Fresh Perspective

Logan Miller

Regional recycling manager at Rumpke Waste & Recycling

A one-month college course on zero-waste ethics in 2015 opened Logan Miller’s eyes to job opportunities in the recycling industry.

For the course at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, two professors and 10 students lived together for one month and tried to produce zero waste. Students read literature on the waste and recycling industry and visited a material recovery facility (MRF) in Indianapolis as well as a landfill in the area.

“That was an interesting class to dive into for one month,” Miller says.

Upon receiving his bachelor’s degree in environmental geoscience in 2018, Miller contacted Waste-Away Group Ltd., Elkhart, Indiana, saying he was young, passionate, “wanted to make a difference” and cared about recycling and natural resources. When he asked if the company needed someone like that, Miller says, “They said, ‘Absolutely.’ That was my entryway into the industry.”

Miller spent the first three years of his career as a sustainability coordinator at Waste-Away Group, learning about MRF operations and commodity markets.

About a year ago, Cincinnati-based Rumpke Waste & Recycling offered Miller a position as a regional recycling manager in central Ohio, where he focuses on operations as well as planning for the new Rumpke Recycling & Resource Center in Columbus, Ohio, which is expected to be operational by 2024.

In the following interview, Miller shares more about that project as well as MRF technology advancements he is hopeful about.

”Being on the cutting edge of building a MRF is a huge thing to be a part of. That experience has been unmatched.”

Recycling Today (RT): Could you tell me more about the new MRF Rumpke is constructing in Columbus?

Logan Miller (LM):  Rumpke has committed to invest over $50 million on this project, which is one of the largest expenditures that they’ve put on a single project, which says a lot.

Being that we process waste for over 36 counties, we are looking to take it to the next level and we’re looking to have the MRF of the future. We’ve partnered with Machinex to design a facility that is built to process recycling for the next 20 years.

RT: What kind of technology will be featured at the MRF?

LM: We’re going to be putting artificial intelligence and optical scanners [in the MRF], really collecting data on what’s going through. We’ll be able to detect a lot more than just what commodities we should be firing on.

I’m excited to have fewer screens in the plant. MRFs built five to 10 years ago were designed to have a lot of screens; we’re looking to do away with that and separate material in a different manner by using trommels, optics and ballistics. That’s going to greatly impact downtime—we’re going to be more efficient and spend less time inside screens undoing tanglers.

RT: What do you see as the biggest issue affecting the recycling industry?

LM: The big issue I see haunting the recycling industry is the lack of a unified message.

Just recently, there was another article written about the plastic recycling industry saying that plastic recycling doesn’t work, and it will never work. I believe that’s a gross oversimplification; it simply does not give credit to the existing infrastructure and diversion that has gone into developing the community recycling programs that we have. … [W]e have infrastructure in place to vastly increase diversion efforts. We see brands across the board working to increase their use of recycled content—they are making commitments. I don’t think this is slowing.