In order to plan material recovery facilities for the future, it helps to know what we'll be recovering and for what use. From there, it's simple—or is it?

By Lynn Merrill

Take the life of a cardboard box. It begins its career in a slurpy mass of pulp, and after several passes through various rolling mills where more and more water is squeezed from its fiber, it becomes sheets of kraft paper. Through various metamorphoses, it becomes a vessel festooned with a logo into which anything from a cell phone to a home theater may be placed. It journeys long distances in cargo hulls and containers until it reaches a distribution center that sends the box and contents to your local retailer where, some Saturday afternoon, you pick it off a shelf and bring it and the contents home. The contents stay on your hip or in your living room, and unless you're a total packrat, the box unceremoniously ends up in the recycling bin, or worse, in the trashcan.

With rare exception, most of the materials that join our now-battered and crushed box in the blue can were used to transport something to our homes and businesses that we consumed while discarding the container. Whether it's a piece of paper with advertising for refinancing your house or a juice can or bottle, the bulk of what makes up the recycling stream was used to deliver something to us. Once consumed either orally or visually, it has concluded its useful life.

A century ago, what we consumed we generally produced locally and didn't have to ensure that the product's integrity had to survive a thousand-mile journey, so packaging wasn't an issue. But with the exception of those who still grow backyard fruits and vegetables, even a trip to the local organically touted farmers' market generates plastic bags to transport those baby carrots and pesticide-free apples home. As the cost of transporting something expands with rising fuel, labor, and capital costs, manufacturers seek ways to deliver more product and less packaging.

Take, for example, computer software. When software first came out, it was delivered in an elegant and durable slipcovered case with a binder festooned with tabbed operating documents and plastic inserts that held the precious disks for all eternity. The software package looked more like a book that would stay on your shelf next to your first-edition classics than something that would become outdated. More than likely, on some dusty shelf, there's a decade-old software package you can't bear to throw out because it looks so lasting. In contrast, today's software package is a box about 50% smaller than what you were buying a couple of years ago that contains some cardboard baffles to hold the CD so it doesn't rattle. Some package designer figured out that it could ship twice as much product in the same volume by downsizing or lightweighting the package. Concurrently it also figured that smaller packages mean more packages on a shelf and therefore more product in a retailer's store.

What's Coming in the Front Door

If we think about the changes that occurred in packaging over the last 10 years and then think of how the contents of the blue container also have changed, we begin to understand the challenge facing those who will be trying to design material recovery facilities (MRF) in the future. Understanding the material stream and predicting what will be economically recoverable will mean we have to build a tremendous amount of flexibility into our MRFs if we don't want to have large quantities of capital tied up in dinosaur equipment because what was tipped on the floor changedÑand we didn't.

More and more information is being generated and delivered electronically, and although there's little doubt that paper will remain a primary packaging medium for advertising, Sunday-morning funnies, and mud-slinging election brochures into the immediate future, the ratio between information delivered (the product) and the amount of paper that's used to deliver it will probably change. If you receive a hundred e-mails a day, you've received the delivery of the information but didn't generate 100 sheets of paper to get the information. But if you store and file, you've now generated a computer file stored on a read/write CD. In several years, when you've amassed a collection of disks, those "packages" will need to be either discarded or recycled. How do we recover those out of our pile on the tipping floor?

If you've designed your system to recover the various grades of paper, the impact of high-end information delivery via electronics may change the use of office paper, resulting in less office mix grade papers and more lower-end news grades. This could impact both your sorting system and your bottom-line return on investment. Although computers, cell phones, and hand-helds continue to grow in numbers, the issue of how to handle them in the wastestream is now under debate, and MRFs will have to play a part. In the January/February 2004 issue of MSW Management, Contributing Editor W.L. Rathje discussed the issue of CRTs as hazardous waste, mentioning that by next year, "some 300 million personal computers manufactured after 1985 will be obsolete."

Currently most jurisdictions handle the increasing number of CRTs and other electronics through drop-off programs and "electronic roundup" events. But at some point, solid waste professionals' expectation that consumers will transport these items from their homes to a roundup event ignores the fact that sooner or later, it's going to come to some facility for recovery. By some estimates, there are between three and five major electronic systems in every household, including televisions and computers. Expecting 100 million residents to transport these items to an event, coupled with the labor- and cost-intensiveness of these events, is unrealistic. This looks like we've gone back to the days when Saturday mornings included a trip to the town dump, and getting rid of your trash meant a trip to the local ravineÑonly now the ravine is an urban alley, and the burden of cleanup falls on the cash-strapped municipality picking up discarded electronics instead of trash.

