Decisions, decisions! What’s a municipal solid waste manager to do with recyclables?

By George Leposky

Every combination and permutation of recycling options has its adherents—with a seemingly random distribution of diverse solutions across the land. “From location to location, despite regional borders and socioeconomic circumstances, there is no one definitive answer on how recycling is handled,” declares Tracy Timmerman, vice president and general manager of the refuse division of McNeilus Companies Inc., of Dodge Center, MN, a manufacturer of truck bodies.

This diversity in recycling methods has spawned diverse collection-equipment technologies, along a spectrum ranging from trailers that a pickup truck can pull, through high-tech compartmentalized trucks with mechanized dividers and tipping devices, to a sophisticated tractor-trailer combination with an automated arm for hoisting and tipping loaded carts.

Dave Kutschinski, director of fleet equipment performance for Waste Management Inc., based in Houston, TX, buys vehicles to collect residential recyclables at curbside from 10 million households all over North America.

“We write the specifications for these trucks based on current available technology,” he explains. “A lot of our requirements are dictated by the local municipality or county that tells us how they want recycling done, and what the local infrastructure is to handle the material that’s collected.

“Sometimes this is mandated by the city’s franchise agreement with a municipal recycling facility (MRF). If a full-service MRF is in the vicinity and can handle commingled recyclables, we would go that way. If it’s a limited MRF, we would need compartmentalized trucks so we can separate what we collect before we bring it to the MRF.”

Dropoff: Not Just Rural
Many solid waste managers think drop-off recycling programs, using trailers with multiple bins for participant self-sorting, are appropriate only in rural areas and small towns. That’s the most common application, concedes Bob Hemphill, sales manager for Dempster Industries Inc., of Beatrice, NB, but he says such equipment also has a place in suburbs, in constricted big-city locations where a normal refuse truck won’t fit, and in restricted areas off limits to normal collection arrangements.

Dempster’s AlleyCat trailers have a modular design, based on a 1-cubic-yard plastic bin. The firm sells four models: four bins in a single row with a single axle, six bins (two three-bin rows) with a single axle, 10 bins (two five-bin rows) with double axles, and 14 bins (two seven-bin rows) with triple axles.

“We’ve got a trailer for every size application,” Hemphill says. “We created the four-bin model for a university that needed a trailer small and light enough to pull down the campus sidewalks behind a utility buggy. We’ve also been contacted by a national park with 22 separate campgrounds and picnic areas. The park staff can’t put a big trailer in every one of them, and doesn’t need to. The four-bin trailer is ideal where they’re collecting mostly cans and bottles, such as [during] fairs and other special events.”

The six-bin trailer fits into a single space in a parking lot. Hemphill says it’s ideal for small towns and military bases, “including one [base] in downtown Washington, DC, that bought 10 of them.”

The 10-bin version is the most popular, Hemphill says. The 14-bin trailer is for communities with a relatively high population density, and for rural areas with a long haul to the processing plant. All four models are light enough to be towed by a .75-ton pickup truck with a standard suspension.

Protecting the Contents
Each AlleyCat bin has a door in the top through which people deposit their materials. The door protects the recyclables from precipitation and small animals. A roof covers each row of bins. At the MRF, the roof lifts on gas struts like a car’s hatchback. Then a forklift removes each individual bin and dumps its contents into the appropriate floor bunker or Gaylord box (a 64-cubic-foot cardboard box that some MRFs use).

The AlleyCat trailer chassis can be galvanized—dipped in a big pool of liquid zinc heated to 850† F—to seal them against corrosion. “Dempster Industries got its start in 1878 by making windmills,” Hemphill says. “We had them galvanized, so it took them forever to rust.”

Jim Fisher, landfill superintendent in Rush County, KS, says his AlleyCats are “practically maintenance-free, although we had to drill some holes in the bottom of the bins so water would drain out. In winter, snow packs on top of the lids. When it melts, it runs down into the bins.”

Rush County, located 150 miles northwest of Wichita, has just 3,200 people scattered across 900 square miles of corn, milo, and wheat fields. Sixteen-hundred live in the county seat, La Crosse. Other towns in the county range in population from 60 to 300. The nearest MRF is 35 miles away in Great Bend.

