TribLIVE's Daily and Weekly email newsletters deliver the news you want and information you need, right to your inbox. A fire that broke out in machinery at an industrial scrap metal plant in West Mifflin early Wednesday morning has been extinguished, Tribune-Review news partner WPXI-TV reported. The fire was reported at about 3:30 a.m. at the TMS International plant on Delwar Road. No injuries were reported.

Fire extinguished at West Mifflin scrap metal plant

TMS acquires fellow mill services firm - Recycling Today

TMS acquires fellow mill services firm

Photo courtesy of Alterra Energy
Neste acquires minority stake in Alterra Energy
The collaboration includes joint technology development and global technology licensing, enabling the commercialization of Alterra’s thermochemical liquefaction technology in Europe. Nest Oyj, an oil refining and marketing company based in Espoo, Finland, says it has acquired a minority stake in Akron, Ohio-based Alterra Energy, a chemical recycling technology company. Their collaboration includes joint technology development and global technology licensing, enabling the partners to collaborate in commercializing Alterra’s thermochemical liquefaction technology in Europe. Alterra’s technology can liquify a range of postconsumer plastic streams into a material similar to crude oil. Neste can process and upgrade this material into feedstock for use in polymer and chemical production . The companies say they are working toward a global rollout of Alterra’s liquefaction technology with a strong initial focus on Europe, accelerating the adoption of chemical recycling and developing capacity to turn hard-to-recycle postconsumer plastics into polymers and chemicals. Their collaboration supports Alterra Energy’s target of constructing a state-of-the-art liquefaction site in Europe beginning in 2021. Alterra’s existing industrial-scale postconsumer plastics liquefaction plant in Akron produces commercial volumes that can be refined and upgraded into feedstock for the production of plastics and chemicals. This, together with Neste’s refining capability, enables sustainability-oriented brands globally to start introducing recycled content into their products and offerings, according to a news release from Neste. Alterra says its 60 ton-per-day continuous chemical recycling facility in Akron has diverted millions of pounds of end-of-life plastic from landfills and other down-cycled applications. “Collaboration with Alterra Energy strengthens Neste’s ecosystem of partnerships that are aimed at accelerating the transition to a circular plastics economy,” says Mercedes Alonso, executive vice president, renewable polymers and chemicals, at Neste. “It demonstrates our commitment to continue developing the chemical recycling industry by supporting some of the leading companies in commercializing promising technologies. This partnership also supports Neste’s aim of building new business growth based on chemical recycling, while marking another significant step towards our target of processing more than 1 million tons of plastic waste from 2030 onwards .” 
“The Neste-Alterra partnership will unlock the full potential of the circular economy, bringing our technology to more partners around the world, creating a cleaner planet,” says Alterra CEO Frederic Schmuck. “Neste is a world leader in renewable and circular solutions and its endorsement of Alterra's proprietary process is both extremely rewarding and validating.”
Pittsburgh-based TMS International buys Cleveland-based Stein Steel Mill Services. Pittsburgh-based TMS International, formerly known as Tube City IMS, says it has acquired the business and assets of Stein LLC and Stein Steel Mill Services LLC, both based in Cleveland. TMS describes Stein as “a leading provider of high-quality services to steel producers throughout the United States.” The company provides metal producers with steel mill processing services such as slag removal and metallics reclamation, scrap handling, scrap management, recycling, raw material screening, material handling and maintenance and repair services. “We are very excited to welcome Stein into the TMS organization,” says Raymond Kalouche, TMS president and CEO. “Stein has a long and distinguished history in our industry and nicely complements our existing services that we provide to world class steelmakers throughout the U.S. This acquisition is an excellent fit with our company and meaningfully strengthens our U.S. footprint and will provide a breadth and depth of resources and talent to us.”