In order to address the "new" packaging issues, MRFs of the future will need to not only handle the traditional streams of paper, plastics, metals, and, for the immediate future, glass, but also address the area of new materials that will need to be recovered. A responsive and responsible waste collection system that focuses on material recovery should include the new materials in the blue can. It's not realistic to expect separate collection systems for these new materials when the trend in recycling has been to increase the types of materials programs accept accept for recycling, reduce the number of collection trucks in front of the house, and maximize the amount of material collected per stop.

Growing Recovery

For Mike Long, executive director of the Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio in Grove City, OH, the 20 to 30% diversion rates he sees with traditional programs is a ceiling that needs to be pushed through. "It's very difficult to move beyond 30%," he says. "We've got to look to the future and find different ways, more efficient methods, and better technology to reduce this wastestream. The MRF has got to work as part of the overall system to reduce the wastestream and move beyond 30%."

In Ohio, if any agency reaches 60% diversion, much of the solid waste regulations and licenses are no longer applied to that agency. "As we are doing our planning for any new MRF technology, we've set a goal that there has to be 60% diversion, and we are letting that be our guiding force as we develop new facilities," Long says. "That gets us two places: One would be a boutique MRF that brings in only very selective material, primarily paper fiber. The other would be what we would call 'the dirty MRF.' The key to the dirty MRF is to figure out something to do with all of that nasty stuff that's the 30% in the middle that you would like to recycle but never could before. We're talking about a mixed bag of material, very rich in fiber and organics, which can, I believe, be recovered for energy value, composted, or something of that nature."

Long now is seeing generation rates approaching 8 lb. per person, a possible result from the changing lifestyles. "I don't know if that's unique to our environment right here in central Ohio just by the nature that we are a host community for economic development," he remarks. "A lot of people come here and leave waste and then go home. I am not sure exactly why that's happening, but what's scary to me is even though our diversion rate may be increasing, if the per-capita generation is going up, we're going to lose the battle and the war. We may be lulled into a false sense of security because we are watching the wrong measure of performance."

Watching the dump end of the collection truck, Long sees a lot of opportunity in the stream of materials. "I sit at our landfill and watch what comes out of those trucks, and it's just unbelievable," he states. "Those trucks open up and it's just a sea of corrugated and paper. Well over 50% of what's going in there is paper, and it makes no sense why it's happening, which is why we're being driven toward developing a fibers MRF and giving economic incentives to keep it out of the landfill. We tell those collectors that we've got a different place you can tip at a lower rate, but you've got to do a little bit of work on your end to rearrange these routes so we get less contamination."

To further get the economics of MRF processing down, Long feels there needs to be an emphasis on more automation in the sorting line. "Mentally we think that there's got to be more things like robotics in sorting," he states. "We can't be in a situation where we are using all manual labor to be sorting at some of these MRFs because of state health and safety regulations. Just the cost of doing that is going to be prohibitive, so we think there needs to be more research and development on sorting technology, using automated identification technology, and robotics." Bag opening technology is also an area that Long sees needing improvement.

Where Is the New Technology?

The new technology necessary for improving the bottom line on both cost and quality will need to achieve at least a 90% recovery rate, says Charles Ramer, coordinator for Portage County Solid Waste District in Kent, OH. "The biggest debate these days is single stream versus dual stream," he says. "Our paper is segregated from the bottles, cans, and plastics; we've always maintained that segregation because of product quality. As soon as any of the containers start to contaminate the paper stream, our paper prices plummet. Some of the new technology in the single stream processing is impressive, and as long as the residual is down below 10%, I think that's acceptable."

Although the initial capital cost of the new technology might be high, the promised impact of lower cost to process is attractive but not yet available. "It's becoming increasingly expensive to process the different sorts of paper by hand," observes Ramer. "Everyone was anticipating that there would be some technology that would save MRFs financially. We had anticipated that mixed-waste processing would be more successful or more optical—sort of the StarScreen technology for segregating paper. But none of the technology I have seen has been cost justifiable. The fact is, for at least the next five to ten years, we're resigned to the fact that our MRF is going to be labor intensive."

Ramer sees several issues that will plague processing for the next 10 years. "One of them is glass," he states. "If you talk to the glass-industry people, they say it's not going to increase, but it's not going to decrease as a percentage of the wastestream. You talk to the plastics people, and they say that glass is going to be nonexistent in five years. We are going to anticipate that we are going to continue to take glass, but it's so destructive to the machinery, it's so expensive to sort, and it's worth so little. I wish the glass didn't exist. The other thing that has been a bane for us and a good portion of our residual stream is 3 through 7 plastic. We don't believe that a reliable market exists right now, and it's such an expense to sort it into those different grades."

