Covanta begins operations at its Pennsylvania metals processing facility

Morristown, New Jersey-based Covanta has started up its new metal recycling processing operation in Fairless Hills, Pennsylvania. The new facility cleans and sorts metals 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," says Steve Bossotti, Covanta 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 the capacity to process 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, Covanta says.

Covanta says that since 2012 it has made significant investments to recycle more metal from the waste stream. Using new technology and installing systems to recycle more ferrous and nonferrous metals, metal recovery has improved by the equivalent of 16 cars per facility per week for ferrous, and for non-ferrous it has increased by the equivalent of 25,000 additional aluminium cans per week, according to the company. In total, Covanta now recycles approximately 500,000 tons of metal per year, the equivalent amount of ferrous and nonferrous metal to build five Golden Gate bridges and manufacture more than 2 billion aluminium cans, the company adds. The company’s metals recycling also saves approximately 1.2 million tons of greenhouse gases, the equivalent of pulling 112,506 cars off the road for a year.

Covanta operates 45 EfW facilities around the world, converting approximately 20 million tons of waste into electricity to power 1 million homes.