TMS says Stein has a “high-quality customer base and more than 60 years in the industry,” and describes the firm as a family-owned business with approximately 500 employees. Stein provides services to customers in Alabama, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and South Carolina. TMS also says it plans to continue to operate Stein initially under its current brand name. In 2019, Stein was involved in a legal dispute with the United Kingdom-based GFG Alliance and its Liberty Steel USA subsidiary over the mill services contract at the Liberty electric arc furnace (EAF) steelmaking facility in Georgetown, South Carolina. TMS International describes itself as the largest provider of outsourced industrial services to steel mills in North America as measured by revenue, and as having “a substantial and growing international presence.”
Germany-based metals equipment and technology provider SMS Group says it will supply a secondary copper smelter to Ames Copper Group for its planned facility in Shelby, North Carolina. Ames is a joint venture between Connecticut-based wire processor and nonferrous recycler Prime Materials Recovery Inc. and Spain-based Cunext Group. The proposed plant will produce up to 50,000 tons of copper anodes annually, according to SMS, with the plant startup scheduled for 2021. SMS says the new plant will be the first secondary copper recycling facility in the United States to produce copper anodes from copper scrap and copper fines. The equipment firm says its “scope of supply will include a tilting refining furnace, anode casting wheel, gas cleaning system, and electric and automation systems.” In addition to the equipment supplied, SMS will provide technical assistance for the installation and startup and be responsible for the layout of the core equipment, adds the company. “With this important project, SMS underlines its strong position as a supplier of integrated solutions for the nonferrous metals industry,” states the German company. A metal recycling facility in Christchurch, New Zealand, voluntarily installed stormwater treatment best management practices (BMPs) to demonstrate its commitment to raising environmental protection standards within the metal recycling industry in that country. The facility owners proactively installed stormwater treatment at its 1.5-acre facility, establishing a new benchmark for industrial stormwater quality under New Zealand’s Resource Management Act 1991 . Industrial facilities in the United States are subject to similar stormwater discharge regulations and monitoring under the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit program as mandated by the Clean Water Act. In the United States, these regulations typically are administered by individual states. In the case of the facility in New Zealand, monitoring and enforcement fall under the purvey of a city council. What is unusual about this facility in New Zealand is that the owner went the extra distance to ensure the environmental impact of the business operations was minimized to the greatest extent possible, meeting local discharge requirements in the process, and Christchurch City Council took notice. The facility
Established in 1989, Metalcorp NZ Ltd. is a family-owned business that operates from two branches within the South Island of New Zealand. The primary function of Metalcorp is to collect and process ferrous and nonferrous scrap into the raw materials that other industries require to produce new products for domestic and international markets. Such facilities in the developed world are subject to varying degrees of stormwater pollutant discharge regulations. Metalcorp is no exception, yet the company is exceptional for its regard for the environment and the community. As a long-term member of the New Zealand Association of Metal Recyclers, Metalcorp demonstrated its commitment to raising the environmental protection standards within the metal recycling industry by proactively installing a series of stormwater treatment BMPs at one of its sites. The compliance drivers
While Metalcorp was proactive in installing stormwater treatment to ensure that the company’s pollutant discharge was clean, it also was subject to stormwater compliance regulations outlined in Section 15 of New Zealand’s Resource Management Act. These regulations and the enforcement network, Environment Canterbury (ECan) of New Zealand , are analogous to the Clean Water Act and the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) NPDES permit program in the United States. Just as each U.S. state is given general guidelines to enforce stormwater discharge limits through a permit system under the Clean Water Act, each regional council in New Zealand has guidelines to follow when tailoring monitoring and enforcement to their regions. Because Metalcorp is in Christchurch City Council’s jurisdiction, compliance officers from Stormwater Audit, the compliance arm of the Council, monitored Metalcorp’s stormwater discharge compliance. Pollutants of concern: sediment and heavy metals
Routine monitoring action by the Christchurch City Council revealed that the facility had exceeded trigger levels for stormwater discharge of aluminum, copper, zinc, lead and magnesium. The trigger levels for Metalcorp were based on local regulations that set the levels required to be higher quality than drinking water—levels that are unnecessarily stringent for stormwater runoff. Despite being subject to this exceedingly high bar for stormwater quality, Metalcorp decided to proactively implement BMPs to bring the pollutant discharge levels down closer to trigger levels. Photo courtesy of StormwateRx
