Changes in the way recyclables are picked up, with less source separation at the curb, are causing some MRFs to consider automation. What should you know before you make the leap from manual to machine sorting? It depends.

By Penelope Grenoble O’Malley

Space to Grow
Enough Is Not Too Much
Keeping the Lights On
Leaving the Most ’Til Last
A Hauler’s MRF

Consultants and material recovery facility (MRF) and transfer station operators agree that the degree to which a facility goes automated depends on a range of factors, many of which are outside its control. Steve Viny of Norton Environmental in Cleveland, OH, maintains, for example, that currently there’s no machine on the market that can accurately tell the difference among grades of paper. "The commodity markets change all the time," says Viny, "so even if you were able to buy a machine that could grade paper, you would have to constantly adjust it to meet market conditions. That being the case, there are areas for automation and there are areas for manual separation."

Lycoming County's recycling facility: Building #1 houses newspaper, magazine, office paper, and the plastic sorting and baling operations.

MSW consultant and former MRF operator Bill Brennan thinks one reason companies prefer manual labor is that people are readily available and just as readily disposed of. "You buy a system for a million dollars," says Brennan, "you’ve got a note every month." Rebekah Cadigan, environmental services manager for the City of Flagstaff, AZ, thinks there’s no way to get to a fully automated system. "No matter how good people are with their recycling, there’s going to be something that doesn’t fit the mix. Then you’re going to need someone to make that judgment."

All things considered, most everyone agrees MRF and transfer station operators should be open to automation. "I’m not suggesting that MRF operators should drop what they’re doing and replace their manual operation with a more automated system," says Viny, "but I think there’s been some breakthroughs, and if you haven’t revisited what’s available, now’s a good time to do it, especially if you’re running a recycling system that’s working but isn’t cost-effective. When I say cost-effective, I mean processing is less expensive than going to a landfill."

Bruce Mooney, a consultant who works out of Alison Park, PA, requires that his clients complete a questionnaire before he gets down to talking turkey about sorting. The first question is what kind of material they’re bringing in and what they want to do with it. "I also want to know what they think their market is," says Mooney. "Only then do I ask about their objectives in terms of labor versus capital." Although no one we spoke with was comfortable naming a cutoff number that justifies automation, there’s no doubt that a fundamental requirement for sound decision-making is a straightforward look at volume. "To go from manual to an automated system, you need significant value in what you’re processing and you need to have that relatively consistent," says Viny.

Consultant Tim Bratton wants to know the community’s "civic philosophy." Do residents want a high level of diversion and/or to derive as much income as possible from the wastestream so cost of operation isn’t an overriding factor, or have they made it clear there’s a limit to what they will invest? Another important factor is community outreach: Do residents know what to recycle, and are their efforts monitored and regulations enforced? "The amount of sorting required might be higher in a community where there isn’t much education," says Bratton, "because there’s likely to be a higher level of contamination."

Start with the market, says Brennan. "No margin, no mission. Recycling markets are relatively immature, which means there’s a lot of fluctuation in pricing. I might go out today and put together a system that’s going to recover OCC [old corrugated cardboard] based on a market rate of $150. Six months or a year later, the market might drop to $10, but ultimately I’m going to amortize the equipment. It’s a fixed asset that’s going to take seven years to pay off, so I have to be in business for that amount of time. The goal is long-term contracts. You want to be producing consistent materials with consistent tonnage so when times are lean, you can go to your markets and let them know that in order to commit your tonnage, you need a floor price. So ultimately, it’s not a decision about which machine do you buy, but why are you buying a machine?

"Let’s take a facility we started in Brooklyn. We were doing 500 tons of MSW per day. We were shipping it out loose over the top, which meant we were out there chasing trucks all the time because we weren’t going to use our own trucks to ship the material 400 miles away. In this kind of operation you’re sorting on the ground, so your labor is very expensive. Then maybe you install some picking belts, and all of a sudden you’re doing, say, 20 tons per hour and you’ve got a diversion ratio of 10%. Now you’re starting to benchmark your operation, and your labor is now working at your speed. Instead of picking two pieces of cardboard a minute, now the material is being presented to them on a picking belt and they’re picking 20 pieces an hour, and you’re able to benchmark that also. So now you’ve got 10 guys working on the belt picking 5 tons of cardboard in an eight-hour shift, so each man picks, say, 400 pounds per hour. Now you’re able to benchmark performance, which is the first step toward improving it."

Space to Grow

During the remodel project, Lycoming County's building #2 houses the cardboard sorting and baling operations.

