Redoing Recycling

The new direction came July 16, when the joint city/county Santa Fe Solid Waste Management Agency took the advice of a third-party operations review and decided to outsource the sorting and selling of recyclables.

Now, city and county trucks take recyclables to the Buckman Road Recycling and Transfer Station (BuRRT), where they're then sent to Friedman Recycling Center in Albuquerque. The agency entered a one-year contract with three optional one-year extensions.

"I see this as a win-win," says David Friedman, the company's CEO. "This is going to allow people to expand the breadth of the program and improve the economics of it."

The change could save the regional agency upwards of $200,000 per year, although it forces seven workers to be reassigned. It's expected to delay future expansions at the Caja del Rio Landfill by putting less trash there. It remains to be seen whether the expanded collections will move the needle on Santa Fe's weak recycling rate, which hovers at around 9 percent for residential and commercial clients combined.

It also means the massive machines that make up BuRRT's mixed-materials sorting line are going idle, at least for now. In 2006, the equipment and site renovations cost the agency $3.12 million.

Local officials and Friedman agreed to renegotiate payment rates every six months based on how much the recyclables are worth on the commodities market.

But the deal doesn't include glass, and the agency says the current way of dealing with the heavy product costs more than it earns. For now, glass should continue to be separated from other recyclables. The material will remain at BuRRT, where another machine crushes it for resale.

Both BuRRT and Friedman rely on the same principle elements of a conveyer belt that, through various means of agitation, shakes certain materials from others. Friedman's line is significantly larger and includes some modern bells and whistles, among them a series of optical sensors used to identify certain plastics and jet them off the line with a burst of compressed air.

The 89,000-square-foot Friedman center opened in 2013 and already takes goods from municipalities as far away as Roswell and Durango, Colo. In addition to the milk jugs and water bottles that are high-grade plastic #1-2, it also processes plastics #3-7. BuRRT refused those lower-grade materials because sorting them wasn't effective in terms of cost, time and space. Friedman is able to turn a profit in part because they consolidate recyclables from a number of areas and have 8 acres to use as needed.

"The economies of scale allows [us] to more efficiently collect that material, so therefore we have a lower cost basis," Friedman says. "It is a relatively low revenue item, but because we're getting that volume of material from a number of other cities and contracts, we're able to garner sufficient quantities that we have ready access to markets that perhaps the city of Santa Fe by themselves wouldn't otherwise have access to.…The other thing is, when the markets are simply not there, which is not very often, we have the ability to store it."

Meanwhile, the city has other key choices to make, among them what kind of containers residents will use at curbside. Right now, people are supposed to haul two rectangular bins out of their yards: one that contains glass and one with everything else. The city has been offered a $125,000 grant to assist in covering the costs to move from the 14-gallon containers to 96-gallon containers with wheels that can be picked up with automated collection, but it has requested an extension on the deadline to spend that money. Transitioning the program would require an estimated infusion of $1.4 million. Glass would have to remain outside those larger carts, and there's been talk of shifting to a drop-off-only approach to collecting it.

At the same time, some councilors want to again consider a "pay-as-you-go" system, recommended in the same report that suggested a model like the Friedman contract. That idea would give residents tiered prices for various sizes of garbage bins.

Since the change in collection, Nicholas Schiavo, director of Santa Fe's Public Utilities Department and acting environmental services director, has asked for feedback on how it's going.

"The message that's coming through from staff is, it would be good to go automated. This is a lot of stuff, it's getting heavy," Schiavo says.

Likely, there will be some waiting to see what actually happens to recycling habits, given the change in materials accepted, before that proposal moves forward. The national trends have shown that a larger container and a less confusing program trigger broader participation in recycling by 40 to 80 percent, Friedman says. Contamination can also increase, and he reminds people that green waste and food waste, rope-like items such as garden hoses and extension cords, textiles and plastic bags all should stay out of bins.

"Some people believe when you have this dedicated container and you don't have to guess quite as much on different types of plastic and paper, production's going to go up, and other people believe that no, no, that's not necessarily true, as soon as you have this big container, all that's going to mean is I'm going to throw my trash in there," Schiavo says. "We need to make sure that we've worked through what's actually going to go down before we make a final decision or before council makes a final decision."

Members of the Public Utilities Committee have tabled the question of container size and are expected to first resolve the pay-as-you-throw model, which is on the agenda for their Aug. 5 meeting. Changes may also be in store for the city's approach to commercial recycling and food waste.

There's also a question of getting the word out. Keep your eyes open for a public information campaign using major points like libraries, senior centers and public events like Santa Fe Bandstand, as well as digital formats like social media. New reminder refrigerator magnets are also in the works.

Santa Fe Reporter