Double Down

It is 3 a.m. on a cold February morning. Brent Hildebrand is at work talking to the route drivers for Alpine Waste & Recycling, Commerce City, Colo. He delivers a combination pep talk and educational session as the drivers nurse their coffees. The session will be repeated at 6 a.m. and will give management the chance to talk about the company’s successes and to remind drivers that they are the front line in educating the customers on their routes in the company’s battle against contaminated loads.

The drivers are engaged and ask questions of Hildebrand. Despite the cold and the hour, the time is well spent, he says.

“We like to be sure the whole company knows what we are doing,” Hildebrand says of these talks. “Drivers get a run-down on the tonnages they are recycling and what is happening in the industry.”

BETTING ON RECYCLING

Alpine’s story is one of success, driven by the company’s bullishness on the future of recycling. The current market is rewarding Alpine’s outlook. With more than three years of recycling under its belt, the company is already doubling its recycling capacity.

Most of Alpine’s customers are commercial enterprises, but its recycling figures show Alpine has only scratched the surface. The company figures it saved 148,652 cubic yards of landfill space in 2010. “And we believe there are a lot more tons out there to generate,” says Hildebrand, who serves as vice president of recycling for the company.

Alpine has consistently been one of the fastest growing companies in the Denver area since it first opened as a waste hauler 11 years ago. In 2005, the company’s principals saw an opportunity to profit from recycling, anticipating a shift in the industry. They positioned Alpine for the wave of recycling they saw coming.

“We knew single stream was key to the industry and we wanted to get out in front of that technology,” Hildebrand says of the company’s decision to open its Altogether Recycling material recovery facility (MRF).

He adds, “The shift in focus from a company that simply picks up trash to a company that manages resources is a big step.”

Alpine began by hauling 200 tons of recyclables per month when it first opened its MRF in September 2007 and is now hauling 1,500 tons of recyclables per month.

Altogether Recycling is the trademarked brand for Alpine’s single-stream recycling program. Altogether Recycling customers no longer have to sort recyclables into separate bins. Instead, all of the sorting is done at the company’s MRF.

While “single-stream” is an industry term, Hildebrand says Alpine President John Griffith, the company’s CFO Alek Orloff and he agreed they needed a name for their recycling operation that anyone could understand. “We wanted something that gave more explanation to the customer,” Hildebrand says. “We wanted something different but something that explained what we were doing.”

 The company hired a public relations firm to develop the concept, and Altogether Recycling was born.

Alpine has been so busy since the startup of its MRF in September 2007 that it began the installation of a second processing line in February of 2011. Eventually, both lines will run at the same time. Alpine is adding 21,000 square feet to accommodate the second sorting line, which will increase the MRF’s monthly capacity to 15,000 tons.

“That’s really nice for us,” Hildebrand says of the expansion. “We are hoping to take advantage of the proximity of our waste hauling station.”

The tipping floor expansion should be finished as spring begins to blossom. The material will flow through the sorting line into a pair of balers—a Harris HRB and an American Baler 8043—by May 1 at the latest, the company says.

When the Altogether Recycling MRF was built it measured 31,000 square feet. The current expansion will bring the size of the facility to 52,000 square feet. At the core of the expansion is the addition of a second sorting line, which will handle all of the typical recyclable materials collected at the curbside, including glass, aluminum, paper, cardboard and plastics Nos. 1 through 7.

This past February, the MRF processed a total of 5,500 tons using its single sorting line.

Alpine Waste & Recycling began the installation of a second processing line at its MRF in February. It will add 21,000 square feet to accommmodate the second line, which will increase monthly capacity to 15,000 tons.

WALKING THE LINE

The main building at the Altogether Recycling MRF is split in half. Finished material is on one side awaiting shipment; processing takes place on the other side.

Material is loaded into an in-ground conveyor that feeds the whole sorting system. The first line of defense that protects this system is the pre-sort portion of the line.

About once per month, Hildebrand joins the crew out on the line, picking material. During one shift, he says he had to extract a car bumper from the stream of incoming material. While recyclable, it would have wreaked havoc with the line, he adds.

Plastic bags are removed, too, in the pre-sort. (MRF operators soon tend to discover how plastic bags, while recyclable, can gum up the works, wrapping themselves around every moving part on the line.)

An established practice at the Altogether Recycling operation is the early pulling of the glass fraction. “We pull off as much glass by hand in the pre-sort as possible,” Hildebrand says. The collected glass gets put into roll-off containers in the bunkers that are under the pre-sort area, creating a three-color mix.

Next, the remaining commingled materials pass over the first screen, which recovers OCC (old corrugated containers). The recovered OCC is stacked on the floor for easy loading into the baler’s in-feed. Everything else falls through to the next conveyor, which feeds screens designed to recover the ONP (old newspapers) and SOP (sorted office paper) paper fractions.

