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Stepping things up: with price and demand for secondary commodities increasing, MRF operators are seeking ways to improve their operations
Recycling Today, June, 2005 by Dan Sandoval
The business of siting and operating material recovery facilities (MRFs) can often be a challenge. With pressure from states and municipalities to maximize their recovery levels, most notably California's Assembly Bill 939, which mandates that local jurisdictions in the state achieve a 50 percent diversion goal by 2000, many communities are seeking help from expanded collection programs and high-performance MRFs.
Many cities are finding the least restrictive way to meet these levels is to ship greater amounts of recyclables to MRFs, increasing the volume and diversity of incoming material.
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PLANNING FOR GROWTH. When a company is looking to build a MRF, a primary consideration is the importance of ensuring that the facility will meet the expectations of the community, not only in the present, but in the future, as well.
Mick Barry, president of Mid America Recycling, a Des Moines, Iowa-based company that operates a number of MRFs in the Midwest, notes that when his company looks to open a MRF, it factors in expectations of population growth and demographic information for the area.
Harvey Gershman, president of Gershman, Brickner & Bratton Inc. (GBB), a solid waste consulting firm based in Fairfax, Va., remarks that the best strategy is to build a MRF as large as possible. Additionally, another strategy to focus on is constructing a MRF at an existing site, whether it is a transfer station, waste handling plant, waste-to-energy facility or some other facility that presently handles the material.
While companies employ different approaches to designing and operating MRFs, more are recognizing that designing a MRF doesn't just entail finding the right type of equipment to fit into an operation.
Nat Egosi, president of RRT Design & Construction, Melville, N.Y., says an operator must consider many of the secondary and ancillary issues. He notes some MRFs have found an ideal building in which to install equipment; however, possibly because of space limitations or even location, the MRF is unable to expand or adapt to changes in its operations.
Hans Ouellet, with equipment manufacturer CP Manufacturing, National City, Calif., says one of the biggest and most important issues for a company to figure out before investing in a sorting system is finding the right location for the MRF.
At times, such forethought is lacking. "There isn't [always] a lot of strategic thinking that goes into building MRFs," Egosi says.
While centrally locating a MRF is important, there is no hard-and-fast rule for how far out the hauler can economically collect and deliver material. Single-stream collection methods will ideally increase the volume of material collected when compared to source-separated programs.
For some cities, the ability to allow packer trucks to consolidate shipments from several smaller trucks also increases the possibility to collect material from a wider area.
Also factoring into the distance a hauler can service is the relative cleanliness of the material collected. If a MRF deals with minimal outthrows and contaminants with its shipments to end markets, pulling material from a wider distance is feasible. However, Ouellet says some cities in California (as well as in other states) may see their coverage areas shrink in light of poorer material quality.
Ouellet says California Assembly Bill 939 has resulted in some MRFs dealing with 18 percent or more non-recyclables.
While this means many MRFs that have to service municipalities with single-stream collection programs will have to put in more sorting equipment, such as disk screens, to remove more of the material, the ultimate impact is that less of the recyclables being delivered truly end up being recycled.
LESS OF A HAUL. While a MRF can typically handle the volume from a heavily populated area, the geographical range is something that needs to be factored in.
Ouellet says that the city of San Diego has two MRFs servicing the community, not necessarily because either facility couldn't take in all the tonnage collected, but because it allows more efficient servicing of a wider coverage area. The farther out a hauler goes to collect the recyclables, the more uneconomical it is to deliver the material to the MRF.
While getting the proper technology in place is always an essential part of the overall picture for MRFs, the reality is that a fairly decent sized plant should be able to service the needs of a community. A bigger issue, however, is balancing the right mix of automation and labor to ensure that the material is properly sorted according to expectations.
Despite some harsh criticism from several paper companies as to the much poorer quality material that comes out of many MRFs, especially those processing single-stream material, many MRF operators say that the quality of the material that comes out of their plants is far superior to what was produced several years ago. In fact, some operators say they are able to clean and sort grades of fiber that had previously been impossible to reach with older single-stream MRFs.