The county operates three 10-bin AlleyCats, each equipped with six removable bins (three on a side) and, at the rear, an optional “quad” stationary bin for cardboard that occupies the space of four removable bins. One trailer remains permanently in La Crosse; the others rotate through the smaller towns at two-week intervals. “We publish a yearly schedule telling everybody when those trailers will be in their town and for how long, and listing what recyclables we’ll take and what we won’t take,” Fisher says.

“I’m very happy with the cooperation we’ve gotten. We’re in our third year of operation. We took in 60 tons the first year, and over 120 tons the second.

“In the first quarter of this year, we collected 15 tons—but our collection is seasonal. It will double through the summer. More comes in when the weather is warm than when it’s cold, with snow and ice. Also, many farm folks bring recyclables in once or twice a year rather than weekly.”

Fisher’s collection program separates cardboard, magazines, newspaper, office paper, plastic, ferrous metal cans, aluminum cans, and brown glass. He says participants do a good job of sorting and “we’ve not had a major problem with household trash being dumped” in the recycling bins.

Managing in Michigan
Another rural county with a recycling program, Crawford County, MI, operates four 18-foot-long trailers and recently ordered another, all from the Geneva Products division of National Feeding Systems Inc., in Valley City, ND. Each of these Geneva trailers has five compartments capable of being partitioned, with loading lids on top and unloading doors on the sides. (Geneva also sells 10-foot trailers with three compartments and unloading doors, 14-foot trailers with four compartments and unloading doors, and 22-foot trailers with five compartments and six unloading doors.)

Crawford County, located 50 miles east of Traverse City in Michigan’s northern lower peninsula, has 576 square miles and a population of about 15,000. Bruce Patrick, the county’s environmental monitor, says the trailers are parked at township transfer centers where residents can bring recyclables during operating hours. When full, the trailers go to a recycling center in Grayling, the county seat, where workers unload and transfer the materials to semi-trailers for hauling to remote MRFs.

“People self-sort effectively,” Patrick says. “We collect cardboard, newspapers, magazines, plastic, Styrofoam, and metal in the trailers. We also collect glass at the recycling center, but not in the trailers.”

Patrick complains that Crawford County’s older Geneva trailers “tend to blister up and get rusty” from exposure to salt on the roads in winter. “The new one has special undercoating to put on the front, which should help. We’ll use that as a substitute in rotation with the others while we get them refinished. Then all five will look pretty nice—and we’ll keep them rinsed off so this won’t happen again.” The company’s Web site says Geneva products are “finish-ground and phosphatized washed for corrosion resistance prior to applying an industrial quality enamel.”

Balancing Bismarck’s Budget
Bismarck, the capital city of North Dakota, has 15 Geneva recycling trailers—three 18-foot models and a dozen 14-foot models—at 12 locations on municipal property to collect aluminum and tin cans, corrugated cardboard, newspapers, magazines, office paper, and telephone books. In addition, the city picks up cardboard and office paper from businesses.

“We aren’t a full recycling center,” explains Galen Bren, public works recycling specialist. “We don’t take glass or plastics at this time.”

In 2004, recycling brought more than $60,000 into Bismarck’s coffers—an 82% increase from 2003 recycling revenues of $33,000.

The city’s 58,000 residents deposited 521 tons of material in the recycling trailers in 2004, up from 410 tons in 2003, and 281 tons in 2002. Bren says newspaper comprised 60% of the tonnage and yielded 64% of the dollars.

Dennis Albers, fleet manager for the department of public works, says the trailers are “sturdy and well-made. The doors the citizens use are big enough that they don’t have to force recyclables in there, and the unloading doors are big enough that we don’t have to struggle to unload the trailers.

“We found the trailers were so long that they dragged on the asphalt when we went through the valley gutters at intersections, so we welded on extra steel skid plates to keep the bumper and the back of the trailer from dragging. That solved the problem.”

