MRF Market Matures

While the number of MRFs in the U.S. is still increasing, trends point to consolidation, private ownership and increasing automation.

As municipal recycling develops, changes and strengthens, so do material recovery facilities. From simple material processing centers, MRFs have become sophisticated, often highly automated facilities. But debates still rage about the optimal methods of collecting and processing municipal recyclables. Some in the glass industry are vying for more color separation of glass in order to address breakage concerns, while other recyclers predict the development of highly efficient mixed waste processing facilities that require little or no curbside separation. Either way, a strong future for some type of MRF is assured.

"There’s lots of activity right now," says Dick White, sales and marketing manager of Count Recycling, Des Moines, Iowa. "That activity is coming from new areas. It’s driven by recent legislative mandates in states like Georgia. And it’s going to stay active and spread into areas that don’t have recycling yet. Then existing facilities will need to upgrade and expand. The need for MRFs will be strong for quite a long time."

There are about twice as many MRFs in early 1995 than there were in early 1992, according to Eileen Berenyi of Government Advisory Associates, N.Y., who is in the midst of updating a 1992 report detailing all the existing MRFs and MWPFs in the U.S. This brings the number of MRFs to about 450.

However, the number of MWPFs has not increased as rapidly, Berenyi adds. There were about 35 such facilities in 1992, and that number has not even doubled.

"There are some in California still, and there are still some in the Midwest," she explains. "While I don’t think they are taking the world by storm, there are still people that find them somewhat attractive. But I think some sort of a modified version may be where it’s going."

A "modified version" of a MWPF might include processing of recyclables that have been commingled and collected in the same trucks as waste but kept somewhat separate from waste in order to facilitate later separation.

Strong commodity markets have been a boon to MRF operators and processors, says Berenyi, and may be contributing to greater consolidation in the MRF market. Smaller MRFs are being closed in favor of regional facilities which allow the operators better control over their material flow and better deals with purchasers of the materials.

"And on the other side you see the ultimate users, particularly in plastics and paper, becoming very interested in capturing sources," says Berenyi.

INTEGRATION. Along with an increase in the number of MRFs , there is a trend towards greater integration of collection and processing rather than viewing the two as completely separate functions, says Berenyi.

"People are definitely trying to integrate collection and processing more," she explains. "They are looking at the whole thing in a much more integrated way so that it really makes sense for their locality. It’s not a cookie cutter approach — they’re really looking at the impact of the collection on the processing and vice versa. Ultimately this will make municipal recycling cheaper and more efficient."

This trend is partially driven by the higher prices for materials, says Berenyi. "There are revenues to be garnished from this enterprise so that what you collect is quite important in what you can process and how."

The rate of growth in MRFs is likely to continue nationally because some areas of the country are still developing recycling infrastructure, says Berenyi, especially parts of the Midwest, the Southwest and the South.

"Will the rate of growth be quite as extreme? Probably not. But there will be growth, because there’s still these population centers that are not yet fully serviced."

The many deinking mills coming on line are competing for consistent source of feedstock, says Berenyi, which adds another factor to the mix. Mills would prefer long-term contracts, whereas most MRF operators, in the current strong market, would prefer to play the spot market.

"They don’t want to be locked into a longer term contract at a low rate, but the end users are looking for long term supply," she explains. "So ultimately you’ll probably see some contracts being fashioned that would allow for some variations based on the price but that would allow the end users to have some sort of a reliable supply."

CULLET QUALITY. With the increased demand for high-quality glass cullet, members of the glass recycling industry have expressed concerns about the viability of commingled collection of recyclables, which can result in large quantities of low-value mixed-color glass cullet.

"All aspects of recycling have a long way to go with technology, and you’re going to see a lot of improved technology and hopefully that will be an answer to some of it," says Douglas Gibboney, executive director of the Mid-Atlantic Glass Packaging Institute, Carlisle, Pa. "But at the same time, you’ve never seen a recycler — scrap dealer — put everything together and then separate it out to recycle it."

There is a trend towards more commingled collection of recyclables, says Gibboney, which he says the glass recycling industry should have taken a stand against when recycling was first developing, "but we didn’t realize what the implications would be."

It’s unlikely that MWPFs would be able to provide higher-quality glass cullet, according to Gibboney.

"If you’re losing a substantial portion already in MRFs that aren’t separating from garbage, you’re going to lose even more if you’re going to a MWPF unless there’s some great technology breakthrough that I don’t know about," says Gibboney. "But I’m looking at it through the eyes of the glass industry in terms of what we need to get back in order to make new glass containers."

The glass industry has been working with the Solid Waste Association of North America in researching various methods of preventing glass breakage in MRFs around the U.S., says Gibboney. He says it is unlikely that MWPFs could be the primary strategy for handling recyclables and solid waste in the future, given various regulatory issues on the state and local level and the likely objections by recycling-oriented citizen activists.

While not advocating any one method of collecting recyclables, Gibboney does point out that a three-color sort of glass would result in a more marketable commodity.

