Municipal & IC&I, Financial

Balcones Resources earns San Antonio recycling contract

Photo courtesy of Balcones Resources

The San Antonio City Council has approved an ordinance awarding Balcones Resources Inc., headquartered in Austin, Texas, a 15-year municipal recycling contract beginning Aug. 1, 2024.

Under the terms of the contract, Balcones will build and operate a 200,000-square-foot, $47 million material recovery facility (MRF) and recycling education center in San Antonio. The facility will combine the latest innovations in recycling technology with employee wellness and community engagement programs, according to the company. This will be Balcones’ sixth recycling facility and fourth in Texas.

“The city of San Antonio has a long history of sustainability and, being one of the fastest-growing municipalities in the country, they had a very clear expectation for the future of their recycling program,” Balcones President Adam Vehik says. “Our goal was to deliver a recycling campus that was without peer anywhere in the country.”

The campus’ MRF will be custom engineered to prioritize high recycling capture rates, employee safety and quality control, the company says. The MRF will feature the latest technology to ensure Balcones produces the highest-grade materials possible.

“Recycling continues to be a better economic option than the landfill, and our commitment to recovery rates and material quality will have a direct financial benefit to the city of San Antonio,” Vehik says. “We are excited about the environmental and economic impact that the recycling campus will bring to the community.”

Balcones says all recyclables recovered at the new San Antonio MRF will be marketed in North America, prioritizing Texas-based companies.

The company says it will create approximately 70 new full-time environmental jobs in San Antonio to operate the facility. The campus will include a number of on-site resources: employee wellness amenities that include integrated walking trails, recreational facilities and a community garden program; an interactive viewing gallery and education outreach activities for the community; energy-conservation design innovations, including solar panels, passive lighting, native landscaping and electric charging stations; and drop-off options for recyclables outside of the city program.

Maryland city receives funding through Every Bottle Back

The city of Laurel, Maryland, will receive a grant through The Recycling Partnership and the American Beverage Association to expand recycling as part of the Every Bottle Back initiative.

The $112,465 investment from The Recycling Partnership, Falls Church, Virginia, and the American Beverage Association, Washington, will help provide Laurel residents with more than 7,000 65-gallon lidded curbside recycling carts for free, which are expected to help increase collection rates. The investment includes funding for direct-to-resident outreach and education on what is and isn’t recyclable, helping to cut down on contamination in the recycling stream, the funding organizations say.

The investment is estimated to yield 7.32 million new pounds of recyclables over 10 years, of which 285,480 pounds will be polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and 109,800 pounds will be aluminum, the funders say.

Katherine Lugar, president and CEO of the American Beverage Association, says, “We’re helping to modernize the city’s recycling program, improve recycling rates and ensure more of our valuable bottles are collected and ultimately remade into new bottles—reducing our use of new plastic.”

Launched in 2019 by the association, the Every Bottle Back initiative is a partnership featuring The Coca-Cola Co., Keurig Dr Pepper and PepsiCo that aims to improve the collection of plastic beverage bottles.

“Maryland’s beverage bottlers and distributors share the goal of ensuring valuable recyclable materials, like our carefully designed 100-percent-recyclable bottles, are collected so they can be remade into new products, as intended,” says Ellen Valentino of the Maryland-Delaware-Washington Beverage Association.

Cody Marshall of The Recycling Partnership adds, “We are grateful to American Beverage’s Every Bottle Back initiative for their support of this recycling transformation that will keep valuable recyclables out of our environment and waterways and put them back into the circular economy to provide much- needed supply for local producers.”

The investment in Laurel is the 12th of 22 projects that the beverage industry has committed to fund under Every Bottle Back. These investments total $14.3 million and will yield an estimated 698 million more pounds of recycled PET over 10 years, according to the American Beverage Association and The Recycling Partnership.