Bridging the Divide
Some companies bridge the divide between drop-off and curbside collection of recyclables. Kann Manufacturing Corp. of Guttenberg, IA, supplies “a full range of recycling collection bodies, from the simplest manual loading multi-compartment drop-off containers to the more sophisticated fully automated single-stream recycling truck,” says Ken Goedken, general manager.

The Kann Curb Sorter series includes models designed for drop-off recycling collection programs and curb sort routes. They can have two to 11 compartments, depending on community needs. Each compartment is loaded from the side in a manual or semi-automated manner. The individual compartments are separated by bulkhead panels or have separate, independent containers that can be unloaded by rear or side-dump methods.

Kann also makes semi-automated multi-compartment frontloader and sideloader series of truck bodies that allow a single vehicle and operator to collect multiple streams of solid waste, recyclables, and/or green waste at the same time. Each individual compartment has its own compactor. A patented adjustable floor system permits adjustment of each compartment’s volume to accommodate various routes and commodities.

Shifting Gears in Miami
The city of Miami, FL, had to change the way it collected recyclables when the company to which it delivered them went out of business in 2000. “We were using Eager Beavers [from Eager Beaver Trailers of Lake Wales, FL] and sorting plastic, aluminum, tin, and three colors of glass at the curb,” says Felix Carmenate, recycling and garbage pickup supervisor in Miami’s solid waste department.

Miami signed a new agreement with BFI Waste Systems of North America, a subsidiary of Allied Waste Industries Inc., of Scottsdale, AZ. BFI’s Miami recycling center can accept commingled materials, so now the collection crew sets newspaper aside and commingles everything else. Using 10 recycling trucks purchased in 2001 from Crane Carrier Co. of Tulsa, OK, Miami collects recyclables from over 66,000 residences, capturing close to 53 tons of material in a typical week

“The Crane trucks have bins along the sides,” Carmenate explains. “On a residential street where traffic is light, the driver works one side and the laborer works the other. They place the recyclables into the bins. When the bins are full—every 10 homes or so—they lift them over the top and drop the load inside the truck.”

A partition across the width of the truck divides it into two compartments, separating the newspaper from the other materials. The partition is adjustable from a 50% split to 75% to 25% in either direction. “We adjust the partition for different areas of the city, depending on the mix of recyclables we get,” Carmenate says. “It’s a push-button hydraulic system. We can move the partition forward or backward without climbing in, and we can tell whether it’s locked in place just by looking at it.”

Multiple Body Styles
McNeilus, a subsidiary of Oshkosh Truck Corporation of Oshkosh, WI, makes two kinds of multi-compartment recycling-truck bodies for curbside sorting—non-compacting and compacting.

The non-compacting bodies come in 33-cubic-yard and 38-cubic-yard capacities, with movable interior vertical walls that can create up to four compartments.

The compacting bodies come in 34-cubic-yard and 40-cubic-yard capacities, split horizontally into an upper and a lower compartment. “The bottom compartment is for fiber, paper, and cardboard; the top is for glass, plastic, steel, and aluminum,” explains Tracy Timmerman. “This unit has a dump body with a single front-mounted lift cylinder and individual tail gates. You dump one compartment, then close its tailgate, drive to the next dumping area, and open the other tailgate.”

Both types of bodies use the same chassis as garbage trucks. “It’s just a wheelbase change,” Timmerman says. “The non-compacting bodies go on a single-axle straight frame, the compacting bodies on a tandem straight frame.”

Other McNeilus body styles also are used for curbside collection of commingled recyclables, Timmerman says. “Our drop-frame bodies are friendly for recyclables. In the center where the operator drops the materials, the sill height is lower—easier to load by hand or with a cart tipper or automated arm. In addition, certain of our customers collect commingled recyclables with a normal automated truck that picks them up from a separate 96-gallon cart.”

Paying Participants Back
In Philadelphia, PA, a McNeilus 25-cubic-yard rear-load truck retrofitted with a mechanical arm, scale, and bar-code reader is being used in a pilot project to reward residents who recycle. Funding this experiment for the city is Recyclebank, a private firm that weighs residents’ recyclables and pays for them in “Recyclebank Dollars” redeemable for discount coupons from over 50 local merchants and local outlets of nationwide firms.

