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Standards differ in terms of materials and processes. By Carol Brzozowski On a sunny February Sunday in Coral Springs, FL, cars lined up to enter a municipal parking area staged with numerous Dumpsters and barrels as residents rid their homes of household hazardous waste and electronics. With proof of residency, residents may drop off paint, solvents, pesticides, household cleaners, lawn and pool chemicals, mercury thermometers, rechargeable batteries, fire extinguishers, televisions, cell phones, computers, monitors, printers, keyboards, auto batteries, propane tanks, tires, and motor oil. Workers retrieve the materials from the vehicles and sort them into appropriate containment systems. While some of those items will be sent outside the county to a facility permitted to accept hazardous waste, many will find their way to a second use. case in point is that Broward County recycles latex paint by sending it to a facility that reblends it and re-packages it as high-quality latex paint for distribution to municipalities for neighborhood beautification and graffiti control. Residents also can pick up as many as 20 cans of recycled paint, available in four colors, free of charge. Across the country, materials recycling facilities (MRFs) give extra life to materials that would otherwise clog landfills. But standards for recycling differ in terms of materials and processes. Nationwide, the recycling industry has created more than 1.1 million jobs, generated $236 billion in gross annual sales, and is comparable in size to the auto and truck manufacturing industry, according to a study cited by Broward County’s Waste and Recycling Services (WRS). Broward County’s 1.8 million residents generate about 3.5 million tons of waste annually, including that from construction and demolition (C&D). The county’s resource recovery system encompasses a group of 26 cities that, through an “interlocal agreement,” send their eligible municipal solid waste to the county’s two Wheelabrator waste-to-energy plants and recyclables to the MRF. Cities are responsible for collecting recyclables from the residents and managing their own collection contracts. For example, a city might have an agreement with Waste Management, which conducts curbside collection of recyclables. The county provides the processing service through a contract with Waste Management Recycle America. Most of the county’s cities offer curbside recycling and many offer multifamily, apartment, and condo recycling. “That’s a big deal here. Broward County has a very high percentage of residents living in condos, apartments and multifamily properties,” says Phil Bresee, who manages the county’s recycling program and assists with the efforts of the interlocal agreement. “From a residential recycling perspective, that’s something we really need to put a lot more focus on in the coming years.” Also on the drawing board is the establishment of more greenwaste recycling options, Bresee adds. The average cost per ton for recyclables can vary from city to city within the county. Some have recycling built into an overall monthly rate per household, whereas other cities have a separate recycling fee tacked on to the waste service contract. Processing costs are $32 a ton with an 80% revenue share with Waste Management, which is rebated back to the cities based on their tonnage contributions, says Bresee. “We have distributed more than $5 million in revenues back to our cities during the last fiscal year, so it’s been a very beneficial program for the cities,” he says. “It’s allowed them to sustain their recycling programs over the years.” Broward County utilizes a “two-sort” recycle system: Residents put mixed paper in a brown paper bag or bin, leaving it curbside on appointed days. In another bin, they can place aluminum or steel cans, as well as brown, green, or clear glass containers, milk or juice cartons, drink boxes, and No. 1 and No. 2 plastics. In Broward County, the process works as follows:
“Broward is like any large jurisdiction across the country that has seen paper revenues increase considerably over the last two years, in large part determined by the demand for paper by Asia, particularly China,” notes Bresee. “Recycle America does utilize domestic mills as well.”Electronics is growing at three times the rate of other wastes, producing hazardous materials that pose an environmental challenge, according to the WRS. Bresee has noted rapid growth of the e-waste recycling program.