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What Caused the Recycling Plant Meltdown?

Posted on Apr 24, 2023, jshell55

Today’s project is to try to figure out what caused the Recycling Plant Meltdown in Indiana the other day. In our ongoing effort to try to understand human failure, there is no shortage of examples.

Problem Statement

This is what happened. A giant recycling plant full of plastics of some kind caught fire and basically burned to the ground. This happened on April 13th, in Richmond, Indiana.

I have linked a news story down below. The fire burned for several days, emitting various types of toxic fumes which caused health concerns. This was of course aggravated by the previous train wreck in nearby Ohio which has people on edge.

Who am I to write about this?

Well, in addition to my qualfications as a Quality Systems auditor and consultant, I actually spent a few years in a recycling business. You will find more about this down below. In fact, I went through a couple of places exactly like this during that time. Because of this, I have literal business hands on experience in this kind of environment.

www.jimshell.com/

Recycling Plant Meltdown: What happened?

Well, the story, based on the references below, was as follows: The fire actually started in a semi-trailer, full of scrap plastic. Somehow or other it spread into the plant itself which was literally stacked to the rafters with all sorts of plastic scrap.

The resulting blaze caused toxic fumes, debris, asbestos and a lot of other nasty chemicals to be spread over the area. Secondly, the local fire department had to evacuate 2000 people. It has since been declared “safe” but obviously there is room for doubt.

Who could have possibly forseen it?

Firstly, the fire department. According to the article, this company has been cited repeatedly for code violations. This is because the place has repeatedly flunked fire inspections and complaints of one kind or another.

Thusly, the first set of lawsuits have already been launched.

I’ve actually been through Wayne County a lot, because I had a project for awhile up there. Richmond is close to the Indiana-Ohio Border.

Frequency of Recycling Fires

Apparently, according to the sources below it is very common for recycling places to burn.

We’re at the rate of one per day. Time Magazine has one theory on why this is the case, and I have a slightly different one.

I have linked an article below.

Fundamental Principles of Recycling

It’s time for a little discussion on this. Actually this is probably book worthy. But, I will give you the abridged version.

To be specific, we’re talking about “industrial” recycling at the moment. These same fundamental rules also apply to the type of recycling where you throw away your little plastic water bottle and it ends up someplace useful. But, in that situation, the scale is vastly different, the problems are vastly different, and the solutions are paid for, at the moment, by the “waste management” processes like garbage collection that we’re all aware of.

The basic issue with recycling is this:

Anything you do to the “waste stream,” including store it, costs money.

The recycling place I visited at the time was in the business of recycling ABS and other plastics from the automotive industry. What I remember particularly about that place was the giant warehouse full of pallet boxes of partial or full tail light assemblies.

The “Tier 1 Hell” auto component suppliers mold the headlights and tail lights for all of the cars, and assemble them into units.

These “units” can be bolted into the car simply and efficiently. There is a video below about the auto company business model, in case you are unfamiliar.

So it is difficult to produce these things. They’re big, there are complex shapes that are difficult to produce, and there is a lot of what is called “engineered waste”, which are the sprues, vents, runner systems and other molding by-product that is built into the molding equipment.

This particular place is in China. The “engineered waste” is that little tail piece that the operator grabs to de-mold the part. That thing gets broken off and ends up in a box somewhere. We can talk more about China later if you want. A 12,000 mile supply chain with no legal system makes it hard to return defective parts, So a significant amount of automotive scrap is items that have been scrapped at the line.

This stuff doesn’t just appear by Magic

The waste stream as well as scrap parts that don’t quite pass inspection, end up in big boxes at the plastic molding operation. That means, from the time they are generated in the molding operation, they have to accumulate, be put in a staging area, wait until there is a full truckload so that they can be shipped cheaply, and then transported somewhere.

After some processing, they also need to be packaged and transported to the end user somehow.

Side Note (not really).

In the ideal world, these operations should have a way to reprocess this stuff onsite, and put it back into the waste stream.

I audited a place that injection molded the lids for plastic jars at one point. The scrap at that place was accumulated at the end of the line, chopped up, and then re-introduced into the supply chain immediately. That is what works best. No shipping, fairly harmless, and no technical issues.

But in the real world, very often these companies don’t actually do the initial plastic compounding and blending themselves. They get someone else to do it, like a custom blender. That way they can concentrate on what they’re actually good at, which is molding.

In these complex parts, there may be several colors and types of plastic and possibly reflective components that won’t grind down easily and can’t be re-introduced into the same part.

So at those places, the nasty stuff accumulates in a storage area somewhere.

What they would love to do is just bury it or take it to the landfill. But a lot of the automotive companies have committed to “green” manufacturing and so politically they don’t want to.

So there needs to be a process to accumulate it, and get rid of it “responsibly.”

Plastic Purgatory

Therefore, every big plastic molding operation has a nasty storage area in back somewhere. The same goes for rubber, but because a lot of the rubber is not recyclable, a lot of it still ends up in the landfill. The plastic itself needs to be ground down into pellets somehow before it can be re-introduced to the system.

Are these beautiful rows of tidy boxes, that are sitting in a well organized area? No, that never happens. These are nasty, the boxes are used from some other part of the process and are often damaged themselves, and this area is an afterthought in most of the places I have been in.

Also, the companies that generate the scrap would actually prefer that this stuff not even exist. Even though one person’s waste stream is often another person’s supply chain, it is almost never treated respectfully. Actual garbage is thrown into the containers, along with other industrial trash. This includes other flammable items, from time to time.

Also, not all plastic is directly recyclable into the original application. A lot of this has to be downgraded. In the case of tail light assemblies, there are optical requirements and cosmetic issues that make it so that the plastic itself needs to be “repurposed.”