In Lycoming County, PA (1,200 mi.², population 149,000), things operate on a smaller scale. Garbage is picked up by private haulers and dumped at the county-run landfill. Source-separated recyclables are collected curbside from 12 communities and from 24 county-run drop-off centers and delivered to a county-owned MRF. The county markets and transports whatever glass it recovers and has standing contracts for other materials (with a total output of about 18,000 tpy). Materials sorted curbside go into individual buckets, one each for glass, tin cans, and aluminum. Anything else, including plastics and paper, must be disposed of at a drop-off center, where it is collected in split-box containers. The county also offers commercial pickup using its own multicompartment vehicle, and businesses are asked to do the same three sorts as residents. The truck is cleaned and goes out again to collect office paper and newspaper.

The system was put in place in 1990 to comply with statewide diversion mandates, and now 10 years later, County Resource Recovery Manager John Yingling is planning a new "brick-and-mortar facility" to replace the three temporary buildings in which the processing center is presently located. Currently Yingling utilizes two balers, two can densifiers, a plastics sorting platform, a secondary glass-sorting line, and an area for plastics, all in just a little more than 1,200 ft.² Because so much material comes in already sorted and the facility uses inmate labor from the county prison system to finish it off, Yingling doesn’t plan to make any changes in the new facility. His biggest gain will be space. "We gain economies of scale. Right now when a picking container is full, we basically have to cease operations and pull it out. In the new building, I will have vastly enhanced storage areas for sorted material awaiting the baler, and this will mean I’ll get much longer runs on a single product. We’re also building concrete separators to isolate sorted materials. On heavy days, bins often get pushed too close together, and this causes contamination."

Residential and commercial glass usually comes in clean enough to be baled, as does commercial newspaper and office paper. Glass from the drop-off centers moves along a secondary line where colors are separated from clear. The regular line sorts newspapers, magazines, and plastics–high-density polymer (HDP) natural, HDP soaps, or HDP colored and PETs; one station removes contamination. On most days, six of the eight picking stations are in use; the plan is to add two to four more in the new operation to accommodate anticipated growth.

"We didn’t call for any automation in the new facility," says Yingling, "because we don’t need it. We’ve got enough source separation and good availability of labor" (a sorting crew of 10 prison inmates from the county prison system comes in daily). Yingling provides safety equipment and is required to allocate one supervisor from his own crew for every three prisoners. The inmates receive a stipend from the county, but otherwise the labor is "free." Yingling says anyone with the opportunity should try inmate labor. "We’ve used them for eight years now. If you can be sure of having a corps of the same people so you don’t have to reeducate every day, it’s worth looking into."

Enough Is Not Too Much

Managers at Blue Line Transfer Company decided to utilize limited automation when they upgraded their combined transfer station/MRF in South San Francisco, CA. "I had seen other automated systems," says Ed Vortoli, operations manager of the new facility, "and in my opinion they don’t really work that well. I don’t think anyone has developed a really foolproof way of sorting. I also think you get better material when you sort manually. When we did the numbers, it still came up that manual was better costwise; a big consideration was when something breaks down, it basically stops the whole operation. Ours is a very simple system that will hopefully last us many years without too much trouble."

Blue Line Transfer handles about 60 tpd at its new 110,000-ft.² facility, the bulk of material coming from franchised pickup from South San Francisco, Millbrae, Brisbane, and San Francisco International Airport. The facility also buys cardboard directly from the public and accepts loads from private haulers, mostly construction and demolition materials. Residents do the first sort curbside–glass, plastics, cans, and newspaper/cardboard–but the commercial stream comes in commingled. The facility uses a double conveyer system with two shifts of 10 pickers, all full-time employees; a magnet pulls off the tin and a small shaker screen separates pieces of glass. Pickers drop picked items down a shoot into a bunker; a full bunker proceeds to the baler. Cardboard is picked first, then newspaper, then aluminum cans, then plastic, and then glass.

Vortoli says if he had it to do over again, he’d install a separate shuttle belt to sort newspaper. "We can do newspaper better with a negative sort. We tried putting a diverter onto the existing system, but it didn’t work. We didn’t put it in originally because of the expense, and that was a bad call."

Any advice? "It’s important to back into the planning," say Vortoli. "Start with what you’re guaranteed in income in any given year. Also, build the facility as big as you can afford, because no matter how big you build, it will fill up fast."