“We’re on target to recover more than a million pounds of e-waste this year,” he says. “Last year, we recovered about 920,000 pounds of e-waste, and, a few years ago, a half a million pounds. This program is set to double as far as the amount of stuff we have recovered in the course of just a couple of years.” Broward County’s e-waste recycling program includes two permanent drop-off stations open two days a week. The effort is supplemented with community-based recycling events held around the county up to 15 times a year, such as the one in Coral Springs. Once dropped off, the county partners with the nonprofit Association for Retarded Citizens (ARC) whose members refurbish or dismantle end-of-life electronics as part of the organization’s mission to provide vocational training for people with disabilities. Recovered materials are shipped out for recycling or environmentally safe disposal. “The e-cycling program is a very unique program in large part because of our partnership with ARC,” says Bresee. “They didn’t come into this as a conventional e-cycler, so they’ve had to develop their own markets, partnering with other e-cyclers around the state.” Pounding Glass Into Sand “There are a number of very rigorous environmental and regulatory requirements we’ve had to go through in order to be sure this is something that’s technically and biologically viable and environmentally feasible,” says Bresee. “Research to date has shown technology does exist to grind glass down to the same size of a natural grain of sand and to where the edges are rounded like a natural grain of sand. We can blend the various colors of glass with sand to make it look like real sand.” Research was needed to ensure that contaminants in the glass, if put in water, would not harm any of the local sea creatures living in the surf zone. Studies were also necessary to guarantee that if the glass was blended with the sand and placed in an upland area—not part of the current plan—that it would not adversely affect sea turtles. Presently, the county has a coastal permit application in with a number of regulatory agencies: the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. “We are proposing to put about 2,000 tons of this material on the beach sometime in either 2008 or 2009 to see how it reacts with the surf,” says Bresee, adding that tests have already occurred in labs and engineering studies, as well as at a test plot. “Does it travel? Does it erode the same way as natural beach sand? Does it move up and down along the coast the way of natural beach sand?” Everything thus far leads the county to believe it is feasible. “It’s a win-win approach in the sense that we have always struggled with the marketing of our glass in south Florida,” says Bresee. “We are hundreds of miles away from the nearest glass markets, and we see this as not only a way for us to create a more sustainable and higher-end use for our recycled glass, but also our beach renewers would see this as a possible way to have the readily available supply of beach-quality material they can use on a regular basis to plug in gaps along the beach. “Typically, beach renourishment projects are done on five- to 10-year cycles, and they require permitting and huge capital investments,” he adds. “They are getting more expensive because it involves dredging of sand from offshore, which also can impact coral reefs.” The question is whether the glass can be produced to the needed quality level in a cost-effective manner, Bresee says. “One of the big challenges that the project faces is that we don’t have any glass processors in south Florida,” he adds. The residential construction slump of recent times notwithstanding, Broward County also has a large C&D debris-processing infrastructure. “There are a lot of private companies that do a good job at recycling construction-and-demolition debris, whether it’s wood or concrete or metal, so there is a real strong infrastructure in place,” says Bresee. “That’s good for the county because we’re able to claim credit for a lot of those materials when we report our recycling efforts every year to the state.” Recycling tires is another effort generating positive results. A 2003 study shows that more than 15 million of the 290 million scrap tires generated in the US came from Florida. Illegally dumped tires create an environmental and health hazard, as well as a breeding ground for mosquitoes. Tires in Broward County are recycled into new products, such as rubberized asphalt, mats, and playground surfaces, with tire chips used as landscaping mulch, fuel, and daily landfill cover. Broward County also has a 320-facility institutional recycling program, which Bresee believes is one of the largest in the country. Among those entities with which the WRS has a local agreement is the Broward County School District—the nation’s sixth largest—to pick up its recyclables from the county’s schools and deliver them to the MRF. “We’re probably unique and one of the first counties in the country to reach out to our school system the way we did. This program is a win-win in that it allows the school system to realize almost a million dollars a year in avoided disposal savings by recycling,” says Bresee. Other entities include the county park system and community college campuses. On its Web site, WRS encourages residents to recycle materials they no longer want by donating them to local non-profit organizations, such as Trash to Treasure, which accepts donations of clean scrap and redistributes them as educational and artistic resources. Designing Programs to Meet Changing Times “Going across state lines is interesting because of different rules and different approaches,” says Brian Tippetts, Solid Waste Director for La Crosse County. “I think we have a leg up on people who don’t work across state lines, because we can understand the best dynamics of each state better than those that don’t have that sort of interaction.” The entire solid waste program encompasses a sanitary landfill, ash monofill, C&D landfill, clean woodwaste processing, and yardwaste