The treatment solution: gravity separation inline, upstream of media filtration
Not finding stormwater specialists within New Zealand willing to provide assurances that their products would meet the trigger levels if monitored, Metalcorp sought help from StormwateRx LLC, a United States-based stormwater treatment engineering and treatment equipment company. Korina Kirk, president of Metalcorp, met Calvin Noling, general manager of StormwateRx, which is based in Portland, Oregon, at the 2018 Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI) Annual Convention. In 2019, resulting from a few months of site-specific retrofit design and site planning with StormwateRx engineers, Metalcorp installed a Clara 25C gravity separator upstream of an Aquip 110SBE media filter in its Christchurch facility. This combination of technologies provided oil and total suspended solids pretreatment followed by particulate and soluble metals removal—a strategy commonly employed at top-tier scrap recycling facilities in the U.S. The results
Metalcorp ran the StormwateRx units for an entire year before collecting and testing samples. The company submitted the test results to Stormwater Audits, a branch of New Zealand’s governing entity Christchurch City Council. The results demonstrated that Clara effectively removed bulk solids and metals, with Aquip further filtering the effluent. These BMPs together brought total suspended solids, aluminum, cadmium and chromium below the exceedingly low trigger levels while also significantly reducing copper, lead and zinc by greater than 98 percent. All of the treated stormwater quality values were below U.S. EPA benchmark standards for the multisector general permit and industrial stormwater general permits. Based on the results, which assume 1.3 acres for C1-C3 and 26 inches average rainfall for Christchurch, the Christchurch City Council calculated that Clara and Aquip are mitigating an estimated 1,224 pounds of chemical oxygen demand, 2 tons of solids, 35 pounds of aluminum, 4.4 pounds each of copper and lead and 110 pounds of zinc per year from Halswell Junction Outfall, the watershed most affected by runoff from the Metalcorp facility. As the Council Advisor put it: “Not quite drinking water quality, but nearly!”
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The presence of e-commerce had been growing in recent years, and its presence boomed this year due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic. “I think everyone is seeing significant growth in e-commerce, with people avoiding face-to-face interactions right now,” says Kevin Hudson, senior vice president of Forest Resources and Recycle Fiber at Atlanta-based WestRock . Prior to the pandemic, Hudson says e-commerce had been growing but not too rapidly. He says it seemed as if some people were still hesitant to order online. However, he says, the pandemic has forced some of those people to begin ordering online. “More and more people stepped into e-commerce [in 2020],” he says. “That’s not necessarily a trend but an observation of what’s to come.”
E-commerce growth impacts containerboard and corrugated box industries as well as old corrugated containers (OCC) recycling several ways. Recycling Today followed up with Hudson in December to gauge how e-commerce is affecting the containerboard and recycling industries. Recycling Today (RT): What are some of the biggest trends you are noticing with online shopping and e-commerce? How do these trends impact WestRock? Kevin Hudson (KH): I think that e-commerce has accelerated more sustainability components of packaging. The second thing I’ve seen is our customers’ increasing focus, as e-commerce becomes a larger part of business, is on right-sizing packaging. This is a key area, certainly WestRock is positioned well with box sizers, to help create shipping boxes that are better suited for products. I think in that process, you’re going to have several key advantages for our customers and consumers. Consumers are focused on environmentally friendly sustainable packaging. As you right-size, you’ll see less fiber used, so that’s a good thing. You’re also going to see improved protection for the products as the industry grows its focus on e-commerce. RT: How are e-commerce trends impacting recovered paper markets? What does a surge in e-commerce mean for recycled commodities? KH: I’m cautious on any statements related to supply and demand—that’s not my place to speculate. But in general, just an increase in e-commerce by itself would not change one way or another demand for overall fiber-based packaging. There is a broader global economy that will play in there. So, what does commercial manufacturing and the retail sector demand for boxes—how does that change as e-commerce changes? That I can’t speculate on. But as more shifts are made to an e-commerce platform, we do anticipate the collection of boxes to change. I don’t think it specifically creates a surge in demand; I don’t think it’s directly correlated. It goes back to balance between e-commerce, commercial, retail and manufacturing presence. It does change the dynamics of collection. Today, you go back in time two years, as more volume was in the retail stores or commercial outlets, obviously the collection of [old corrugated containers, or