THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, August 5, 1996 TAG: 9608050033
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY TOM HOLDEN, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: GREENSBORO LENGTH: 163 lines
On the southeast side of town, not far from an animal rendering plant, a small fleet of gray trucks regularly drives into an unassuming building, carrying the accumulated trash of North Carolina's third-largest city.
The trucks transport an endless array of household refuse, from tuna cans and pizza boxes to milk jugs and beer bottles, which is dumped on the floor and pushed onto a conveyor belt by a front-end loader with solid rubber tires.
The conveyor carries the trash to a second-story production line where a crew of workers wearing industrial-strength gloves begin the tedious task of sorting glass, paper, plastic and metal for resale.
Here is the heart of Greensboro's curbside recycling program and a possible example for Virginia Beach. Amid an industrial din and the collective odor of 54,000 households, employees of Fairfield County Redemption, a Connecticut-based contractor, sort, bale and prepare recyclables for sale to unstable commodities markets.
Last year, the city's share of the company proceeds from selling recyclables provided Greensboro taxpayers $570,000 to offset the collection costs, which totaled almost twice that amount. This program has caught the attention of Virginia Beach officials who on July 1 killed the city's curbside recycling program run by the Southeastern Public Service Authority.
Citing inefficiencies and its opposition to a new monthly $1 per household pickup fee, Virginia Beach backed out of SPSA's program, dealing a stiff blow to the regional waste consortium, which lost its biggest customer. The charge was later lowered to 50 cents and applied to the remaining South Hampton Roads cities that continue curbside pickup.
In that time, Virginia Beach has expanded its drop-off centers while turning to the private sector for information on how it might devise a curbside program of its own. The first answers are due Friday.
Already, Virginia Beach officials have toured the Greensboro operation and pronounced it a possible alternative to the drop-off centers - many already groaning with excess trash once picked up by SPSA workers.
What Virginia Beach wants is a curbside program of its own, using its existing one-armed mechanical trucks to pick up trash from new 65-gallon containers that would be placed curbside along with the big black trash cans used for regular garbage.
Beach officials argue that such a program would make it easier for residents to recycle and eliminate the up-front manual labor used by SPSA to sort materials curbside.
Whether Virginia Beach can afford the program is another question.
Although it shares in the profits of its recycling contractor, Greensboro does not make money from its program. Operational costs alone ran $1.36 million last year, meaning that the net loss to the city was $791,000.
Simply setting up larger drop-off centers will cost Virginia Beach $200,000 annually, and city officials have talked in the past of startup costs that will run into the millions.
In Greensboro's case, many of its costs come from fees the city pays to its contractor to dump recyclables in the building by the rendering plant. That fee is now set at $42.50 a ton. It would be far cheaper simply to dump the trash in the Greensboro landfill where disposal costs are a modest $30 a ton.
B. Wayne Turner, Greensboro's recycling coordinator, concedes it would be easier to use the landfill, but that approach, he says, is short-sighted.
``There is a social component and a political one to this as well, no question,'' Turner said. ``It would be cheaper to dump in the landfill. We don't do that because of the cost of land.''
Turner said that while landfill costs are low now it's certain they will rise when the existing landfill is closed and a new one must be opened. Extensive federal regulations that require landfills not pollute local water tables contribute greatly to the cost of building new landfills, he said.
``We don't know what the costs will be 20 years from now, but we do know they will be significantly more,'' Turner said. ``Landfills will cost more and so will the land.
``Recycling is a hedge, a hedge against future costs and an expression of community sentiment about the environment,'' he said. ``The only place where you find it cheaper to recycle is in some Northeastern areas where landfill disposal costs approach $80 a ton.''
Part of Greensboro's contract calls for the recycling contractor to run an education center where schoolchildren, civic groups and other interested parties are escorted into a small auditorium and taught the basics of recycling. There, within earshot of the sorting room, people learn what not to recycle, such as beer boxes coated in aluminum paint or laundry detergent boxes, which carry a soap residue that tends to ``foam up'' the slurry of recycled paper.
