Recycles.Org  BETA Nonprofit Materials Exchange Network Computer & Office Electronics Recycling & Reuse

Date: Friday, 11 November 2005

Title: City recycling program flourishing after decade

Source: By Mike Penprase http://www.news-leader.com

Remarks: Local effort includes the collection of household chemicals and electronics.

After just over a decade, organized recycling in Springfield has become more than collecting aluminum, plastic, glass and other materials and shipping them away. More of those materials are being processed for new uses locally, city materials recovery coordinator Barbara Lucks said. The NestlePurina PetCare plant, which converts paper to cat litter, is a prime example of attracting a business that uses recyclables, but it's no longer the only one. Demand is growing for plastics, such as milk jugs, which no longer are shipped out of the city, Lucks said. The city has come a long way as it prepares to observe America Recycles Day on Saturday. The proposal to build a Materials Recovery Facility in the early '90s created a heated debate and eventually resulted in a court ruling stopping the city from adopting "flow control," which would have required waste haulers to take their loads to the facility, but the recycling component of that plan has survived and expanded. Springfield has become one of three cities in Missouri — the others are Independence and Columbia — with a comprehensive recycling program, Lucks said. The effort includes a household chemical collection center where materials too dangerous to put in the landfill are recycled or packaged for special disposal. The city runs education and information programs and yardwaste recycling and operates three recycling centers. Curbside recycling is offered by some waste haulers. Those programs have kept recyclables and yard waste out of the landfill, but regulatory changes allowing greater depths of refuse in landfills and other changes also have contributed to estimates that the landfill can be used another 35 to 40 years, Lucks said. The household hazardous waste center will accept 500 tons this year, and the city's recycling sites collect about 3,500 tons a year, Lucks said. Residents can contribute their own recyclables to that tonnage with ease, North Franklin Avenue recycling center attendant Randy Reed said during a lull this week. It's the busiest time of the year for the site as people bring in leaves that will go to the city's yardwaste recycling center, located near the Southwest Wastewater Treatment Plant. "No, it's not all that difficult," he said of using recycling centers. "That's what we're here for, to help them out if they need anything." Residents who start using the centers quickly catch onto the routine, he said. The center's latest change means those who want to recycle glass no longer have to laboriously separate glass by color. A stockpile at the landfill set up to take raw material for glasphalt — a paving material that uses crushed and processed glass — accepts a mixture of any color. Some recycling efforts hardly were anticipated when the program started, Lucks said, like recycling "dead" electronics such as computers, VCRs, camcorders, televisions and cell phones, which are now accepted at the Computer Recycling Center. The center will take microwaves, computers, VCRs, camcorders, televisions and cell phones; a $10 charge applies for microwaves, televisions and computer monitors. As electronics become obsolete at a faster pace, director Ken Reiss said he expects more business for the not-for-profit center. In 2003, the center recycled 75 tons of equipment; in 2004, the center recycled 300 tons of electronics, he said. "Now, we're doing over 1,000 monitors a month," he said. The operation processes electronics from Kansas City, St. Louis and as far away as Minnesota. The center hauls off small mountains of dead electronics from other sites, center general manager Jonathan Stevens said at the center's Commercial Street headquarters. "One year, we pulled the equivalent of two tractor-trailers out of Lone Pine," he said. The center's employees disassemble the electronics, separating materials to send elsewhere. Ninety-five percent of it is recycled, with video tubes and other lead parts going to Doe Run for reprocessing, steel to Commercial Metals, plastic to another buyer and circuit boards to a couple of reprocessing businesses, he said. The Computer Recycling Center is just one firm that's made a business of recycling: "A Guide to Recycling in Springfield" published by the city offers four pages of information on where to take anything from antifreeze to walnuts. There's also recycling for charity: Habitat for Humanity in Springfield, which itself is involved in recycling with its ReStore that sells surplus building materials, is participating in a national contest that will award the ReStore collecting the most aluminum cans enough funding to build a house. Anna Codutti, Springfield chapter director of development and community relations, said that last year, the ReStore collected more than 10 tons of aluminum. To win the contest, ReStore will have to collect two to three times that amount, she said. Codutti acknowledged high prices for scrap aluminum is an inducement for people to sell the metal rather than donating it. It's one thing to recycle; it's another to recycle and make it economically viable, city solid waste supervisor Tim O'Neal said. "As we commonly say, recycling doesn't actually occur until the materials collected are used in some constructive way," he said. O'Neal said it isn't possible to determine exactly what effect recycling has had on extending the life of the city's landfill because recyclables such as metals ranging from old appliances to scraps from factories go to commercial recycling firms and aren't counted in the city's recycling effort. But the fact private companies are buying, selling and converting recyclables is encouraging, particularly when compared to the early years of the program, he said. "Of course the downside of that is when markets are soft as they were some years ago, it's harder to see that practical value, and less material gets recycled," he said. "It's both an environmental enterprise, as well as a business enterprise, to recycle materials out of our wastestream." As for the program's future, Lucks foresees the need to develop a program to handle materials much more basic than electronics. While the "green building" movement puts an emphasis on recycling a variety of materials for construction, it's likely more emphasis will be placed on keeping construction debris from landfills, she said. "There's a lot of wood, Sheetrock, glass, metals that can be recycled and put to a much better use," she said.