OCC] was clean and pure. Boxes were sent to consumers in that form. As you see more e-commerce, changes will be more focused on how do you sort material to get clean OCC that you had been getting from behind-store collection programs? How much of that OCC will be collected from an e-commerce chain or residential recycling chain versus behind-store collection? Of that volume that shifts from behind store to residential collection, how much of that volume will be smaller boxes, and how will those boxes be sorted from other single-stream materials such as plastics and aluminum all has to be sorted now at residential single-stream facilities instead of commercial sorting facilities. That plays a larger role in the near-term future—what is the sorting capacity of recycling operations today versus what they need to be to be managed. RT: How much has the pandemic affected e-commerce trends you’re mentioning? KH: My opinion is this has shifted over time. I think initially I thought we’d see an initial increase in e-commerce and then as the virus came under control, you’d see a lag back to historic norms. But I think COVID has truly shifted the mindset at least in the U.S. population of the acceptance of e-commerce as a viable alternative. Even now, you see some larger retail stores with the carryout or delivery of products to households, not necessarily through Amazon or whatnot but through store platforms themselves. People are becoming more used to that as a way to shop. Certainly, I think all of the surge in e-commerce participation is driven by COVID. I think COVID has been here long enough and manufacturers and retail centers have adapted to where I think it will stay. More of this increase will stay than what I originally thought. RT: What does the increased e-commerce use look like from your perspective? KH: What we’re seeing with our customers is trends forcing them to shift fast. If you think about it, retail has had a stable platform and e-commerce was a piece of it. [Before COVID], e-commerce grew in retail programs but at a level that was predictable. Now, I think what you see is customers need to shift fast. It’s not just online shopping. A lot of the pandemic has brought about that forced consumers to change how they consume even takeout food. Takeout food is much more the norm than sitting at a restaurant. If you look at actual takeout packaging, people want to know that the takeout packaging has not been tampered. WestRock created Bio-Pak to protect food containers; it provides consumers with a high level of confidence that their takeout has not been contaminated. RT: What are some advances in sustainable packaging that have been innovative this past year? KH: The CanCollar product is one. If you think about it, you have traditionally had plastic collars to hold six-pack beverages together. We’ve created a fiber-based replacement can collar to replace difficult-to-recycle plastic collars. So, this is another area where enhancing the use of fiber-based products that are easy to recycle and replacing other less-recycled materials is an area we’ve really got a lot of groundwork with. While we say advances, I think really just focusing on what can be recycled is just as important. You’ve heard us talk about our partnership with Domino’s . In this process, we’ve participated in several studies to understand what level of grease and residues from pizza that would be left on the pizza box—how much is acceptable in recycling? We discovered the volume of grease and other materials in there is acceptable to filter out and make good paper from. This is a huge study and project we’ve had with Domino’s. … This is an area we have to work with customers to help people understand they can recycle this material.

Neste acquires minority stake in Alterra Energy

Photo courtesy of Machinex
Michigan county commissions Machinex MRF
The automated MRF can process 10,000 to 15,000 tons per year of commercial and residential single-stream material. Machinex has announced the November 2020 commissioning of a new residential and commercial single-stream material recovery facility ( MRF ) in Marquette County, Michigan, that was designed to address the challenges of rural recycling. The Plessisville, Quebec-based systems integrator says the project is the result of cooperation among Machinex, Bradley Austin from the Marquette County Solid Waste Authority and Resource Recycling Systems (RRS), Ann Arbor, Michigan. The county received a $3 million interest-free loan from New York-based Closed Loop Fund and an $800,000 grant from Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy (EGLE) to build the $6.3 million facility, which was part of the funding the state allocated to recycling infrastructure in 2018. Marquette worked with RRS to find the funding opportunities. “Simply, we saw an opportunity to improve recycling not only in Marquette County but the Upper Peninsula as a whole,” says Brad Austin, director of operations at Marquette County Solid Waste Management Authority , of the new MRF. “The challenges of rural area recycling needed to be addressed in a more regional frame of mind. People in Upper Michigan want to recycle; however, recycling capacity and education was lacking in many parts of the region. This facility is designed to process recyclables from the entire region, and the hope is that with this new infrastructure and solid education in place, participation in recycling will increase across the entire territory.”