disposal. Wisconsin has a “responsible units” recycling program, Tippetts says. State statute establishes that [to be] the town, village, and city—not the county,” he says. “The towns, villages, and cities can collaborate with other entities, private or public, including the county. “Wisconsin has 72 counties and nearly 1,100 responsible units. And in our county, every town, village, and city is its own responsible authority for recycling. We have 18, so we have 18 somewhat different recycling programs for aluminum, steel cans, paper, plastic, glass, and other materials. “Some communities recycle newspapers; some do not. Some do plastics; some do not. They all have programs for steel, glass, and aluminum.” There are three primary haulers in the county and six in the service area. Waste Management has a fiber MRF in La Crosse County; containers are taken to a MRF outside of the county. A small, independent local hauler has a dual-stream MRF in the county; the other companies piggyback on one of those two or use a vendor outside the area, Tippetts says.The cleanliness of the sorts depends on each community, says Tippetts. “Some communities mix materials; other communities mix most of their materials,” he says. “Other communities require things to be kept separate.” La Crosse County has a variety of recycling efforts
“We have a fairly active salvage program by our private landfill operator,” says Tippetts. “We pull out hundreds of tons of metals and wood. We have a dual-stream wood-recycling program—we keep the dimensional lumber, the brush we’re more apt to make into mulch. Some of the untreated, unpainted lumber is pulled up from the demolition landfill, and if we can grind it up economically, we do it. “Pallets and crates are all ground up and most are sold for boiler fuel. Some of it is sold for mulch. The brush itself can be blended and sold as boiler fuel or used as mulch.” Additionally, La Crosse has been recycling tires since the late 1980s following the discovery of a strain of encephalitis in the county that bears its name. “Most species of mosquitoes don’t carry encephalitis; but tires are an ideal breeding ground for them, so we were pretty aggressive in organizing permanent collections for tires,” says Tippetts. As for the markets for the recyclables, Tippetts says the county does manifest tracking of its e-waste; officials are confident it’s being handled responsibly. “There’s one vendor who we didn’t use because he sent out of the country and couldn’t tell us more,” he says. “It could have saved us money; but if you can’t answer the question, we don’t feel comfortable using you even though it’s less expensive. But our other products stay local.” Steel cans are pulled from the wastestream with a magnet at the county’s solid waste disposal waste-to-energy program and recycled. Steel cans go to a processor in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area. Paper is recycled locally. “Wisconsin is a big consumer of wastepaper,” notes Tippetts. “Paper companies in Wisconsin are almost begging for more scrap paper—they need a lot more scrap paper than what they are getting.” Bringing the Public Onboard Through the curbside program, Denton recycles single-stream items, including newspaper, other paper, cardboard, and No. 1 and No. 2 plastic at a contamination rate of no more than 10%, notes Vance Kemler, Denton’s general manager of solid waste services. “We’ve had a strong education program to attempt to get to that level,” he adds. Community outreach programs include a public schools education program whereby “we’re educating at a young age and getting some immediate and better long-term return,” Kemler says. Additional community outreach includes multimedia education and marketing. Denton has a volume-based refuse collection program for the residential market. There are three sizes of containers—large, medium, and small—with different pricing. “You can reduce your garbage bill by producing less trash and increasing the amount of recyclables,” says Kemler. “We have carts for recyclables—the standard 35-gallon and the 60-gallon. We have once-a-week curbside collection of recyclables and once-a-week refuse collection.” Items accepted for recycling include aluminum, steel, and tin cans; glass bottles and jars; plastic bottles and jugs; newspapers and magazines; junk mail and phone books; office and school paper; and cardboard and boxboard. While Denton does automated and semiautomated collection, the separating and processing is done by Allied Waste Services. More than a year ago, the city instituted a weekly collection of household hazardous waste that includes such items as general household cleaners, automotive fluids and fuels, lawn and garden chemicals, pool chemicals, paint, and related supplies, among others. Denton recycles such items through its ReUse Store, where residents can pick up reusable items from this collection for free. Additionally, there are five electronics waste drop-off facilities to further support recycling efforts. There is no charge to recycle the e-waste. “We have a vendor that handles the deconstruction and processing of the electronics, and we verified this contractor does not ship them to China or that area and has a verified program for processing in the Dallas market,” says Kemler.
