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Waste Management opens new green facility in Northeast Philly

The city's household recycling rate has hit its highest level in history. And with three sorting facilities already in the region, Waste Management Inc. held a formal opening Monday for yet another - a $20 million operation in Northeast Philadelphia.

Nonrecyclables — mostly plastic bags — are removed at Waste
Management’s new recycling facility. (Ron Tarver / Staff Photographer)
Nonrecyclables — mostly plastic bags — are removed at Waste Management’s new recycling facility. (Ron Tarver / Staff Photographer)Read more

The city's household recycling rate has hit its highest level in history.

And with three sorting facilities already in the region, Waste Management Inc. held a formal opening Monday for yet another - a $20 million operation in Northeast Philadelphia.

A jubilant Mayor Nutter extolled the green values of recycling at the new facility and then accepted another kind of green.

He opened an envelope with a check for $489,000 - the city's take for the recyclables it delivered to the new operation in January alone.

Rising volumes of recyclables and high prices on commodity markets are expected to push that amount still higher in the months to come.

The city has to pay $68 a ton to put waste in a landfill, but by collecting recyclables curbside and taking them to Waste Management, it avoids those costs and gets paid about $65 a ton at current commodity rates.

"It's nice to send people your trash and get money in return," said Streets Commissioner Clarena I.W. Tolson. "You can't beat that."

The new facility is one of the largest such operations in the nation, said a Waste Management vice president, Michael Taylor.

Here, the contents of curbside bins - from cans to bottles, from paper to plastics - are brought to be sorted, baled, and sent to markets around the world. Plastics prices are particularly high because of the rising cost of a key component, oil.

Philadelphia's household recycling rate has grown to 19 percent - about triple what it was four years ago.

Officials credit a switch to single-stream recycling, which means all recyclables can be put into one bin. The city also switched to weekly recycling collection, made it on the same day as trash collection, and brought in a rewards-based program run by RecycleBank. The city also has begun accepting more materials, including plastics labeled 1 through 7.

The new facility is taking all that Philadelphia is sending it now, and has the capacity to process double that.

Given that the region has four sorting facilities plus a food waste composting facility in Wilmington, "we now have the capacity to do a recycling program as robust as any in the country," said Maurice Sampson II, who has long championed recycling in the city.

He also owns a commercial recycling business, Niche Recycling Inc.

"We have the capacity to do a 75 percent recycling rate," he said. "Now, it's truly up to the ability of our municipalities to plan the programs, and it's up to us as citizens to do the separation."

The new facility also is intended to position Waste Management as more than a waste outfit, said Brett Frazier, a senior vice president.

The amount coming into landfills is dropping, and the company has a goal of tripling the amount of materials it recycles by 2020.

A sorting facility in Philadelphia was considered a cornerstone of that strategy, said Waste Management's area recycling operations director, Tara Hemmer.

Waste Management also recently entered the high-profile natural gas arena, treating the "cuttings" - soil and stone, basically - from the drilling process and landfilling them. Current state laws allow companies to bury the refuse on-site, but when Waste Management takes the material, it also assumes liability for it, officials said.

None is being landfilled in this region, officials said.

Waste Management also has begun treating wastewater from the gas "fracking" process on site. The water is for reuse or disposal elsewhere.

Waste Management already had a transfer station - a place where trash trucks could off-load to bigger vehicles - on part of the 42-acre site near the Cottman Avenue exit of I-95.

Last week, the building got a silver certification from the LEED - for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design - program of the U.S. Green Building Council.

Leftover buildings originally used as an armory in World War I were torn down, their materials recycled. New construction materials were brought in from within a 500-mile radius. The siding and roof are made from 80 percent recycled materials.

Now, sedum grows in the green roof planted atop the office portion of the building. The pavement allows rainwater to soak through. The toilets are dual-flush and the faucets are low-flow.

Most of the 70 employees are from the surrounding area - Waste Management and the Tacony Civic Association held a job fair to attract them, said Edgar Palacios, plant manager.

From 20 to 45 trucks a day pull up to the facility and with thunderous crashing disgorge their loads in a receiving bay.

The stuff travels up a conveyor belt to the top of the building, where workers do an initial sort for things that shouldn't be there.

First on the list is plastic bags. People often put their recyclables in the bags, but these can become entangled in the machinery.

So workers dump the bags and hold them under a vacuum tube to be sucked away.

Still, so many bags make it into the stream that they have to stop the machinery twice a shift to clear it.

The plastic bag problem worried Sampson, the recycling advocate. "Closing down that belt twice a shift, that costs them a fortune," he said. "That's a real blow."

He said city residents needed more education: "That's up to us to keep those bags from going in."