having to make compromises in quality and performance.

The company also is researching ways to apply the process to other naphthenic oils, such as cable oils, eliminating lifetime product stewardship liabilities and potentially reducing the need to refine new sources of crude oils.

The association says technical and legal analysis demonstrates advanced recycling is not waste incineration.

Dec. 16, America’s plastic makers submitted comments to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regarding its advanced notice of proposed rulemaking on gasification and pyrolysis, also known as advanced recycling.

Regulating these technologies as incineration would contradict the very definition and established EPA interpretations of “incineration” and hinder progress toward increasing plastics recycling and achieving a circular economy, the American Chemistry Council (ACC), Washington, says.

“Advanced recycling is critical to realizing sustainability and recycling goals, including the EPA’s goal of recycling 50 percent of postuse materials by 2030 and America’s plastic makers’ goal of reusing, recycling or recovering all U.S. plastic packaging by 2040,” says Joshua Baca, ACC vice president of plastics. “EPA’s National Recycling Strategy, released last month, recognizes the potential of advanced recycling technologies to transform plastic recycling rates in the U.S. Regulating these technologies as solid waste incineration would be a step backwards.”

Businesses are using advanced recycling to create innovative new products made with recycled plastics, and incorrectly regulating advanced recycling as solid waste incineration would stifle similar innovations in sustainability, the ACC says.

Many states are regulating these facilities as manufacturing sites, and 14 states have reinforced this by enacting laws that ensure advanced recycling is regulated as a manufacturing process as opposed to solid waste disposal or incineration since 2017. More than $7.5 billion in advanced recycling projects have been announced or are operating in the United States, with the potential to divert 11.7 billion pounds of waste from landfills, the ACC says. Regulating advanced recycling as solid waste incineration would hinder these investments and create significant uncertainty in the market.

The ACC notes that advanced recycling facilities do not dispose of or incinerate the used plastics they receive. Rather, they convert them in the absence of oxygen into raw materials for new products, including virgin-quality plastics for food- and pharma-contact applications. 

The technology will allow the plant to recycle and reuse 15,000 tons of paper per year.

Building materials manufacturer Saint-Gobain, with North American headquarters in Malvern, Pennsylvania, has announced it installed recycling technology at its gypsum wallboard plant in Silver Grove, Kentucky, through its building products subsidiary CertainTeed, which it says will allow the plant to recycle 15,000 tons of paper per year that otherwise would have been sent to a landfill.

The project was announced months after Saint-Gobain rolled out its new global Grow and Impact strategy, which includes reducing waste and increasing the circularity of raw materials at its manufacturing sites. CertainTeed invested $850,000 into the recycling equipment.

Gypsum wallboard is made from a gypsum slurry that is poured and dries between two sheets of paper, and some scrap material consisting of gypsum and paper is normally created every time a production line is started or shut down or when production equipment is changed to manufacture different sizes of wallboard.

CertainTeed captures and recycles most of the gypsum in this scrap material at all its gypsum plants, including Silver Grove, but the scrap paper in this process could not be recycled through traditional means because it was coated in gypsum. The new equipment in Silver Grove grinds the scrap gypsum and paper to finer particles, allowing the plant to capture and internally recycle both the gypsum particles and paper particles, which are then sorted and reintroduced to the production process at the plant.

“This project allows us to reduce our waste and reduce our production costs in Silver Grove while also empowering us to increase the efficiency of our use of natural resources,” says Jay Bachmann, vice president and general manager of CertainTeed gypsum. “We will continue to look for ways to minimize our environmental footprint while maximizing our company’s positive impact for our customers and the communities where we do business.”

The CertainTeed facility in Silver Grove is the largest gypsum wallboard plant in North America and one of the largest in the world. The recycling project at the facility follows several investments in environmental sustainability this year, including renewable energy and sustainable manufacturing and construction initiatives.