Denton also composts and recycles sludge and yardwaste. The city maintains a separate yardwaste collection program, which—in conjunction with waste-activated biosolids recycled from the Pecan Creek Water Reclamation Plant—forms the basis for the production of Dyno Dirt and Dyno Soil, a line of soil-conditioning and compost products. They’re made and sold by the Water Utilities Beneficial Reuse Division and have exemplary soil conditioning and moisture retention properties, providing a slow release of fertilizer. Denton also engages in commercial business recycling of cardboard and paper fiber. “We have a public/private partnership that should have a processing facility capable of 50,000 tons per year on the ground and operating this summer on our landfill site,” says Kemler. Pratt Industries, a subsidiary of Australian-based Visy Industries, will build the facility at the Denton Municipal Landfill. To date, the city hauls its recyclables to Fort Worth at an estimated carbon release of three tons per week. The country’s seventh-largest packaging and paper company, Pratt uses the paper fiber for its own box and paper plants throughout the United States. Plastics and metals will be sold, notes Kemler. Innovative Programs, Increased Diversion Folsom’s recyclables are handled through a privately owned MRF—BLT Enterprises—in Sacramento, where it is put on a series of conveyors. Fine matter is separated by screen from the rest of the material, which is placed on another series of conveyors for manual separation. There’s some pneumatic separation as well, says Richard Shaw, Folsom’s environmental specialist supervisor. Folsom offers curbside recycling—a blue can for commingled recyclables and a green one for greenwaste—as well as community drop-off sites for recyclables. Folsom’s other programs include a neighborhood cleanup program by appointment whereby a crew picks up such large bulk items as greenwaste and appliances, as well as other types of refuse, such as lawnmowers, tires, and barbeque grills. By appointment, the city also has a door-to-door household hazardous waste collection program for picking up batteries, oils, paints, antifreeze, and electronic waste. Folsom provides drop-off locations for residents recycling large amounts of cardboard after moving into a new place—so much so that they can’t fit it all into recycling containers. The city also sponsors backyard composting and a mulch-mower rebate program in which residents can take a one-hour class and receive a free compost bin or rebates towards the purchase of a gas or electric mulching lawnmower. Folsom has what Shaw calls a unique C&D recycling program. “It’s a two-tiered process where we give the building permit applicant a choice as to how they want to separate the materials,” Shaw says. “With the first option, they can defer any permit fees related to recycling and the accountability for recycling to a permitted hauler who then has the task of being responsible for maintaining 50% diversion in each job site. “There’s a threshold level of $100,000 valuation for whether or not it’s a covered project, or they can go with the second option and self-haul the waste to a recycling facility and then report the numbers directly to the building permit applicant or job-site manager. It’s been successful.” Shaw says Folsom’s single-stream recycling is recording about 10% contamination. Because the recycling market varies from month to month, percentages of recyclables sent to local or domestic markets vary in comparison with foreign markets, Shaw notes. “There’s a large emphasis on Asian exports here,” he adds. “The Chinese economy is expanding, so much of it going to Asia now—probably more than 50%.” Collection costs—including cost per truck amortized over five years, drivers’ wages with benefits, maintenance, repairs, and fuel divided by the tons per year collected—amounts to $73 a ton, says Shaw. “If you deduct the revenue received from the recyclables, it amounts to $51 per ton,” he adds. From Drop-Off to Curbside The recycling program consists of 21 unmanned drop-off units where residents can leave aluminum, corrugated cardboard, chipboard, newsprint, household batteries, magazines, tin cans, and No. 1 and No. 2 plastics, The recycling program processes 3,500 tons yearly. Five communities in the area provide curbside recycling. “It helps to complement the drop offs but certainly not enough at this point in time,” says Steve Christman, executive director. The curbside program results in much more cleaner sorts than the unmanned drop-offs, Christman notes. “We do suffer from some contamination because it’s an unmanned situation,” he says. “We contract with a private service provider to service that program, and he is running about up to 6% contamination.” While all recyclables belong to the service provider upon collection, under a new contract he will reimburse the district for 10% of the value of recovered fiber. Christman says all materials are reused domestically. Hazardous household waste is handled on Friday mornings, at which time the staff accepts the various materials that are dropped off, while a chemist from Pollution Control Industries is onsite to evaluate the material. Christman says the district’s goal is to expand the program as to service both east and west sides of its area. E-waste is also taken as a drop-off material. The district cites studies that point out that in a single day, 130,000 computers were discarded and, in 2005, approximately 93.9 million computers and television sets were in storage, while 288.3 million units were in use and 229.7 units were collected for end-of-life management. The district sends collected e-waste to a contractor who prepares it for processing. Hard drives are rendered useless for security purposes by drilling them. Components are given a second life through a variety of applications: Screws, clips, and metal parts are sold as scrap; circuit boards can be placed into new units; plastic housings from CPUs