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Aluminum bales, each weighing 1,100 pounds, ready for transport. TFC sells all its aluminum to several corporations, including Anheuser-Busch Co. (Photo by Tina Griego)
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"Anything and everything, you'll find it in here." A cellphone and scissors found among the broken glass. (Photo by Tina Griego)
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A TFC worker pulls out cardboard and other brown paper from the pile. Recycled white paper sells at a premium overseas. (Photo by Tina Griego)
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After the paper, glass, cans and other items are mechanically sorted,workers continue to refine the stream for quality control. (Photo by Tina Griego)
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After the paper, glass, cans and other items are mechanically sorted,workers continue to refine the stream for quality control. (Photo by Tina Griego)
The TFC Recycling plant is about a 20-minute drive south of Richmond, just off Interstate 95 in Chester. The plant is technically called the Materials Recovery Facility and colloquially known as the MRF, pronounced, as you might expect, "murf."
The actual process of materials recovery takes place in a cavernous warehouse set back in the property. On your way in, you are likely to pass trucks bearing shipping containers, some of which are filled with 1,700-pound bales of paper and cardboard for which there is currently great demand in China, Indonesia and Thailand. TFC exports about 150 containers of paper a month from this operation. From its plant in Chesapeake, it ships about 250 containers a month.
“Paper and cardboard are our two strongest commodities,” says Tad Phillips, the plant’s general manager. He’s been in the recycling business in one fashion or another since the late '70s. “About 70 percent of the volume by weight coming out of the plant is fiber, and that’s going to be newspaper and cardboard.”
He can get a premium on clean newspaper – Indonesia gobbles that up. Cardboard is good business, though the price dropped some to offset the increased cost for foreign buyers whose currency lost value to a strong U.S. dollar. Oh, and plastic — the falling price of oil has knocked the value down by 50 percent in the last year. “It’s just like gas,” Phillips says, “you’re paying half what you once did.”
Still, that’s better than the market for recycled glass. That’s a net loss. It costs him more to transport, but he’s got a company in North Carolina that will take it, which is cheaper than a landfill. Aluminum is still the most profitable — also the least available — but 100 percent of it can be recycled, which is a heck of lot cheaper than making it. Anheuser-Busch Co. will take aluminum by the 33,000-can bale.
I will never look at my recycling cart the same way again.
The Valentine’s next Community Conversation brings me out to the MRF, which turns out to be a fascinating window into the global market and human behavior. Recycling is the subject of our next conversation, set for 6 p.m. on Tuesday, March 1, at The Valentine. Richmond magazine is a partner in the conversations. Our expert guests will be Shannon Freeman, a local market manager for the Recycling Perks program; Bill Carlson, vice president of the Donated Goods program at Goodwill Industries, and Kim Hynes and Nancy Drumheller, who are, respectively, the executive director and public affairs manager of the Central Virginia Waste Management Authority, which you can call the CVWMay, because they have fun with acronyms in this industry.
Perhaps you come to the subject as I did, which is to say knowing next to nothing. Oh, I rinsed my jars. I took the lids off the plastic bottles. I broke down the cardboard and dutifully tossed in my pizza boxes, unaware that in introducing the box, with its grease stains and occasional clump of clinging mozzarella, I have committed an act of food contamination and, therefore, “the number one recycling sin,” as Phillips sees it. I recycle for all the environmental reasons for which we congratulate ourselves.
But much is afoot here. In Richmond, start with the replacement of the bins with the carts last summer. Since doing that, the volume of recyclables coming out of the city has increased by about 50 percent. According to a Feb. 17 report from the CVWMA, in January, about 793 tons of material was collected from recycling carts and hauled to TFC. That was a 33 percent increase over January 2015. Pat yourself on the back for that, Richmond.
“I think part of what’s going on is simply that the carts hold more, so people are not throwing away recyclables,” Hynes says. “At the same time, a lot of people were not participating for whatever reason, so giving everyone a cart has been hugely successful. “
The CVWMA measures participation in terms of the set-out rate, which is exactly what it sounds like. Richmond’s set out rate is about 44 percent, as is Henrico County’s. Chesterfield County’s is about 34 percent. These are conservative estimates given that people are not necessarily setting out their carts twice a month.
The name of the game here is boosting participation and volume for both environmental and business reasons. Profit lie in tonnage. It helps pay for the cost of recycling. And tonnage isn’t what it used to be.
“Plastic bottles are getting thinner and thinner,” says Bill Dempsey, president of Recycling Perks. “Tuna cans aren’t necessarily cans, anymore. They are pouches. Dishwasher and laundry detergent isn’t just sold in bottles, but in little soap packets. That’s the challenge of the last five years; the material is changing.”
Come to the Community Conversation and you’ll learn that your cart has a chip in it and the trucks have readers, so that if you sign up for Perks, you get points every time you put your cart out. The points are good for discounts at local businesses. The technology, still evolving, Phillips says, basically allows for more targeted recycling campaigns. A win-win-win, he calls it.
Back at the plant, he’s walking me through the process. It’s loud and dusty, which you might expect. It smells like paper, which I should have expected, but didn’t.
From the back of a truck comes a landslide of newspaper, tuna cans, beer bottles, aluminum cans that somehow escaped scavengers, milk jugs, detergent bottles and the loathed pizza boxes. Out comes the junk mail, the empty cans of peas and corn and soup, the newspaper inserts, the plastic water bottles, a pillow. A pillow?
“I don’t know if that’s wishful thinking or what,” Phillips says. “I try to give everyone a hall pass. They’re misinformed about what can be recycled … Anything and everything, you’ll find it here. You don’t even want to know.” (About 10 percent of what comes in the door here can't be recycled, he says.)
Bulldozers pushed heaps onto conveyor belts. Conveyor belts convey. The sorter, a many-limbed, mechanical creature of screens, blowers and magnets, sorts paper, glass, steel and aluminum in a cacophony of clanks and clunks and clinks. Glass in one direction, paper in another, cardboard in still another. Metals here, plastics there. A river of recyclables branching off into tributaries, guided and refined by the nimble fast fingers of workers who pluck from the flow that which should not be there. Newspaper floats and paper flutters from a chute; a brown stream of cardboard rushes towards the bailer. Giant rectangles of crushed aluminum gleam in the filtered light.
Outside, another trailer loaded with another shipping container trundles out, bearing the last couple weeks of local newspapers for an enterprising company on the other side of the ocean, and so connecting us, cart by cart by cart, to the global marketplace.
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