The Last Frontier

In Alaska, "The Last Frontier," curbside recycling is still in its infancy.

In early 2008, consultants reported to the Municipality of Anchorage that Anchorage was the largest city in the United States without curbside recycling. Shortly thereafter, Solid Waste Services, the municipality’s recycling and refuse department, began pioneering some of the first automated collections of recyclables in the state.

Anchorage residents seeking to recycle have historically driven to recycling drop-off stations. Now resident demand for recycling has driven the city to provide convenient curbside collection of recyclables. Solid Waste Services responded by purchasing three Curbtender automated side loaders (ASLs) from Wayne Engineering, based in Cedar Falls, Iowa. The trucks are capable of collecting residential recycling and refuse, even in the city’s restricted alleyways.

The Municipality of Anchorage currently provides commingled recycling collections to 3,500 households in the city. This will expand to approximately 13,000 households as the program is phased in throughout the next 18 months. Additionally, private hauler Alaska Waste in Anchorage collects commingled recyclables from about 5,200 opt-in Anchorage subscribers.

In addition to providing new recycling programs in Anchorage, the municipality’s Solid Waste Services collects residential trash daily from about 13,000 households. Alaska Waste collects most of the remainder.

Prior to the introduction of public and private recycling collection services, recycling in Anchorage only included the options of dropping off pre-sorted aluminum cans or newspapers at various grocery stores, at the landfill or at the Smurfit-Stone Recycling Center in the city.

Thermo-Kool, a local company that produces cellulose insulation, purchases the recovered newspapers, while another local company, EK Industries, accepts the recovered glass for use in manufacturing sandblasting materials.

Katy Suddock, recycling coordinator at Alaska Waste in Anchorage, says EK Industries provides an outlet for all of the container glass recovered in the community. However, the material cannot be recovered through the commingled curbside collections, even with the advent of automated collection. Brian Vanderwood, who’s in charge of refuse and recycling collections for the Municipality of Anchorage, says glass breakage in commingled collections is the primary reason it must be excluded from the curbside recycling program. "As commingled recyclables are baled for shipment to the lower 48, broken glass can contaminate the other materials and reduce the market value for processors such as Smurfit-Stone," he says.

All citywide collected recyclables, including the material collected through the new commingled curbside recycling collections, are dropped off at Smurfit-Stone Recycling Center. At the center, commingled recyclables are baled and then shipped to Washington state, where the bales are broken and the materials sorted. Shipping the recyclables is economically feasible thanks in large part to a back-haul agreement crafted in the 1980s by Anchorage-based Alaskans for Litter Prevention and Recycling (ALPAR) with several major Alaskan shipping companies.

The municipal recycling program offered by Solid Waste Services is expected to be completely phased in by June 2010. The first phase began in late 2008 with 3,500 households. In each phase, every household receives a 96-gallon cart for commingled recyclables and one or more additional carts for general refuse.

Along with the new curbside recycling program, Anchorage implemented Pay-As-You-Throw (PAYT) pricing to encourage residents to throw away less material, choosing smaller carts for their refuse, and to recycle more. The larger the refuse cart and more frequent the collection, the more the service costs.

For example, a single 48-gallon cart of general household waste collected every-other week costs just below $15 per month. Two 96-gallon carts collected once per week will run slightly more than $60 per month. Participating residents are allowed to change their cart size once at no cost in the first 180 days of their participation in the program. This allows residents to have a cart size that ultimately meets their household’s specific needs.

The municipality’s Solid Waste Services department decided to order the carts for recyclables in pieces to reduce shipping costs. Local labor is assembling and delivering the carts. This is part of the reason the municipality is spacing out the implementation of automated collections in Anchorage.

In addition to the community’s demand for more recycling services, the challenge of curbside collection was also a driving force for an automated solution. Before automated trucks, older single-operator vehicles needed to be equipped with extra heaters to maintain temperatures in the cab while workers continually got in and out to grab and dump the containers.

According to Vanderwood, "Before the fully automated Wayne Curbtenders, drivers were manually picking up as much as 30,000 pounds of trash each day, often in cold weather. Any time you are manually collecting that kind of waste, you run significant risk of injury."

The cold weather of Alaska only increased the risk of back injury or injury from slipping on snow or ice. Automation did away with the need for operators to lift heavy cans and let the operators stay safe and warm inside the trucks’ heated cabs.

Extra heaters in the new Curbtenders were sacrificed in favor of a four-camera system and extra-bright LED lights. A right-hand camera allows truck operators to view the cart as it is gripped for dumping. A camera in the hopper lets the operator see if unacceptable recyclables are coming out of recycling carts. Two other cameras add visibility while driving forward and while backing up. In addition, extra LED lighting was added to improve safety while backing up, especially important in this region of the country where daylight can be rather limited.

Another unique challenge of collecting recyclables in Anchorage is the number of narrow alleyways lined with resident fencing and with low-hanging wires overhead. For many automated trucks, this would be a dangerous setting, and the risk of property damage would be high. This factor weighed heavily into Vanderwood’s search for the right truck for the job.

Wayne Engineering’s Curbtender scored big points in this area with Vanderwood, as it features a collection arm that stays close to the truck while tipping, rather than arcing outward where the arm could potentially damage fences or overhead wires. It was just one key reason Vanderwood recommended Wayne Engineering’s fully automated Curbtender ASL to the purchasing department.

Alaska Waste also began collecting commingled recyclables in 2008, implementing a strictly optional recycling program in which customers who opt in to the service pay roughly $6 per month to receive a 96-gallon cart for their recyclables. Garbage collection starts at approximately $15 per month for three bags or cans.

For most of its recycling routes, Alaska Waste uses a front-loader truck equipped with an automated cart handling system. The size of the truck and the motion of the arm prohibits the company from using automated collection in alleyways. Instead, the company asks alleyway residents to take their recyclables to the street curbside, if possible. Otherwise, Alaska Waste drivers would have to manually collect containers in alleyways, which would require additional service time that would serve to increase labor costs in addition to posing additional injury risks to the company’s workers.

On the frontier of curbside recycling in Alaska, Anchorage’s future is clearly automated collection. Automation has already added efficiencies to Alaska Waste and the municipality’s Solid Waste Services routes. Using its new automated side loaders, the municipality now collects recycling and refuse in the same time it used to take crews to complete refuse-only collection routes in the municipality.

According to Vanderwood, the municipality was collecting up to 15,000 pounds of recyclables per day with the Curbtenders within the first month. "That’s equal to half of our previous daily poundage of refuse collections," he says. "When you become more efficient with your time using automated trucks, you can now use that saved time to offer other services. That’s what we did here with curbside recycling," he adds.

This feature was submitted on behalf of Wayne Engineering, Cedar Falls, Iowa.