This MRF is highly automated, which, Machinex says, is an asset for the county’s municipalities because they lack laborers to staff the facility. With the capacity to sort 10,000 to 15,000 tons per year, the system is equipped with a back-scraping drum to ensure input material is at a consistent depth, a Mach OCC screen for cardboard sorting, a fines screen to separate glass, a Mach ballistic screen to separate containers from glass and paper, a magnet to sort ferrous metals and a Machinex two-ram baler. To sort polyethylene terephthalate and high-density polyethylene containers more efficiently, a SamurAI robot was installed, creating a loop that enables containers to be sorted with high efficiency and no waste, according to Machinex. This allows for better recovery rates and reduces the need for human sorters. The system is designed to be reliable, efficient and flexible within a limited footprint, Machinex adds. “The project is really rooted in managing materials more effectively,” Austin says. He adds that the degree of organization and communication Machinex showed during the process was “impressive,” saying, “Under some very challenging circumstance with COVID-19, adjustments needed to be made on the fly in order to keep the project on schedule. The ability to bring all phases of the project together and then execute speaks to the attention to detail by the entire Machinex team.”
Chris Hawn, CEO at Machinex Technologies Inc. , High Point, North Carolina, says, “It’s hard to believe that Brad reached out to Machinex in August 2017 with his original vision. Through initial discussions at tradeshows, we were able to blend our visions of the rural MRF of the future. From the time we first visited Marquette, Michigan, in early November 2017, Machinex was heart-set on earning this business. With both a great operator and a good story, nothing was going to stop us from making this a success.” 
Photo courtesy of Alterra Energy
Neste acquires minority stake in Alterra Energy
The collaboration includes joint technology development and global technology licensing, enabling the commercialization of Alterra’s thermochemical liquefaction technology in Europe. Nest Oyj, an oil refining and marketing company based in Espoo, Finland, says it has acquired a minority stake in Akron, Ohio-based Alterra Energy, a chemical recycling technology company. Their collaboration includes joint technology development and global technology licensing, enabling the partners to collaborate in commercializing Alterra’s thermochemical liquefaction technology in Europe. Alterra’s technology can liquify a range of postconsumer plastic streams into a material similar to crude oil. Neste can process and upgrade this material into feedstock for use in polymer and chemical production . The companies say they are working toward a global rollout of Alterra’s liquefaction technology with a strong initial focus on Europe, accelerating the adoption of chemical recycling and developing capacity to turn hard-to-recycle postconsumer plastics into polymers and chemicals. Their collaboration supports Alterra Energy’s target of constructing a state-of-the-art liquefaction site in Europe beginning in 2021. Alterra’s existing industrial-scale postconsumer plastics liquefaction plant in Akron produces commercial volumes that can be refined and upgraded into feedstock for the production of plastics and chemicals. This, together with Neste’s refining capability, enables sustainability-oriented brands globally to start introducing recycled content into their products and offerings, according to a news release from Neste. Alterra says its 60 ton-per-day continuous chemical recycling facility in Akron has diverted millions of pounds of end-of-life plastic from landfills and other down-cycled applications. “Collaboration with Alterra Energy strengthens Neste’s ecosystem of partnerships that are aimed at accelerating the transition to a circular plastics economy,” says Mercedes Alonso, executive vice president, renewable polymers and chemicals, at Neste. “It demonstrates our commitment to continue developing the chemical recycling industry by supporting some of the leading companies in commercializing promising technologies. This partnership also supports Neste’s aim of building new business growth based on chemical recycling, while marking another significant step towards our target of processing more than 1 million tons of plastic waste from 2030 onwards .” 
