Recycler Tour

Today, Hilary Gans the Facility Operations Contract Manager of South Bayside Waste Management (SBWMA) in San Carlos gave us a tour of their facility. Hilary was very knowledgeable and it was a very interesting tour. Here are some of the things we learned:

  • SBWMA is not a recycler: they just collect materials and bundle them up for resale
  • They do about $1 million a month in commodity sales of recyclable material, which about 10% of their total revenue
  • Materials don’t pay for themselves to be recycled
  • Their revenue comes from city fees, tip fees and commodity sales
  • Plastics worth more when oil is expensive, partly recycling consumes less energy
  • 80% of what they handle is paper
  • Price of paper usually $100/ton but went up to $200 a ton and then down $20 ton in last few months
  • Biggest export from Oakland port is waste paper, a lot to China
  • Single-stream recycling is cheaper to pickup in the streets (rather than multiple passes/trucks and manual collection), easier for consumer, collect more material.
  • New equipment can do a good job of sorting single-stream supplies automatically
  • Hard to recycle hybrid materials
  • Any material’s recyclable value can change based on commodity value
  • Plastics are valuable, $1/lb in some cases. PET and HDPE are in wide use and so are more valuable
  • 90% of all materials they get in are shipped back out for recycling. However, the recyclers don't use all the materials, for instance, when plastic gets included in the paper
  • Number 1 and 2 plastics get recycled back into 1s and 2s, others get downcycled
  • Recycling diversion in CA is 50% by weight
  • SBWMA serves half a million people
Created on November 10, 2008 17:45:23 by Max Dunn (69.226.214.117)