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The Municipal Corporation of India’s Chandigarh has decided to close a garbage processing plant in the city as it calls for a new process for converting the entire waste of the city into energy.

Alba SE, publicly quoted subsidiary of Alba Group, was back in profit in 2015 and expects to sustain the positive trend in the current financial year.

India’s decision to ban plastic scrap imports had left the market “in limbo” and was likely to result in substantial job losses, not least among those of the country’s recycling units which relied on supplies from overseas, according to BIR Plastics Committee Chairman Surendra Patawari Borad of Gemini Corp.

Researchers have developed a technique to recover indium, an important raw material with limited supply, from liquid crystal display (LCD) screens. The method could contribute to a resource-efficient, circular economy.

Vehicle airbags constituted “a big issue for the shredder industry to worry about” and merited further scrutiny from the safety perspective, contended BIR Shredder Committee board member George Adams Jr of US-based SA Recycling. “All of us need to be really careful when handling airbags,” he insisted.

India had proved to be a particularly strong market for stainless steel scrap over recent months but mills’ buying interest had waned owing to difficulties in selling their finished stainless products against a backdrop of weak global demand. So said Jonathan Bower of ELG Haniel Metals in presenting his summary of latest market developments worldwide to the BIR Stainless Steel & Special Alloys Committee meeting in Berlin.

Container security and an update on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership were the headline topics of the first plenary meeting of the BIR International Trade Council (ITC) to take place under the chairmanship of Michael Lion of China-based Everwell Resources Ltd.

According to a recent ASSOCHAM-cKinetics study, India’s electronic waste (e-waste) generated per year is expected to grow at a CAGR of 30%, rising from 1.8 million metric tonnes at present to 5.2 million by 2020.

The recent surge in ferrous scrap prices “did not last long enough to adequately repair the collection system”, the latest meeting of the BIR Ferrous Division was told by its President, William Schmiedel of Sims Metal Management in the USA. As a result, he added, there was little evidence of supply overhang in the market.

Doppstadt showed a variety of new machines at Ifat.

With paper recycling companies remaining under extreme economic and regulatory pressure, “there is no room for a further deterioration”, the BIR Paper Divison meeting in Berlin was warned by its President, Reinhold Schmidt of Recycling Karla Schmidt.