The containers that remain after the fiber is removed are transported to the container sorting line, which incorporates a magnet to recover steel and an eddy current to recover aluminum cans. Gable-top and aseptic containers, such as milk and juice cartons and juice boxes, which the company began accepting for recycling in mid-2010, are among the in-feed materials on the container line. Plastic containers are sorted by resin type before being fed to the second baler for compaction.

“We run the commercial and residential input separately,” Hildebrand says.

Alpine operates more than 50 trucks, using them for waste hauling as well as for the collection of recyclables. The trucks include front-load, rear-load and roll-off models manufactured by Heil, Mack International and Peterbilt.

About 90 percent of the 1,500 tons of material per month Alpine gathers is from commercial accounts. The rest is residential material gathered mainly from homeowner associations.

Alpine is moving its whole fleet to natural gas, making it the first company in the Denver market to go this route, according to the company. Currently, eight of the company’s vehicles are natural-gas powered. Alpine says it has signed a deal to install an on-site natural-gas fueling system, the pumps for which will be installed this spring when the ground has thawed.

The material collected by Alpine’s crew is augmented by material picked up by other private and municipal haulers. While Altogether Recycling processes all of the recyclables Alpine collects, it also accepts material from these third-party haulers. When material from these sources is taken into account, there is roughly a 50/50 mix of commercial and residential material being delivered to the Altogether Recycling tipping floor.

The result is a business that sells a broad line of finished commodities. ONP, OCC, mixed paper, No. 1 plastic, natural No. 2 plastic (milk jugs), color No. 2 plastic (laundry detergent bottles), mixed rigid plastics (consisting of plastics Nos. 3 through 7), tin cans, aluminum, glass, office paper and various high-grade papers are among the products Altogether Recycling is shipping to its customers.

“It is really a testament to our President John Griffith and to Alek Orloff to have the long-term vision to put in a plant like this,” Hildebrand says.

GETTING THE MESSAGE

Young kids can follow the adventures of Rick Cycling and his plastic ducky, Al Duckether (Say it fast. Get it?), as they navigate the equipment of the Altogether Recycling MRF with a hungry crocodile on their trail.

No, this is not a recycler’s bad dream about competitors snapping their jaws. Rather, it is designed to offer an informative look at the process of recycling and material recovery.

Although most of the material Alpine collects is from commercial accounts, Hildebrand says the company is looking toward the future and educating the next generation of recyclers.

Alpine’s outreach program includes tours and educational opportunities for teachers and students in Denver-area schools. “This outreach helps our children form a healthy respect for their world and the environment,” he says.

“You need to educate people on what is acceptable. Ultimately, that helps us run better since we have less residue coming in,” Hildebrand says. Talking to children filters up to the parents, he adds.

“Educating the younger crowd is going to help with waste diversion down the road,” Hildebrand says.

In addition to this education campaign, Alpine also supports numerous local charities and nonprofit organizations as well as contests that focus on recycling-related art or art from recyclables.

STRONG MARKETS

Denver has a good market for recyclables. Rocky Mountain Bottling, the Coors-Owens-Illinois joint venture glass plant, buys much of the glass that Altogether Recycling recovers. The company also reports having a good market for PET (polyethylene terephthalate) and for both colored and natural HDPE (high-density polyethylene). There is even a market for the mixed plastics recovered at the MRF, though Hildebrand says it comes and goes. “We will store it if we have to,” he adds. But that is not often—usually it ships monthly. “With fuel prices rising, the homes for all of the different plastics seem to be stable at the moment,” Hildebrand says. 

Although the recyclables recovered at the Altogether MRF are sold almost exclusively to the domestic market, the company will occasionally ship material overseas. In December of 2010, Altogether did not export anything, Hildebrand says. “Then, in January, our rail spur was taken out of service for repairs. As a result, we did export a small amount of goods,” he says.

COMMITTED TO DIVERSION

Hildebrand has a long background in the recycling and waste business. He started working 16 years ago for BFI, starting with the company on the same day as Griffith.

A native of Peoria and graduate of Illinois State University with a degree in sociology, Hildebrand’s career took a turn toward recycling 11 years ago. He went to work for a small independent firm in Denver. “I gained a lot of knowledge there,” he says.

That firm was acquired by Waste Management, and Hildebrand went on to work for the company as part of Recycle America, a wholly owned subsidiary at the time. A while later, he and Griffith joined forces.

“I love this job. It’s an incredible industry. I love every Monday coming to work,” Hildebrand says.

The benefits of working for a future-oriented firm are substantial, he says. “It is really fun to be involved with a forward-thinking company like this.”

Hildebrand says he expects Altogether Recycling to expand again as 2015 approaches. This expansion would likely include an equipment upgrade, he says.

“The company is very committed to diverting waste from landfills,” he says. “It is the right way to go and it is what our customers want. We’re not big like the national companies; but, we are not small, either. But we are on the cutting edge,” he concludes.

The author is a freelance writer based in Cleveland and can be contacted at curt@curtharler.com.