Built To Fit

The people of Summit County, Colo., who live in a Rocky Mountain ski resort area, voted to fund a residential recycling program in a county with just 30,000 year-round residents.

According to Kevin Berg of the county’s solid waste and recycling agency, the voter-approved funding allowed his agency to site 30-yard collection roll-offs throughout the county and build a 10,500-square-foot MRF.

The collection bins accept OCC (old corrugated containers), ONP (old newspapers), mixed paper, steel and aluminum cans, No. 1 and No. 2 plastic bottles and glass containers. Materials are kept separate. "We mix very little; we really want to keep things separated," said Berg.

The MRF features a tip floor and a two-ram baler from Nexgen, Vernon, Ala., that is tasked with quickly preparing incoming material for shipment. "We do very little storage," noted Berg, "and we can’t afford to play the market."

Initially, Berg and others in Summit County may have worried that they built a bigger facility than necessary. "We had a feasibility study done in 2000; from that we sized a bigger baler and went several thousand square feet bigger on plant space," Berg told session attendees.

But the amount of material arriving has increased each month, and there are significant opportunities to increase the tonnage during the peak ski season, when the county’s population more than quadruples to 130,000.

Collecting more recyclables from these seasonal visitors is a current item on Summit County’s "to do" list. "We’d like to increase the number of drop-off centers and we’re pursuing that currently," Berg told session attendees.

The amount of material being collected for recycling from year-round residents is extending the life of the county’s landfill, and markets are being found for the recovered recyclables, including glass. Bottle plants that serve the Coors brewery have been particularly helpful in ensuring that Summit County has a paying market for its clean brown glass in particular.

In East Syracuse, N.Y., Mark Naef and Naef Recycling are trying to keep a dual-stream system in place at the company’s 48,000-square-foot MRF.

With haulers encouraging single-stream collection, however, his company has been faced with the need to do more paper sorting than it would prefer. (See "Dual Purposes" in the June 2003 issue of Recycling Today.)

A team of eight sorters and a star screen help Naef Recycling produce an ONP grade that is often shipped loose to an AbitibiBowater mill in Ontario.

The location of single-stream MRFs in its local and regional markets means Naef Recycling must often take in material brought by customers now in the habit of collecting loads of commingled recyclables for delivery to those other plants. "It just hasn’t been the cleanest stream since we have had single-stream facilities as neighbors," Naef remarked.

A steel-belted conveyor leads bottles and cans past another dozen sorting employees. Glass is run through a trommel screen and crushed and eventually emerges clean enough to be shipped to bottle-making plants.

Naef Recycling’s baler from Logemann Brothers Co., Milwaukee, produces one-ton bales of OCC, aluminum and steel, while its plastic bales weigh in at around 1,700 pounds. "It’s an older machine, but we love the way it works," said Naef.

The company’s dual-stream MRF prepares material largely for domestic consuming markets, with Naef Recycling’s consumer client list including AbitibiBowater, Solvay Paperboard, Alcan and several plastics consumers in Ohio’

Incoming loads that are too commingled for Naef Recycling’s sorting system to effectively sort and some material that remains mixed after passing through Naef’s system sometimes heads to the single-stream Waste Management MRF in the Syracuse area.

There are not so many older machines to see at the El Paso, Texas, MRF that has just been built by Friedman Recycling. The company’s Morris Friedman detailed how the MRF was built after the company secured a 15-year contract to process the curbside materials collected through El Paso’s new program.

El Paso introduced its program in 2007, going from virtually no residential collection (and a 1.5 percent recycling rate) to providing 96-gallon containers to most households. The program accepts OCC, mixed paper, ONP, No. 1 and No. 2 plastic, aluminum and steel cans, but not glass. (See "Into the Blue" within the Municipal Recycling Supplement of the December 2007 issue of Recycling Today.)

A Bollegraaf system installed by Van Dyk Baler Corp., Stamford, Conn., at the 55,000-square-foot MRF features a variety of single-stream sorting and conveying equipment, including a drum feeder, double-deck screens, magnets and eddy currents and an air system.

Crediting an aggressive public education campaign, the facility has been inundated with material from the start and is was processing some 200 tons per day from the city’s homes as of June. "The citizens of El Paso really embraced this program," said Friedman.

Starting up a program for 160,000 households has its risks, including the likelihood that unwanted materials will be in the stream. Friedman noted that plastic shopping bags have been a common site, as has the occasional garden hose.

Serving such a large population that is new to recycling resulted in a 17 percent residual rate in the first few months of operation. While that may seem high, Friedman has not been disappointed, saying, "that’s fantastic for a first-year program."

For Friedman Recycling, the experience in El Paso included choosing a site on which to build a plant, which presented some of the initial challenges.

The company ultimately settled on a 7.8-acre parcel of land and installed a rail spur to make sure that shipping option would be available. ("It’s 15 months later, and we haven’t used it," Morris said.)

The 55,000-square-foot building is made of pre-fab metal components and contained suitable tipping floor space to accommodate the flood of materials that has come in from El Paso residents who have warmed to their recycling program.

As did Summit County’s Berg, Friedman advised conference attendees to err on the side of having extra space. "Yes, you’ll need more tipping floor," he said.

In an automated MRF, Friedman said maintenance is critical. "Daily maintenance is important," he said. "Just like exercising is good for your heart, daily maintenance keeps the sorting and baling system healthy."

While automation is part of the picture, so are productive people. "Having qualified people on the sort line is important," Friedman said.

Friedman Recycling has not been alone in its El Paso efforts, as the city’s Department of Environmental Services conducts collection, and a contract with a public relations firm has helped raise the recycling program’s profile with residents.

Friedman says the public relations firm had a $375,000 budget to promote the "Drop it in the Blue" campaign as the city’s recycling program was implemented.

Television commercials, billboards and truck signage in both English and Spanish helped spread the word.

As a result, El Paso has moved from its 1.5 percent recycling rate in 2006 (6,000 total tons collected for the entire year) to collecting 2,700 tons of recyclables in just the first week of the citywide program. (That’s nearly 45 percent of the previous year’s total in just one week.)

Recycling Today’s 2008 conferences were June 22-24 at the Hyatt Regency O’Hare in Rosemont, Ill.