``We've had groups from Japan, Russia, England and two from Puerto Rico and even Virginia Beach,'' said Carolyn N. Spence, FCR's education coordinator.
At the center of Virginia Beach's planning is P. Wade Kyle, the administrator for the Department of Public Works, Waste Management Division. Kyle visited the Greensboro operation last month and walked away with some concerns.
``They're paying $42.50 a ton in processing fees'' to their contractor, Kyle said. ``That's a lot of money. We're paying $48.20 to SPSA, which processes non-recyclable trash for use in the Refuse Derived Fuel Plant or for trash that is sent to the landfill.''
Recyclable material in Virginia Beach is processed by a company called CRInc., a Massachusetts-based company that runs a small sorting operation at Mount Trashmore II on Centerville Turnpike.
``We're not paying CRInc. anything,'' Kyle said. ``And that's a big difference. . . . I was impressed with what Greensboro had. I just think it costs a lot of money.''
During his tour of Greensboro's operation, Kyle said he noticed that most residential trash cans devoted to recycling were hardly full.
Residents there place two large plastic containers at the curb once a week - one for recyclables, the second one for other trash.
``Most of the cans I looked into had about a foot of recyclables in them,'' he said. ``The thing that concerned me was they provided one-day-a-week service and the volume was not that great. I wondered if it had to be one day a week.''
In order for Virginia Beach to duplicate an operation like Greensboro's, which handles only about half of Virginia Beach's volume, a substantial investment would be needed. Exactly how much is not known.
``The Beach's (facility) is tiny,'' Kyle conceded. ``It's outdoors. They have one conveyor belt and a baler. They're trying to make due, but they're overwhelmed.''
Regardless of the investment, communities like Virginia Beach and Greensboro face the same problem in recovering money from recycling programs given the uncertain market for recyclables.
Joe Truini, who tracks the spot commodities market in recyclable materials for Waste News, an Akron, Ohio-based weekly trade publication, said prices can change dramatically in days.
For example, in the Miami market, which by virtue of its East Coast location is similar to that in Southeastern Virginia, the price for recycled newsprint now stands at minus $1 a ton - meaning it costs $1 to dump it in the landfill.
The low this year, he said, was minus $5 a ton. Many recycling companies do not store old paper; some of it is burned or simply buried. The market is somewhat better for corrugated containers, which are fetching $25 a ton on average this year.
That looks good until one realizes that the price has been as high as $100 a ton, which it was last year. If that looks bad to city officials, the market for recycled plastic is even worse. Clear plastic has been averaging 11 cents a pound this year, Truini said, but it has recently plummeted to 4 cents a pound.
``Paper can change weekly, aluminum can change daily and glass sometimes does not change for years,'' he said. ``There are only a few people who deal with it and there are not a lot of companies that want to handle it anymore.''
Aluminum, among the most stable of recyclable commodities, recently dropped in price from an average of 35 cents per pound to 30 cents, he said.
Despite these problems, there are markets for recycled goods. Greensboro officials like to point out a plastic foot bridge in the Bog Gardens as an example of what kinds of products can be made from old soda jugs. The bridge crosses a small stream and from a distance looks to be made of gray lumber, but closer inspection shows the traces of shredded plastic molded into 2-by-4s that behave like lumber under a carpenter's saw.
Market volatility is foremost in the minds of Virginia Beach officials who would be asking the public to finance an extensive curbside program that offered marginal opportunities to recover the costs.
``The market is so bad that the (materials resource recovery facilities) are getting overwhelmed with materials that they cannot get rid of quickly,'' said Virginia Beach's Kyle. ``We need to be concerned about the market.'' ILLUSTRATION: LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
Sorting recyclables in Greensboro: Virginia Beach wonders whether
it, too, could afford the practice.
How Greensboro's program differs from SPSA's:
Recyclables are picked up curbside by a city garbage truck's
mechanical arm rather than manual labor.
Recyclables are sorted at a separate facility at the end of the
process rather than at the beginning by curbside workers.
Residents use a larger container, which can be filled with a
wider variety of recyclable materials.
KEYWORDS: RECYCLING by CNB