“The Neste-Alterra partnership will unlock the full potential of the circular economy, bringing our technology to more partners around the world, creating a cleaner planet,” says Alterra CEO Frederic Schmuck. “Neste is a world leader in renewable and circular solutions and its endorsement of Alterra's proprietary process is both extremely rewarding and validating.”
Pittsburgh-based TMS International buys Cleveland-based Stein Steel Mill Services. Pittsburgh-based TMS International, formerly known as Tube City IMS, says it has acquired the business and assets of Stein LLC and Stein Steel Mill Services LLC, both based in Cleveland. TMS describes Stein as “a leading provider of high-quality services to steel producers throughout the United States.” The company provides metal producers with steel mill processing services such as slag removal and metallics reclamation, scrap handling, scrap management, recycling, raw material screening, material handling and maintenance and repair services. “We are very excited to welcome Stein into the TMS organization,” says Raymond Kalouche, TMS president and CEO. “Stein has a long and distinguished history in our industry and nicely complements our existing services that we provide to world class steelmakers throughout the U.S. This acquisition is an excellent fit with our company and meaningfully strengthens our U.S. footprint and will provide a breadth and depth of resources and talent to us.”
TMS says Stein has a “high-quality customer base and more than 60 years in the industry,” and describes the firm as a family-owned business with approximately 500 employees. Stein provides services to customers in Alabama, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and South Carolina. TMS also says it plans to continue to operate Stein initially under its current brand name. In 2019, Stein was involved in a legal dispute with the United Kingdom-based GFG Alliance and its Liberty Steel USA subsidiary over the mill services contract at the Liberty electric arc furnace (EAF) steelmaking facility in Georgetown, South Carolina. TMS International describes itself as the largest provider of outsourced industrial services to steel mills in North America as measured by revenue, and as having “a substantial and growing international presence.”
Germany-based metals equipment and technology provider SMS Group says it will supply a secondary copper smelter to Ames Copper Group for its planned facility in Shelby, North Carolina. Ames is a joint venture between Connecticut-based wire processor and nonferrous recycler Prime Materials Recovery Inc. and Spain-based Cunext Group. The proposed plant will produce up to 50,000 tons of copper anodes annually, according to SMS, with the plant startup scheduled for 2021. SMS says the new plant will be the first secondary copper recycling facility in the United States to produce copper anodes from copper scrap and copper fines. The equipment firm says its “scope of supply will include a tilting refining furnace, anode casting wheel, gas cleaning system, and electric and automation systems.” In addition to the equipment supplied, SMS will provide technical assistance for the installation and startup and be responsible for the layout of the core equipment, adds the company. “With this important project, SMS underlines its strong position as a supplier of integrated solutions for the nonferrous metals industry,” states the German company. A metal recycling facility in Christchurch, New Zealand, voluntarily installed stormwater treatment best management practices (BMPs) to demonstrate its commitment to raising environmental protection standards within the metal recycling industry in that country. The facility owners proactively installed stormwater treatment at its 1.5-acre facility, establishing a new benchmark for industrial stormwater quality under New Zealand’s Resource Management Act 1991 . Industrial facilities in the United States are subject to similar stormwater discharge regulations and monitoring under the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit program as mandated by the Clean Water Act. In the United States, these regulations typically are administered by individual states. In the case of the facility in New Zealand, monitoring and enforcement fall under the purvey of a city council. What is unusual about this facility in New Zealand is that the owner went the extra distance to ensure the environmental impact of the business operations was minimized to the greatest extent possible, meeting local discharge requirements in the process, and Christchurch City Council took notice. The facility
Established in 1989, Metalcorp NZ Ltd. is a family-owned business that operates from two branches within the South Island of New Zealand. The primary function of Metalcorp is to collect and process ferrous and nonferrous scrap into the raw materials that other industries require to produce new products for domestic and international markets. Such facilities in the developed world are subject to varying degrees of stormwater pollutant discharge regulations. Metalcorp is no exception, yet the company is exceptional for its regard for the environment and the community. As a long-term member of the New Zealand Association of Metal Recyclers, Metalcorp demonstrated its commitment to raising the environmental protection standards within the metal recycling industry by proactively installing a series of stormwater treatment BMPs at one of its sites. The compliance drivers