Changing packaging continues to be a factor in planning for processing in the future. "We struggle with the change in the variety of packaging," Ramer states. "We went through a period where the mills wouldn't accept wet strength material so we had to pull it and throw it away. Then we went through a period where all of the glossy inserts had to be pulled from the newspaper. There has been so much competition for packaging on the shelf that saw packages that had a little blinking light in them. When we are dealing with packages that have that type of technology built into them, that's just absurd. How are we supposed to recycle that package? There's a tremendous demand for the public for full-spectrum recycling of Christmas trees, TVs, small appliances, computers, and tires. Many of them can be recycled, and many cannot, but the public would like to believe that there is recycling value in each one of those things. It's difficult to convince them that there just is not."

Back Inside

The debate between single - or multiple - stream collection leads back inside the building. As haulers grapple with the staggering cost of running multiple collection trucks, the concept of dirty MRFs is getting a second look. "We quickly identified that the most expensive portion of waste handling is the hauling side," says Steve Viny, president of Norton Environmental in Independence, OH. "The traditional recycling programs that were multiple bin required one truck to pick up the garbage and another to pick up the recyclables. Our goal was to design MRFs that were single stream so that you serviced the homeowner no more times than you serviced him for garbage alone."

The result of that concept was a facility constructed to service Medina County, OH. "Our goal was to work with the existing infrastructure. We didn't want the haulers having to buy new trucks and take some of the small private guys and effectively put them out of business," says Viny. "At this mixed - waste processing facility, we remove recyclables, compostables, and a fuel fraction. Our recycling rate is right around 50%."

Running the entire wastestream over a belt resulted in the need to go back into the community to keep certain components out of that stream. "We found small-quantity medical waste from emergency-care clinics and veterinary clinics," Viny says. "Medina County passed an ordinance that said there is no small-quantity generator exemption and that sharps must be disposed of in sharps containers. We also had an issue with a company that used rags soaked in solvent. They would take rags that were laden with solvent and put them into plastic bags. When it entered the bag opener in our plant, that noxious odor was released."

Viny recommends that the MRF of the future design be designed for flexibility and change. "At the Medina plant, we extracted traditional recyclables," he says. "After running the facility for a while, the mills came to us and said they would like to look at a mixed paper grade. Then we noticed we had a lot fine material that we separated through our trommel. We ran some tests and found that the material was extremely compostable, so we ended up building Ohio's only Class 1 compost facility. Recently we had discussions with a local power plant, and we've designed a system for extracting the mixed grade of paper and film plastics. A trend in the future is certain end users adding sorting equipment to enable MRFs to separate out a more widely varied product. They [end users] will pay less for it, but they'll take more materials."

If It Isn't Quality, It's Just Garbage

Maximizing both the quantity of materials processed and the quality of the end product will continue to be the double-edged sword of the future. Seeking that happy balance, with a changing material mix in the front door, will challenge even the most - dedicated MRF operators. Glass continues to be the poor stepchild, at once both recyclable and problematic. "In Oregon, if a material doesn't make it to a mill for recovery, we don't get credit for it in our goals," says Jeff Murray, vice president of business development for Far West Fibers in Hillsborough, OR. "We're very sensitive to quality because if it ends up as garbage, it doesn't count in those numbers. We put an emphasis on cleanliness of material coming in, that the mixes we receive we can truly get the material apart. We've found that once glass enters the system, it causes havoc for the mills and processing. The broken glass tends to stick with the paper. We've come to the conclusion that glass is not allowed to be mixed with paper and programs. That was the single action that will help preserve the integrity of the material. If we cannot produce a product the mills want, we will put ourselves out of business."

Murray feels bottom - line costs at the curb might ultimately determine the fate of various components. "For programs to last, we need to be efficient in how we collect the materials," he says. "The ratepayer doesn't want us to be collecting stuff and turning around and throwing it away. We believe that wholeheartedly. They would like there to be a purpose for why they have done this extra action. With glass, you cannot always promise that anymore. Nobody wants to give up a material at the curb, but some materials just aren't meant to be together. We haven't seen the technology that will really separate the glass for recovery from paper. There may be ways to get the bulk out of it, but there is just a lot of lost product when you include glass with paper."

Author Lynn Merrill is director of public services for the City of San Bernardino, CA.

MSW - May/June 2004