Keeping the Lights On

At the Norton Environmental MRF in Flagstaff, AZ, a portion of the sort labor comes from developmentally disabled crews provided by the Hozhoni Foundation Inc., a local nonprofit agency that finds work for challenged individuals. The foundation employs the workers, sees that they have benefits–insurance, sick days, and vacation–and bills Norton only for time worked. The system has been up and running for the three years the facility has been operating, put in place by Plant Manager Lyle Gorman. "The foundation supplies me with a supervisor for the employees they send me," says Gorman. "They’re good workers, and working here gives them some self-worth and shows them they can contribute. It also saves the taxpayers money."

All the activities of Flagstaff’s semiautomated 30,000-ft.² MRF are confined completely inside the building Norton built on property purchased and still owned by the city. "The completely enclosed building was part of the contract," says Cadigan, the city’s environmental services manager. "We didn’t want any outside storage or outside processing. You can ruin your recycling program with the wrong image." Norton’s contract also requires it to take certain recyclables "in good times and bad," although it countered with a request to exclude glass because of contamination and to protect workers. Instead the city maintains glass drop-off stations. The 20-year agreement guarantees Norton a minimum annual tonnage of 10,500. The city also pays a tipping fee, and any profits from marketing the recovered materials are split 50-50. "The tonnage guarantee and the tipping fee keep the lights on," says Cadigan. "That was our big concern. We want the lights to stay on."

Neither the state nor the city mandates recycling, and before the Norton facility was built, Flagstaff’s 15,000 residents depended on drop-off areas and a series of small recyclers. Cadigan says, "Small recyclers came through when the markets were good and were gone as soon as they turned bad. We needed to go the next step, which was curbside pickup. Arizona has been on the leading edge of commingled recycling, and Flagstaff has used automated collection in our trash collection for many years. I like not having the workmen’s comp claims. I like that I can pick up a home every couple of seconds." Arizona mandates twice-a-week collection, and Flagstaff applied for a waiver to allow crews to collect once for trash and use the second pickup for recyclables.

Norton’s facility currently processes 40 tpd, well shy of its 150-tpd capacity. Loads are dumped onto a tipping floor, where they’re grabbed by a loader and thrown on an in-feed conveyor that moves the material 20 ft. up into the first sort room. Cardboard is picked off first, then newspaper and contaminants. From there the material drops down into an automated sort to separate containers. A magnet grabs the steel and sends it off to a chute, and an eddy-current separates aluminum. Plastic is hand-sorted by grades in another sorting room, and paper is sent ahead for additional sorts. Sorted material drops down into revetments. When these fill up, it’s onto a central belt and then the baler.

Commercial material is also collected commingled in 4- and 6-yd. bins and is processed with the residential material. Cadigan has set commercial rates at 60% less than trash rates to encourage recycling. "We have 500 local businesses recycling, and we are going to continue to market to that segment. That’s where I see the real key to success." To increase the flow of product, Cadigan plans to offer processing to neighboring communities. "The more material we get, the better off we are. We’ve reached out and have signed agreements with other communities ranging from Williams, a town of 1,000 homes, 35 miles west of us, to Prescott, which transfers its material in bulk to be sorted here. It’s a long way, but it’s actually cheaper for them to transport their recycling all the way to me than to go to the landfill."

Norton has also done its part to feed the new facility, collecting both refuse and recyclables in unincorporated areas of Coconino County. "Nobody wanted to take this on because the distances are so far," says Cadigan, "but Norton came up with a scheme to give residents a split cart so they can use one truck for collection."

Both parties agree the partnership has worked out well. "I can go in there and tell them that it looks like the belt’s moving too fast and we’re missing a lot of stuff," says Cadigan, "and they’ll address it. On the other hand, I give them a heads-up when I know a big load is coming in."

Leaving the Most ’Til Last

Although Far West Fibers in Portland, OR, was originally established to provide brown fiber for a local mill, it quickly discovered if it wanted to receive enough cardboard, it had to be willing to take newspaper, and if it wanted to get any amount of newspaper, it had to deal with other curbside material. The realization led to its current business of processing commingled recyclables from residents and businesses in the Portland metropolitan area. "We process 14,000 to 15,000 tons a month from curbside and commercial," says Jeff Murray with Far West Fibers. "In Oregon, the municipalities franchise their hauling, and the haulers are independent as long as they market their materials to facilities that will handle them correctly and treat them as recyclables. We built our facilities to meet haulers’ needs. We set up a committee with local government and established a formula for curbside mix in each market–so much new, so much scrap, so much cardboard. Then we figured out the market value of each of these materials and established an agreed-upon processing fee for sorting and bailing, which pays the company overhead. To bill, we deduct the cost of processing from the market value and either pay or charge the hauler. We even credit back freight for customers who come from a distance.