Ron Gonen and his partner, Patrick Fitzgerald, are Recyclebank’s principals. Columbia University in New York holds a minority stake. “I was an M.B.A. student at Columbia, and went to them with the business,” Gonen explains. “It’s a way of providing an incentive for people to recycle, while helping municipalities avoid landfill disposal fees, and helping companies such as Acme Supermarkets, FedEx Kinko’s, Shoprite, and Starbucks demonstrate community responsibility.”

Recyclebank initially distributed 36- or 64-gallon recycling containers to 600 Philadelphia households in February 2005. Each can bears a bar code. Technology on the truck reads the bar code, associates it with the address, weighs the commingled recyclables, and deposits them in the truck. Participants receive an account number that allows them to view their account online—how much they’ve recycled, and how many Recyclebank dollars they’ve earned.

“A household can earn up to 25 Recyclebank dollars each month,” Gonen says. “In the first month, we had an 85% participation rate. We averaged 26 pounds per home each week.”

With the addition of two more similarly equipped trucks, Recyclebank extended its reach to another 1,000 households in April 2005. Gonen hopes to expand elsewhere, adapting the program to whatever separation arrangements other communities may require.

Innovation in Phoenix
The STARR System automated sideloader, the only tractor-trailer combination designed specifically for refuse collection, is the brainchild of Marc Stragier, manager of research and development for Heil Environmental, a Dover Company, based in Chattanooga, TN.

During an 11-year stint with the city of Scottsdale, AZ, Stragier sought ways to decrease the cost of refuse collection. After retiring from the city, he and his wife established Government Innovators Inc., in Phoenix, AZ, to manufacture automated refuse collection equipment. In 1990, Heil bought Government Innovators and hired Stragier, who then proposed the STARR System.

After almost a decade on the market, more than 100 units have been sold. It’s especially effective in communities with long collection routes and long hauls to a MRF or landfill. Cities using the STARR System include Glendale, Mesa, and Phoenix, AZ; Pomona, CA; and Longmont, CO.

Stragier says the STARR System’s advantages include

• More payload. “With a standard three-axle truck, you’re allowed to put 34,000 pounds on the two rear axles. With a semi-trailer, you can put 20,000 pounds on each axle, so you get an extra 6,000 pounds of payload—almost 20% more.”
• Enhanced maneuverability. “A tandem-axle truck turns in an 80-foot curb-to-curb diameter. The STARR System turns in a 40-foot diameter. It never has to back up on a cul de sac to get around a parked car. It does more work in a day, so it’s more cost-effective.”
• Reduced tire wear. “A standard refuse truck spends all its time turning and wearing rubber off its eight rear tires. The STARR System doesn’t, which saves several hundred dollars a month in tire costs.”
• Tandem hauling capability. “A STARR tractor can pack more in each trailer, and haul two trailers at once to the landfill. Compared to a tandem-axle truck, that adds up to substantial savings for a long haul. The other option for long-haul situations is a transfer station, which is more costly in capital and operating costs than using the STARR System.”

To accommodate the tandem trailers, landfill operators must maintain their surfaces, Stragier concedes. “A STARR System takes a little more care in the landfill,” he says, “because it has just one driving axle, whereas a tandem-axle truck has two.”

STARR System trailers are 25 feet long. They come in two payload sizes—a 30-cubic-yard model with an interior height of 7.5 feet, and a 37-cubic-yard model a foot taller. Both models feature a packing mechanism that resembles a giant windshield wiper—a three-foot-square paddle that rotates back and forth on a vertical axis. This patented design continuously sweeps the hopper and packs the load, eliminating the need to stop to compact the refuse.

“Maintenance is also made easier, since this design doesn’t use a packer panel sliding into the body,” Stragier says. “There are no shoes, guide tracks, or guide rails to wear out, and operators never have to worry about cleaning behind the packer.”

George Leposky is a science and technology writer based in Miami, FL.

MSW - July/August 2005