Covanta announces startup of metal recycling facility

Covanta has announced the startup of a new metal recycling processing operation in Fairless Hills, PA. The new facility cleans and sorts metal materials recovered from a number of Covanta’s Energy-from-Waste (“EfW”) facilities in the Northeast.

“We are very pleased to get this new facility up and running,” said Steve Bossotti, Covanta’s senior vice president, Metals Management. “Sorting by material type and otherwise improving the quality of our recycled metal, provides us with a new set of capabilities we did not previously have and gives us a higher-value and more saleable end product in all market conditions.”

The facility has a design capacity for up to 12,000 tons per month and includes access to a deep water port, which provides the opportunity to load bulk cargo ships for domestic and international shipments.

Since 2012, Covanta has made significant investments to recycle more metal from the waste stream. Using new technology and installing systems to recycle more ferrous and non-ferrous metals, metal recovery has improved by the equivalent of 16 cars per facility per week for ferrous, and for non-ferrous, the equivalent of 25,000 additional aluminum cans per week. In total, Covanta now recycles approximately 500,000 tons of metal per year, the equivalent amount of ferrous and non-ferrous metal to build five Golden Gate bridges and manufacture more than two billion aluminum cans.

Recycling metal from EfW facilities avoids a tremendous amount of greenhouse gases and recovers valuable natural resources that would have otherwise been lost in landfills. The production and mining of new steel, aluminum, copper, and other metals products is a carbon intensive process that negatively impacts the environment. By recovering and recycling 500,000 tons of metal each year, Covanta’s operations save approximately 1.2 million tons of greenhouse gases, the equivalent of pulling 112,506 cars off the road for a year.