"Once the material is in-house, we use a load leveler to level it before it falls on the belt, which results in a good presentation of what has to be sorted. We pull off the large-volume material first–cardboard–and this is done by hand. Then we proceed to clean up the newspaper. Our logic is ‘Why pull out the material that you have the most of and that has a value?’ So what we’re doing amounts to cleaning that newspaper by picking out plastic containers and scrap paper. Some outlets allow magazines, some don’t, which is the neat thing about commingling–we can switch the mix to accommodate the market. Although some facilities separate plastic into two or three sorts, we put the plastic containers in one sort and sell it to a market that will sort it later."

Commercial waste is clean, source separated, and also commingled–cardboard, office paper, film plastics, metal and plastic containers. Currently it goes down the same line as the residential stream, but efforts are underway to transfer paper to another facility where it will be sorted by crews of developmentally disabled individuals. "Once you get the cardboard out of the office paper, then it’s not so bad sorting it by hand, but when you have large volumes of corrugated, it just is not a practical thing," says Murray, "and it just beats up on your labor."

Because the company recently determined that its sort labor costs have been going up in direct proportion to tons processed, and because it anticipates processing commingled recyclables from neighboring Marion County, plans are underway to add screens for separating corrugated cardboard and separating out the bulk of the newspaper. The goal is to dramatically increase throughput and reduce the sorting crews. Murray thinks screens are a good solution for sorting large-volume materials from high grade. Currently, sort labor costs the company $10-$11 an hour (about what everyone estimates), including medical and dental insurance and retirement. Potential employees are hired on a temporary basis and allowed two months to decide if they want to stay (and if the company wants to keep them). Far West Fibers offers sorters hepatitis shots, spends a lot of time educating haulers and local governments about reducing contamination, and has installed an air/heating system over its sort belt. "It’s difficult to get people to do this job and keep them," says Murray. "We have a fairly good steady crew, but it took a long time. In adding some automation, our goal is to not have to use as much temporary help and not lay off anybody at the same time that we increase our throughput dramatically."

A Hauler’s MRF

The material heading north out of Marion County to Far West Fibers in Portland is being transferred from the Marion County resource recovery facility in Salem, OR, recently established by a consortium of eight private haulers. Facility Manager Dan Dudley tells the story: "We recycle and sort construction demolition material, dry solid waste only. The facility was originally started to get the Sheetrock out of loads so the county waste-to-energy facility could burn the rest. From there it grew into the idea that since the load is already dumped on the ground, why not pull out the cardboard, wood, metal, and concrete. The county liked the idea because the haulers who used to dump at the burner could dispose of their loads by recycling. This freed up the burner for the growth the county anticipates in the area."

Dudley estimates he moves 13-15 tons of construction and demolition material an hour and that his recovery rate varies between 28% and 30%. He employs 11 workers total. Loads are dumped on the floor, and anything too large for crews to pick up is moved with a loader or a skid-steer. The rest of the material is placed on a conveyor by an operator using an excavator. The belt takes it up an incline and dumps it on a shaker screen that removes the fines, and then it goes onto a sort belt where five sorters remove the marketable commodities. The residual is loaded onto walking floors and sent to a landfill.

"With this particular wastestream we really couldn’t do any more with automation," says Dudley. "One reason is that the material is so heavy and isn’t uniform. We get every imaginable thing, including an occasional dead horse."

Since the haulers own the facility, Dudley is guaranteed a consistent wastestream. "If they’ve got it, I know I’ll get it." He says this helps him keep crews working. "I can move 100 to 120 tons of material a day, so if I’m getting 140, 150 tons a day, I’ve got a little overhang for the days when I only get 60 or 70 tons." Haulers pay a tipping fee, and Dudley is required to charge the same rates as the county charges at the waste-to-energy facility. Profits from marketing recovered materials go directly back into the MRF. "We’ve only been open a year," says Dudley, "but so far we’ve been able to keep our head above water."

If real life is any measure, it doesn’t appear there’s an end in sight for manual sorting except perhaps in single-stream collection, where automation does the initial sorts, separating whatever materials can be reclaimed from garbage, at least in part because the exposure for labor is too high. "MSW is urban ore," says Brennan. "The advantage we have over a typical mining operation is that we actually get paid to take our feedstock."

Journalist Penelope Grenoble O’Malley is a frequent contributor to environmental publications.