may be used as roadbed fill; and CRT glass is used to make new glass. “E-waste is continuing to impact all of us from a budgetary standpoint,” Christman points out. In all, the average cost per ton for recyclables for the Northeast Indiana Solid Waste Management District is $98. In its recycling program, the district charges a $5 per computer user fee. The e-waste is palletized in the shop and loaded out to Chesapeake Recycling. “They are able to certify to us and guarantee destruction of the hard drives, which is very important to us as a public agency,” says Christman. “When people and businesses bring their computers in, we can give them assurances their computers won’t be back out on the street.” Other items the Northeast Indiana Solid Waste Management District recycles include shoes, which are transported to a Texas vendor who sends them to needy people domestically and abroad. Funds generated by the sale of the shoes are donated by the district to cover the costs of housing animals in local shelters. Paint and related materials are recycled for a $5 vehicle fee. The district’s reuse program offers usable latex paint to nonprofit organizations. Automotive fluids, such as oil, are likewise recycled for a $5 vehicle fee, along with such household hazardous wastes as fluorescent bulbs. The bulbs are transferred to a processor, where a pressurized machine breaks the glass and removes the powder by vacuum. Clean glass and metal tips are recycled into a variety of products. Mercury is extracted from the powder and sent to a refiner. The remaining powder is used as filler in concrete. Yardwaste brought to the district’s recycling facilities is composted and sold for $5 per cubic yard. Brush is chipped into usable mulch and made available at compost lots. “We try to recover as much as we can handle,” says Christman. “A small district like this would have to do something very costly to try to handle the sorts in-house.” The cost for a rural recycling program is $441,000 a year, he says. “At one time, years ago, this program cost $50 a month. It was one of the most cost-effective programs in the state. That’s certainly not true any longer.” Innovative Program The solid waste operations encompass collections, a landfill, and a small recycling operation. The recycling operation is a manned drop-off center, open Tuesday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. There, the city accepts cardboard, newspaper, magazines, office paper, metal, glass, car batteries, and aluminum cans. When there’s a sufficient volume of newspapers, Midland Recycling in Tulsa will retrieve it. “They also pay for our aluminum and copper. About the only thing we don’t get anything for is glass,” says David Horinek, solid waste superintendent. Ponca City tries to maintain clean sorts as much as possible. “That’s why I have an attendant there,” says Horinek. “He helps educate the customers on a continuing basis to make sure things get put in the proper spots. He periodically checks the different boxes and Dumpsters; if there’s something in there that shouldn’t be, he tries to catch it right then. We try to keep the commingling down. But even in a manned operation, we’ll end up with people dumping bags of commingled stuff, and when that happens, sometimes we lose the whole box.” The only curbside pickup offered is for regular residential trash service, although during eight weeks in the winter, the city will send a vacuum truck to pick up leaves residents have raked into piles near the curb. The leaves are unloaded, and a tractor and disc is used to spread them into the soil in the borrow area. A few months later, it’s used for landfill cover. Every two years, Ponca City has a free household hazardous waste and electronics collection. “They come here, fill out a survey, and we start unloading it,” Horinek says. That waste then goes to Clean Harbors Environmental Service in Wichita, KS, for final disposal. “We try to cull out the latex paint from the oil-based paint. If it’s dried up, it’s tossed in one rolloff as trash, and if it’s still good it’s tossed in another rolloff where we’ll take it back at a later date, bulk it, and give it away as 5-gallon buckets of paint The way we put it is, ‘You won’t ever get the same shade twice,’” Horinek says. Ponca City started doing electronics recycling four years ago. “I’ve got increasing numbers of people who are bringing computer stuff to my recycling center, and my attendant started collecting it as they were dropping it off,” says Horinek. “I’ve got about 10 yards of electronics sitting here.” Electronics are taken by Natural Evolution, an electronic recycling company in Tulsa. Ponca City has a barter arrangement: “They park a semi trailer out there and after we’ve taken all of their hazardous stuff, they drive up and a couple of my guys will help them off load the electronics.” Horinek says recycling will “never pay for itself” in his region. Looking at seven months’ worth of data, he noted $19,000 in revenues. “There is recycling in Oklahoma City and Tulsa, but the bulk of it is subsidized,” he says. “People do it because it’s good for the environment, but it will never pay for itself; it will be subsidized by some form. We absorb the cost of the personnel and upkeep. “When you look at labor, the electricity used, the gas and oil we use to haul it 90 miles from here to Tulsa, the roll-off trucks we use to transport it—I’m sure $19,000 doesn’t pay for the gas and maintenance on the trucks.” Being good stewards of the environment is the incentive for residents to recycle, despite no curbside service, says Horinek. “We’re seeing people who grew up here come back to retire,” he says. “They are coming from the East and West coasts where recycling is either mandated or there’s economics of scale for the programs. They’ve picked up the habits and want to continue to recycle.” Carol Brzozowski is based in Coral Springs, FL. MSW - July/August 2008
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