Mazza Recycling acquires fellow New Jersey recycling company

New Jersey-based Liberty Waste & Recycling has been acquired by fellow New Jersey company Mazza Recycling.

jimmy dominick mazza recycling
Left to right: Mazza Recycling President and CEO Jimmy Mazza and Executive VP Dominick Mazza

By BRIAN TAYLOR, Waste Today | MARCH 31, 2024

Tinton Falls, New Jersey-based Mazza Recycling has acquired Liberty Waste & Recycling of Moorestown, New Jersey. Mazza Recycling, which operates in east central New Jersey, says the acquisition “will serve as a platform for the Mazza family of companies to expand their market area to the Philadelphia suburbs.”

“We are excited to be able to acquire a company of Liberty’s reputation and caliber and we look forward to building on what they have already accomplished,” Mazza Recycling President and CEO James Mazza Jr. says.

“We welcome Steve Dickey, Rick Jenkins and the rest of the crew to the Mazza team. Now it’s our job to spread the Liberty brand across South Jersey, the Mazza way.”

Mazza Recycling says its acquisition of Liberty Waste & Recycling aligns with its strategy to build relationships and expand its service areas across south and central New Jersey. The acquisition also positions Mazza Recycling “as an attractive partner for potential acquisitions down the line,” according to the company.

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A jury awards NJ residents $21M for flood damage

The borough of Haddonfield in Camden County will be forced to pay nearly $21.8 million to residents who had homes severely damaged by flooding after a storm, a New Jersey jury ruled.

[Editor’s Note: We won’t be surprised if residents of other towns, also periled by inadequate stormwater control systems, file similar legal suits.]

After a 10-day trial in the Camden County Superior Court, the jury reached a unanimous decision on March 21, determining Haddonfield’s stormwater management system was unsafe.

By Nyah Marshall | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

The jury also found the municipality failed to address its stormwater runoff issue, causing “stormwater, fecal matter, and other wastewater materials” to enter and destroy four homes in the borough, according to court documents.

“These are very good people who had their lives turned upside down by what happened to them,” Robert D. Sokolove, the attorney representing the impacted homeowners, said in a statement.

“Their lives were decimated, and they are still fighting to regain the normalcy they had before the flood,” Sokolove added.

A spokesperson for Haddonfield said on Thursday that the borough’s administration had no comment about the ruling.

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Chemical recycling plants are rising. What’s the impact for MRFs?

Chemical recyclers say MRFs are an important source of feedstock, but how their demand will affect recycled plastic markets remains unclear


By Megan Quinn, Waste Dive, April 1, 2024

When Rumpke Waste & Recycling set out to design its latest recycling center, the company planned to have the latest technology to pick out extremely specific items — partly in response to rising demand for “hard-to-recycle” materials. 

Rumpke expects more chemical recycling companies will express interest in buying those hard-to-recycle materials once their plants come online in the next few years. 

Chemical recycling aims to scale fast, but questions remain

Under its current operations across its multiple MRFs, Rumpke is not yet baling and selling any material to chemical recyclers but it recently signed an agreement to send bales of colored PET to Eastman’s planned facility in Kingsport, Tennessee, in the coming months.

Eastman says it plans to turn the material it receives from Rumpke into “virgin quality polyesters” to be used in packaging applications. Rumpke’s 200,000-square-foot facility in Columbus, Ohio, is expected to have 19 optical sorters and other artificial intelligence-assisted technology that could help with the process. 

Related news:
Chemical recycling: the end of plastic waste? (Financial Times video)
Report slams chemical recycling as ‘dangerous and dirty’ (Politico)

Chemical recycling proponents are investing in major projects to scale up the technology. Yet lingering policy and business factors will affect the trajectory of this fast-developing recycling sector.

Some chemical recyclers have already announced agreements with major brands to use chemically recycled plastic in everything from reusable water bottles to food packaging, and some of those items are already available on store shelves in limited applications. 

At the same time, chemical recyclers are continuing to ink deals with MRF operators, private companies, and specialty collection partnerships to source enough material to fulfill their production promises.

Such partnerships could soon represent a turning point for how MRFs and other collectors process, market, and sell plastics that are currently considered waste or have very limited markets, said Jeff Snyder, Rumpke’s director of recycling. 

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Stick a fork in a long-standing NJ tradition – the party-line ballot

Andy Kim speaks with supporters outside the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Hall, Local 164, where the Bergen County Democratic Party Convention is being held, Monday, March 4, 2024, in Paramus
Rep. Andy Kim (D-NJ)


By Charles Stile, NorthJersey.com

At the very end of his historic 49-page ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Zahid Quraishi acknowledged he was setting off a political bomb that would reverberate in New Jersey politics long after the June 4 primary.

“The court wishes to make clear that it recognizes the magnitude of its decision,” he wrote. “The integrity of the democratic process for a primary election is at stake and the remedy plaintiffs are seeking is extraordinary.”

Rarely is a judge more blunt than this. This was not simply a policy nerd fight over the way primary ballots are designed. This was no academic exercise.

Democracy was on the line — a concern that shapes not only this case over the cornerstone of New Jersey elections, but the outcome of the 2024 battle for the presidency. It is the anxiety of the national moment.

And, seen through that lens, the ruling issued Friday aimed to alleviate that fear with a slam-dunk rejection of New Jersey’s Tammany Hall ballot system — the county line, as it’s commonly called — which political bosses use to turn local and state legislators into rubber-stamp stooges for the party machine.

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Judge Strikes Down New Jersey’s Party Line Ballot Tradition

Andy Kim defeats NJ’s ‘county line’ boss system in court

Rep. Andy Kim with supporters

 By DANIEL HAN, Politico 3/29/2024 12:32 PM EDT

New Jersey’s controversial ballot design that gives party-backed candidates an advantage will be scrapped in the June primary, a federal judge ruled on Friday.

U.S. District Judge Zahid Quraishi granted the preliminary injunction sought by Rep. Andy Kim and two Congressional candidates to eliminate the so-called county line, a feature unique to New Jersey elections that has given local party bosses inordinate influence over elections, in the June primary. In 19 of 21 counties in the state, candidates backed by county political parties appear in a single column or row, placing them more prominently on primary ballots and giving them a nearly insurmountable edge.

New Jersey ballot design scrapped by judge (The Hill)
Judge orders New Jersey to redesign primary ballot (WHYY)

The judge ordered the use of office block ballots for the June primary, where candidates are placed together by the office they are seeking. His ruling applies to all offices on the ballot.

“The integrity of the democratic process for a primary election is at stake, and the remedy Plaintiffs are seeking is extraordinary,” Quraishi wrote in his opinion. He added that the plaintiffs “have met their burden and that this is the rare instance when mandatory relief is warranted. “

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