The heart of most integrated waste management systems is the MRF. Waste collection and fate—either through diversion or disposal—are its extensions, yet all too often they are brought into existence long after the other pieces have settled into place, a situation that is both bad and good: bad because, in chasing other elements, MRFs rarely are optimized to the task; good because of their proven adaptability to changing situations.
At the moment, waste flows are down, reducing the burden on waste facilities, while at the same time offshore demand for materials for which no onshore markets exist have thrown a huge monkey wrench into recycling’s punchbowl, but those are momentary hiccups. What is not momentary is the public’s wish for better materials stewardship, coupled with its demand for energy reliability and security, and the emerging belief that we should be looking toward diverting 50%–70% of the wastestream.
Beyond such broad issues as what are the markets for, volumes of materials coming close to rivaling those landfill-bound, and what feedstocks do these markets require, there are a host MRF-related matters to sort through: (1) what kinds of equipment changes will be required to produce these feedstocks; (2) how are these materials brought to the facility; (3) how are they handled on the tipping floor to ready them for processing; (4) once processed and sorted, how are they readied for shipping; (5) what changes to the shipping infrastructure will be needed; and finally (6) what does all of this mean to the weighing, management, dispatching, and billing systems?
Many waste management operations, such as LA City and County, have come to the realization that the only realistic way to deal with the lion’s share of materials bound for the landfill—the organic portion for which no legitimate markets exist—is to turn it into energy. Energy purists will tell you (and they tell the truth) that mass burn is superior to any of the CTs in terms of energy content utilization, but the problem is that—were you to begin the process of siting and financing a mass-burn facility anywhere in the US (but most particularly on the West Coast)—you’d be facing a 15–20-year uphill battle with no assurance of success. CTs, while less efficient, could be up and running in as little as three years.
In my October 19 blog, A Pretty Good Storm, I suggested that in the light of the US Supreme Court’s United Haulers Association, Inc. v. Oneida-Herkimer Solid Waste Management Authority decision upholding the right of public entities to direct the flow of waste to their own facilities, and the infusion of federal stimulus funds under the auspices of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, this may be a good time to consider how these might be brought to bear on your future diversion plans.