Alcoa Inc. has reached an agreement with Novelis that will give the former full control of the companies' three-year-old Evermore Recycling joint venture, the companies announced Monday. Alcoa now owns just over 44 percent of the JV.

Evermore Recycling will remain headquartered in Century City and become part of Alcoa’s global packaging group. Employees of the joint venture are being given opportunities to work for either company.

“Alcoa’s Evermore Recycling is known throughout the world for its strong and committed relationships across the recycling supply chain and for its ability of making it easy to work together effectively,” Andrey Donets, Alcoa’s president of global packaging, said in a release. “When the opportunity first presented itself, we immediately said we wanted Evermore. We are confident the strong relationships we have in the scrap market will grow even stronger as we take over full control of the company.”

Separately, Novelis said it would build its own can procurement operation led by current Evermore manager Chris Anderson.

According to the Alcoa website, aluminum continues to be one of the most sustainable metals in use. As a result, approximately 75 percent of all the aluminum ever produced since 1888 is still in use today.

National Recovery Technologies, a maker and marketer of materials handling equipment founded three decades ago by physicists Charles Roos and Edward Sommer, has been bought by Oregon-based Bulk Handling Systems. Among the specialties at NRT, which is based on Elm Hill Pike, are machines that sort plastic bottles and flakes.

Matthew Murray at PC Magazine and Leon Kaye at Triple Pundit recently toured the Hewlett-Packard printer cartridge recycling facility in Smyrna. The 80,000-square-foot facility opened its doors in 2011 and has since helped HP save tons and tons of plastic from ending up in landfills — 28.6 million pounds last year alone. And the process is being continually refined.

For years the cartridges were shredded with all the materials ending up jumbled together. But now they are disassembled before shredding, which requires less energy, less water and a cleaner batch of plastic for the next generation of cartridges. The new process is also more environmentally responsible because the precious metals like gold and palladium in those cartridges can be melted down with less fuel and less toxins. The cycle is working: HP estimates that some cartridges are entering their ninth and tenth phase of life.

“The city could really use us to be in business right now,” he said. “There’s a lot of refrigerators, washers and dryers that people are taking from these houses, and they need to have some place to take them.”

"With the acquisition of this C&D recycling facility, we will give our commercial customers the ability to bid on LEED certified projects because they know that they have a waste and recycling partner in Advanced Disposal helping them reach their goals of waste reduction and sustainability throughout their business," said Advanced Disposal's Mid-South Area President Gerald Greene. "We are committed to being good stewards to the environment and are pleased to be making this commitment to our newest market."

I would say that we would probably make such an investment assessment within the next 12 months. If we invested capital, the lead time from breaking ground to completion is probably less than 12 months.