Single Stream Recycling Starts

WOODBINE – On April 1, Cape May County began a new era in recycling. That’s when every municipality began tossing all recyclables – paper, glass, cans, and all types of plastics (No. 1-7) – into one truck. Welcome to single-stream recycling.
Officials at the county Municipal Utilities Authority, who tally tonnages of all recyclable materials, hope easier recycling will translate into more recycling. Statewide, zeal for recycling has flagged; tonnage for materials, like this newspaper, soda cans, and glass dipped. That means more is going into landfills, municipalities are losing rebates and paying more to dump.
Hudson Bayler, which operates the Cape May County Re Community Intermediate Processing Facility at the sanitary landfill, accomplished a seemingly amazing mechanical and engineering feat switching the facility from dual to single stream capable site in about 50 days at a cost of about $4 million.
According to Lyn Crumbock, Cape May County recycling coordinator, the plant shut down Feb. 1. Its employees went to Atlantic County Utilities Authority, also operated by Hudson Bayler, to learn the fine points of the new process. On March 28, as crews were still tweaking the machinery to begin its task on April 1, Crumbock gave the Herald a tour of the facility.
John R. Baron, Solid Waste program manager and deputy director, briefed the Cape May County League of Municipalities of the renovation at the March 26 meeting. He stressed to mayors and other officials at the meeting, the more that is recycled, the less their towns pay in tonnage.
Baron also reminded the officials that scope of recycling has broadened. The only things that cannot be recycled by the facility now are Styrofoam and wood.
Cereal boxes, paper beverage bottle and can containers, pizza boxes, and even 5-gallon cans are now accepted at the facility.
“We are really excited to get this project underway,” Baron told the Herald.
“We expect to see (recycling) rates increase from 10 to 20 percent. It will be a cost savings to the municipalities. If they are recycling more, they will get bigger rebates and save on collections,” he said.
He cited Ocean City, which saved 37 percent on collections, since only a single truck is needed to all recyclables.
“We left it up to each municipality as to the size of containers. We did not want to dally in each town,” Baron said.
Crumbock started the tour where all recycling at the facility starts, on the dumping floor. A large truck backed in, and dumped its load of cardboard, bottles, newspapers, cans and plastic. A front-end loader pushed it to one side.
When the conveyors rumbled to life, the loader dumped its commingled contents into a huge hopper.
From there, belts began traveling carrying the material upward. In a sorting room, human hands are employed to do an initial sorting of plastic bags, shredded paper (that gets added to bundles later), trash and plastics.
Onward go the recyclables, plastic bottles and cans are fetched and dropped, paper goes elsewhere.
Cans and bottles head into another sorting room, but not before a whirling optical sorter segregates all Number 1-type plastics.
Some of the old magnets are still in use to attract steel cans, while blowers shunt lighter aluminum cans farther down the line.
Floor to ceiling, at one point, the machinery is 36 feet high. Given the constraints of the present structure, Crumbock said it was amazing to witness the transformation to single-stream recycling.
Crumbock credited plant manager Jim Yezzo with being “such a stickler” as to get the maximum amount of recyclables from every ton delivered.
Figures attest to the value of such strict standards: Of 24,600 tons recycled in 2012, the facility-wide residue rate was 4.94 percent. She said Yezzo had, at times, run some loads through a second time to maximize the rate of recyclables.
As with budgets, where pennies unite to become dollars, so it is with recyclable materials. Each pound squeezed from the load means an extra pound in bales, and that means money on the resale market.
A hefty bale of cardboard tips the scales at about a ton. A bale of aluminum cans weighs about 1,000 pounds. Crumbock was quick to note that the aluminum bales on the floor March 28 were left over from before the renovation.
Bales of recyclables are sold as near as Pennsylvania and West Virginia and as far as China.
In the end, when this story is read, and so has the rest of this edition served its purpose, when it gets tossed into the recycling can it will become part of the county’s ongoing recycling saga.
To see the MUA’s brochure on single-stream recycling visit:
http://filetransfer.cmcherald.com/h_uploads/SingleStreamBrochure.pdf