"There are some towns like Martinsburg, W.V., where they have done that, and there are some towns in Florida where they are curbside separating. Obviously in some large metropolitan areas you couldn’t do it. You couldn’t do it in New York City because you’ve got to move those trucks down the street. But in other areas I think you certainly could."

From the perspective of a company that builds MRFs, there does not appear to be a trend towards more MWPFs, according to Sydney Harris, manager of business development, RRT Design & Construction Corp., Mahwah, N.J.

"I don’t see too many of them coming up for bid," says Harris. "There probably are some, but we’re not involved with them ... From a purely monetary aspect in terms of commodities, what you recover in a MWPF does not give you the best return on your investment. If you take plastics out of the garbage, they are just not as valuable as plastics taken out of a commingled recyclables facility."

A number of efforts are being made to increase the separation of glass after it has already been collected, according to Harris.

"There are people who are trying to recover the maximum amount of flint from the mixed broken, and they’re doing that through optical separation," says Harris. "This is not really expensive. You recover more salable product and you reduce the amount and the cost of residue disposal if there’s no market for mixed broken."

A glass sorter might cost anywhere from $20,000 to $100,000, plus installation and conveyors, according to Harris, but it offers substantial return on investment over a five-year period and could increase recovery of flint glass by 15 to 20 percent.

"There’s no market for mixed glass cullet," says Harris. "If you’re not lucky enough to live in a place like New Jersey where the state is working actively to find end uses for the material like mixing it into asphalt for road beds or using it for landfill daily cover, what are you going to do with it? You stockpile it or put it in a landfill, and because it’s heavy, you’re paying big bucks to get rid of it. If you don’t have a market, the next best thing is to recover as much as you can out of it."

The most expensive part of any recycling program is the collection, according to Harris. This leads many communities use a commingled approach.

"I was doing a little market survey for a proposed MRF we bid on in New Jersey, and most of the communities I talked to had commingled systems," he says. "The few that had source-separated systems wished they could get rid of them because of the cost of collection."

There is a trend towards having MRFs mix the plastic resins and then send them to processors for separation, says Harris, rather than installing plastics separators at every MRF.

"It’s too expensive to put in a big system for separating PVC and then just get a few pieces of PVC every 15 minutes or so," he explains. "Better that the trend would be towards mixing all plastics and then sending that bale of mixed plastics to a processor who then can take tons and tons of that material and put in an expensive sorting system."

Eddy current separators are now almost standard features at most MRFs, especially with the cost of aluminum at high levels, says Harris. In addition, bag breakers are a popular piece of equipment for MRFs.

MIXED WASTE PROCESSING. Although some MWPFs have proven to be very successful, some in the recycling industry remain skeptical about the ability of such facilities to produce recyclables of equivalent market value to those processed in a commingled MRF.

"There are some inherent problems there if recycling is the goal," says Nick Artz, principle, Franklin Associates, Prairie Village, Kansas. "First of all, you’re going to have a lot of the grades of paper that could be source-separated that now will come in potentially contaminated — newsprint in particular, and corrugated, and so on, that may be contaminated with food waste or grass clippings. Or they may just be wet for some reason, and that will likely make that paper unmarketable. Unless you’re going primarily for producing some sort of refuse-derived fuel or a compostable material, I don’t think the mixed waste processing is going to be the way to go."

A more likely scenario would involve source-separating the various paper grades and other recyclables from residences and businesses and then sending the remaining portion of the waste stream through a MWPF, says Artz. "Then, of course, you’re going to get maximum recovery of recyclables as well as maximum diversion from landfills, if that’s your objective."

Artz is also skeptical about the development of technologically advanced means of separating recyclables from garbage.

"They do come up with better and better mechanical and automated means of separating things, but if you’re going to initially throw them together, it’s going to be difficult to market them due to contamination, particularly of paper."

The mixed waste processing approach is unlikely to benefit glass consumers in search of high quality, agrees Artz. Those consumers would prefer to see glass sorted by color at the curb. "I can appreciate that, because there’s substantial breakage, for one thing, when those containers are thrown in together."

The trend nationally seems to be toward less source separation and more commingling of materials. Especially in large communities, says Artz, commingling is significantly more cost-effective than source-separating.

"If you’ve got a large community and a large curbside recycling program, it can be more cost-effective to put in a MRF," says Artz. "In a smaller community, they probably cannot afford a small scale MRF. As a result, they’re more inclined to go to truckside or curbside sorting of the materials and then have to do minimal processing."

However, says Artz, it’s unlikely that any community, regardless of the size, will go back to greater curbside separation — especially if the motivation for doing so is to recover more glass.

"I periodically hear that recyclers are putting in some netting and things like that in their trucks so when these things are thrown in there’s a tendency to break the fall and so there’s less breakage. Beyond that, I’m not sure."

There is a trend towards increasing automation in MRFs, according to Artz, including eddy current separators, optical sorting devices for glass, technologies to sort plastics by resin type.

"Some fairly high-tech MRFs are being used more and more frequently," he says. "The MRFs going in seem to be larger than the older facilities, which probably suggests more processing and higher technologies than the older ones."

First in a three-part MRF series planned for 1995. The next will appear in August.