Too little trash? Why recycling is difficult in Montgomery

Recycling is all about sustainability, but is recycling in Montgomery sustainable?

Last summer, Birmingham Recycling and Recovery General Manager Pete Biddlecome toured Montgomery’s now-closed recycling facility formerly operated by IREP.

What he found was a machine capable of processing 40 to 50 tons of recycling per hour and a facility that would need 4,000 tons of recycling per month to be profitable. What he didn’t find was enough trash in Montgomery to make those numbers work.

“We took a tour to see if the system would correlate with the amount of tonnage they were facing,” Biddlecome said. “After a tour, we determined it would not.”

Seventeen months after IREP permanently suspended operations, Montgomery still has no residential recycling.

The city and IREP are currently trudging through bankruptcy court in what’s been a longer than expected process thanks to at least one unsecured creditor looking to recoup lost capital. Assuming that Montgomery comes out the other side with full ownership of the $37 million recycling facility, the city will then turn to choosing a company to operate the facility.

Birmingham Recycling and Recovery (BRR) was one of more than 20 companies interested in operating the facility. After touring the facility, Biddlecome said his company was no longer interested.

“I went with the intent to see if there were enough tons to flip the switch and make it a go,” Biddlecome said in a phone interview Tuesday. “Since this is our core business, we have a pretty good finger on the pulse of how many tons you need to sustain an operation like that. When your system runs you a $15,000 a month power bill, you have to see if it makes fiscal sense. We determined after a few hours that it did not. There’s just not enough material to sustain that type of operation.”

City Finance Director Barry Crabb said he has heard multiple potential operators express doubts about the amount of trash and recyclables Montgomery can produce.

“We’ve been talking to people for nine months,” Crabb said in December. “Because of the low volume of garbage we have, it’s going to be a challenge to us to find anybody to operate the facility, even if we give them the facility. It’s going to be a challenge to find somebody to operate it profitably without any additional support from the city. And that’s our goal.”

IREP opened the plant in 2014 as a mixed-recovery facility, also known in the recycling industry as a “dirty MRF.” With a dirty MRF, recycling is not pre-sorted at home by a bin or orange bag. Instead, all trash is collected together and a system of machines and workers sort the glass, paper and plastic from the pizza, diapers and chicken bones.

Montgomery’s lack of trash volume — along with a plunge in the commodities market and concern about good quality — was a large reason why IREP failed so quickly.

The facility required about 150,000 tons of trash a year, Crabb said. In its final year, IREP received only 78,000 tons of trash from the city and approximately another 24,000 tons hauled in from north Florida and areas around Montgomery.

“The city is too small,” Crabb said. “We’ve got information from recycling associations that talk about the city. Draw a 50-mile radius around the city and even taking that into account it’s hard to hit those numbers.”

Of the four major Alabama cities with a similar population size (Huntsville, Birmingham, Mobile and Montgomery), Alabama’s capital city is the only one without recycling and the only one facing doubts about its ability to sustain a recycling program.

Kara Smith, the Huntsville account manager for recycler Republic Services, said there are many reasons why a city may not collect enough recycling: route density, location of facility, product contamination and ease of packaging/selling.

“People think you make a lot of money on recycling, and you don’t,” Smith said. “Cardboard for the last several years have been dismal, almost minimal.”

Like many in the industry, Smith said the dirty MRF model is not sustainable in this period of low commodities pricing when considering the employees needed to sort trash and the quality of the goods produced.

“If you have pasta sauce on your paper, that’s trash. Separating trash is important,” Smith said. “It’s so easy to put bins out, I don’t know why everybody doesn’t use the bins.”

Bins may be the next step for Montgomery. Also known as single-stream recycling, any recyclable trash such as water bottles or newspapers would be collected together in the same bin. Clean City Commission Program Director Susan Carmichael is in favor of houses separating trash at the source, and Mayor Todd Strange said he is open to considering any proposal received. And yet, if Montgomery does implement the bin system, it may still face a recycling shortage.

If Montgomery had a curbside recycling program, would you participate?

Most experts estimate that an average of 25 percent of a city can be expected to participate in recycling, and Crabb said that about 25 percent (20,000 tons) of Montgomery’s trash is recyclable. If Montgomery receives a quarter of that, 5,000 tons a year, that’s only 416 tons a month.

“What people operating successful single stream recycling facilities say is they need about 1,800 to 2,200 tons a month. So four to five times what we have,” Crabb said.

In comparison, Biddlecome said BRR processes 1,600 tons a month with a machine one-tenth the size of Montgomery’s that only has to operate three days a week.

“You could use it as a single-stream MRF, but there’s so much equipment on there it would be way overdoing it,” Biddlecome said of the Montgomery facility. “You could take that system and cut it in half and make that system work.”

Montgomery’s best hope may be choosing a company willing to implement a regional program.

Last August, the Southeast Recycling Development Council (SERDC) released a plan for boosting recycling in Alabama that suggests separating the state into hubs.

Under the plan, the Montgomery hub would handle recycling for 28 counties, a network that would yield 142,000 tons of pre-sorted recyclables annually, or close to 12,000 tons a month, SERDC estimates.

While it is unknown if the recommendation will be considered by an incoming company, Strange said Montgomery’s recycling was “always anticipated it would be a regional scenario.”

"That was one of the issues with IREP," Strange said. "They never made a serious run at Prattville or Greenville or some of these other areas."

Carmichael said the city is currently pricing recycling bins, a system she thinks would get enough participation to keep recycling alive in Montgomery due to the curbside pick-up and cleaner goods. If bins are too expensive, she also said that bags similar to Montgomery's previous orange bag system could be used with the difference being curbside pick-up.

"I’ve had several people tell me they want to participate in a curbside program," Carmichael said. "It may be we have to open it up to other counties to use the facility. No one can convince me you can put dirty diapers, tomato sauce and meat in the trash and keep the paper clean. Without being clean the companies will not accept it."

Montgomery is hoping to take a decidedly hands-off approach to recycling. The city is stuck paying $2.175 million a year to pay off the $31 million bond investment and is looking to officially acquire the recycling plant for a combined $750,000.

Strange and Crabb said a potential operator might supplement residential recycling with commercial recycling such as paper from large businesses but taking care of residential recycling is the priority. Others have inquired about the facility being used to produce pellets from recyclables that can be burned as a fuel source.

Strange is still proud of the state-of-the-art recycling facility, but without connecting to other counties, it has either too much machine and not enough trash.

When asked about potential operators’ concerns with Montgomery as a viable recycling center, Strange said he has four or five offers on the table from companies interested in the facility.

“We’ve had a couple tell us that, but we’ve had four or five say they want to do something different and more viable,” Strange said. “From that standpoint we think there is some kind of market for recyclables and our goal is to pick garbage up, get it to a facility in a single-stream fashion probably and from that standpoint you don’t have as much labor or cost.”