While Metalcorp was proactive in installing stormwater treatment to ensure that the company’s pollutant discharge was clean, it also was subject to stormwater compliance regulations outlined in Section 15 of New Zealand’s Resource Management Act. These regulations and the enforcement network, Environment Canterbury (ECan) of New Zealand , are analogous to the Clean Water Act and the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) NPDES permit program in the United States. Just as each U.S. state is given general guidelines to enforce stormwater discharge limits through a permit system under the Clean Water Act, each regional council in New Zealand has guidelines to follow when tailoring monitoring and enforcement to their regions. Because Metalcorp is in Christchurch City Council’s jurisdiction, compliance officers from Stormwater Audit, the compliance arm of the Council, monitored Metalcorp’s stormwater discharge compliance. Pollutants of concern: sediment and heavy metals
Routine monitoring action by the Christchurch City Council revealed that the facility had exceeded trigger levels for stormwater discharge of aluminum, copper, zinc, lead and magnesium. The trigger levels for Metalcorp were based on local regulations that set the levels required to be higher quality than drinking water—levels that are unnecessarily stringent for stormwater runoff. Despite being subject to this exceedingly high bar for stormwater quality, Metalcorp decided to proactively implement BMPs to bring the pollutant discharge levels down closer to trigger levels. Photo courtesy of StormwateRx
The treatment solution: gravity separation inline, upstream of media filtration
Not finding stormwater specialists within New Zealand willing to provide assurances that their products would meet the trigger levels if monitored, Metalcorp sought help from StormwateRx LLC, a United States-based stormwater treatment engineering and treatment equipment company. Korina Kirk, president of Metalcorp, met Calvin Noling, general manager of StormwateRx, which is based in Portland, Oregon, at the 2018 Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI) Annual Convention. In 2019, resulting from a few months of site-specific retrofit design and site planning with StormwateRx engineers, Metalcorp installed a Clara 25C gravity separator upstream of an Aquip 110SBE media filter in its Christchurch facility. This combination of technologies provided oil and total suspended solids pretreatment followed by particulate and soluble metals removal—a strategy commonly employed at top-tier scrap recycling facilities in the U.S. The results
Metalcorp ran the StormwateRx units for an entire year before collecting and testing samples. The company submitted the test results to Stormwater Audits, a branch of New Zealand’s governing entity Christchurch City Council. The results demonstrated that Clara effectively removed bulk solids and metals, with Aquip further filtering the effluent. These BMPs together brought total suspended solids, aluminum, cadmium and chromium below the exceedingly low trigger levels while also significantly reducing copper, lead and zinc by greater than 98 percent. All of the treated stormwater quality values were below U.S. EPA benchmark standards for the multisector general permit and industrial stormwater general permits. Based on the results, which assume 1.3 acres for C1-C3 and 26 inches average rainfall for Christchurch, the Christchurch City Council calculated that Clara and Aquip are mitigating an estimated 1,224 pounds of chemical oxygen demand, 2 tons of solids, 35 pounds of aluminum, 4.4 pounds each of copper and lead and 110 pounds of zinc per year from Halswell Junction Outfall, the watershed most affected by runoff from the Metalcorp facility. As the Council Advisor put it: “Not quite drinking water quality, but nearly!”
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TMS International, through its subsidiaries including Tube City IMS, is a provider of outsourced industrial services to steel mills in North America and has a substantial and growing international presence. Tube City IMS excels at building best-of-class teams that meet partners' toughest requirements anywhere in the world. Whether supporting partners with scrap metal optimization operations or implementing zero-waste solutions, from job sites in Kaohsiung, Taiwan to Norfolk, Nebraska, the company focuses on quality and performance is unrelenting.

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Name	Jan Peuscher	Alastair MacDonald	Guust van Liere
Work History		GeoVS
Title	Chief Technology Officer	Managing Director	Managing Director
Status	Current	Current	Current

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