Also, there’s a law against recycling anything that is food or medical grade. Example: the factory that makes those little brown medical bottles that we’re all familiar with. The scrap bottles and any engineered waste have to be recycled into something else.

Incremental Cost

So, from the time this stuff is generated at the molding machine, you have to pay for a forklift and an operator to haul it to the staging area. Sometimes, there is a preliminary grinder that chops this stuff up into little chips, which can be boxed up more efficiently. But, sometimes not. You have to pay some worker to do that, and manage their activity.

These grinders, by the way, generate heat and dust, and spontaneous combustion is not unheard of. In the tire plant I worked in, there were fires all the time in the summer because of the generated heat from a grinding operation.

The staging area is in some dark, nasty part of the plant but it takes just as much capital expense to store a warehouse full of scrap plastic as it does everything else.

Then, there is more transportation and more storage until it gets to where it is reprocessed. So this is your huge warehouse in Richmond, Indiana.

Here’s another video:

Do you want to be the guy that stands in front of this equipment all day, feeding in the chips? No you don’t. You can see how dusty it is. In this video, the equipment is all white and beautiful because the company is selling the equipment.

The Recycling Operation

That brings us to this. In order for this vast amount of plastic to be useable, it needs to be processed, sorted, and then some work needs to be done to find a customer.

This work is done by some “organization” that is a company that would like to make a profit doing this. Since we are working with capitalism, there needs to be economic and financial incentive to get this to happen.

This is interesting work, in a way, for a certain type of person. You have to be technically knowledgeable about both the generation and end use of the stuff. You also have to have some persuasive ability to talk customers into accepting the product. Along with that, you have a problem of consistency. It is relatively easy for an end user to accept a product like this if they know they can get a consistent supply. They don’t want to do a lot of technical work and then find out that their waste stream is not available next month.

So the whole thing is dependent on that “organization.” And, since everything is under cost pressure, it takes time. And, during that time, even more of a mountain of scrap is generated.

Recycling Cost vs. “Virgin” product.

In most recycling products, across different industries, the cost of the recycled material needs to be about 1/3 of the cost of the “virgin material” or less. That way there is enough of an incentive for an end user to use it and offset the perceived risk.

The best example of this is retreaded tires. The cost of a retreaded truck tire at one point was about 1/3 of that of a new truck tire, from the point of view of the trucking company that uses it.

So if a new truck tire costs $600 a retread that is around $200 will sell into that marketplace in most applications. The marketplace is willing to accept a perceived risk in using a recycled tire, to take advantage of this cost savings.

An even better example for this is gold, which is $1200 an ounce, and the recycling cost is low enough so that you can pay a person to stand on the roadside with a sign, and rent a storefront somewhere to get people to sell you their gold, or silver or whatever.

But in the case of plastic, the raw material is so cheap that it is hard to accumulate, ship, process, and re-use this stuff and still have it be cheap enough to offset any perceived risk.

Cost Example

Since we’re picking on ABS at the moment, there is a link below that says the current cost of ABS is around $3100 per ton. That’s about $1.40 per pound in the US, or $3.10 per kg.

So can you accumulate, store, process, ship, and ensure a dependable supply stream of a known technical grade of ABS for under $0.50 per pound ($1.10 per kg)? It is practically impossible to do this. The math doesn’t work.

So that special person we are talking about above, or special organization, also needs to know that number and turn down any “opportunities” that come their way that don’t fit it economically.

Recycling People

So, in addition to all of those things we talked about earlier, this recycling operation is done by a certain type of person. In addition to being technically knowledgeable, they also need to understand logistics, economics, and be willing to know the marketplace.

They also need to be willing to spend their work lives surrounded by a vast warehouse full of chemical dust and nasty material, sitting around in boxes, waiting for a home.

So at some level, they have to be a person that believes in this as sort of a “cause.” This is a vast, unexploited resource, that could be made into a good for society. 85% of the people believe that recycling is a good thing.

But being an investment banker or “influencer” pays better.

The Worst Case Scenario

Here it is:

Seven remain critical after explosion at rubber-recycling plant

I actually knew this fellow. He is not around anymore. The above disaster left him “not the same” congenial fellow that I had met a few years earlier.

He fit the mold perfectly. Very bright, committed to “the idea” of rubber recycling. He had developed a technology to do so and had been awarded a handful of US Patents.

He spent a couple of decades driving around the country looking for a clean supply chain and also end users that had the same vision as he did.

At one level, he was successful. The high end elastomers which are probably around $15 per pound are economically recyclable, and there is a business in that.

But for the vast majority of it, it’s not economical.

This particular fellow spent a lot of time traveling, and not a lot of time on the roof of his plant shoveling the excess dust off of the place. This was in Vicksburg, which is a place where the economy is such that they don’t mind a little dust blowing around, and vast amounts of rubber scrap sitting in a huge warehouse, or more likely, in a vast vacant lot someplace being rained on.

You can tell what happened. He, too, had been cited a few times, I think. Five of the crew didn’t survive the disaster.

The point of all of this.

Recycling is a nasty business. Only in a few cases can you successfully make money at it. There is a network of people out there trying to do so, and they are a certain kind of person.

We will do the psychological profile of them later. I am thinking INFP on the Myers Briggs test, if you want to probe into this. “Rescuer” personality type. Also “hoarder” personality type, not to put too fine a point on it. Plus they need to be good at math.

These people are not always the best at keeping the housekeeping under control, not to mention the fact that housekeeping costs money.

That’s the fundamental problem in this business, unless some outside force changes the economics of the whole thing.

Let this be a lesson in this case, you can’t separate the disaster from the person, or the economic aspects of the industry.