Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, September 3, 1993 TAG: 9309030153
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B3 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: MANASSAS LENGTH: Medium
The pile is about 300 feet long, 80 feet wide and 25 feet high, creating a headache for county officials.
Prince William began collecting the plastic from homeowners a year ago as part of a mandatory recycling program.
A few months into the effort, the company that was taking the bottles for recycling went belly-up.
The county was left with no choice but to start stacking the bottles while trying to make alternative arrangements, said Tom Smith, the county's solid-waste division chief.
"It's a big pile," Smith said. "We didn't have a big enough building to store it."
Prince William recently found another company to take the plastic, but the pile now is so large county officials are balking at the cost of moving it.
Loading, sorting, shipping and selling an estimated 250 tons of milk jugs and soda bottles will cost about $250 a ton, or about $62,500, Smith said.
Dumping it in the county's landfill would cost about $55 a ton, he said.
County officials knew plastic was expensive to recycle before starting the program, "but we also thought at that time that the market was pretty good," Smith said.
Prince William's plastic problem is not unusual.
As recycling catches on, markets for the collected materials are becoming harder to find, making it more expensive for municipalities to recycle goods than to throw them in the landfill.
"The problem with recycling plastic is that mostly you're moving air," said Jeff Kibler, division manager at Southeast Recycling in Alexandria, which processes recyclables. "The costs are so high because you have to move so much material to get the weight."
To counter that problem, Prince William bought a baler to crush the bottles this summer.
At least two employees spend their days sorting the material into piles of white milk jugs, clear soda bottles and colored detergent bottles.
by CNB