Our Big Blue Bin: PA's Recycling Industry Grows into Green Force

Neon yellow trucks bearing junk mail, flattened cereal boxes and empty water bottles pull into Penn Waste's facility outside of Manchester, York County. Whole truckloads are dumped onto a conveyor belt, spread into a thin layer and carried up to yellow-jacketed workers who remove non-recyclables like plastic foam and scrap metal by hand. High-tech equipment, augmented by watchful workers, sorts paper products, plastic, metal and glass. Then they're packaged and shipped to customers who will transform them into new products.

Penn Waste, with roughly 300 employees, represents just one piece of Pennsylvania's growing recycling industry. A 2009 study from the Northeast Recycling Council found that the process of collecting, sorting and making new things from recyclable materials was directly responsible for around 52,300 jobs. That's nearly equivalent to everyone in Wilkes-Barre and Oil City having a job such as melting scrap metal to make steel or composting food and plant waste.

Recycling as a habit
According to the latest figures from the state Department of Environmental Protection, Pennsylvanians recycled more than 5.5 million tons of waste in 2008. That's up from 4.8 million tons in 2006.

Lawrence Holley, the DEP's manager of waste minimization and planning, says the public's sense of responsibility is responsible for much of this increase. Those in their 20s and 30s have been recycling since they were kids. Businesses look for opportunities to recycle as a way of boosting their "green" credibility. It also helps that innovations in product manufacturing mean some things, like electronics, are more easily recycled than just a few years ago.

The DEP's numbers show that about half of all recyclables come from homes and the rest from workplaces. But the non-residential numbers are low. Businesses, like stores, that receive deliveries on trucks often load up the trucks with emptied cardboard boxes rather than sending delivery trucks away empty, and those numbers don't get reported, Holley says. Hospitals, insurance companies and others that shred a lot of paper often send it away without reporting its volume because they'd rather competitors not find out.

Less work, more collection
Bob Bylone, executive director of the Harrisburg-based Pennsylvania Recycling Markets Center, a nonprofit that exists to expand the state's recycling markets, says one of the industry's most important developments is the proliferation of single-stream recycling. You've experienced this if you can now put all of your recyclables in one container for collection rather than separating paper, plastic, glass and metal. Single-stream recycling has spread nationwide over the last eight years or so, Bylone says. And when it's easier for the average person to recycle, more people will do it.

In 2008 Penn Waste began using new separation equipment and stopped requiring its customers to sort their recyclables before setting them out for collection. Since then collections have gone up 30 percent. The company processed 78,000 tons of recyclables last year. Most is collected directly from parts of six counties in south-central Pennsylvania, but other haulers bring products in from as far away as State College, Chambersburg and the Philadelphia suburbs.

It might come as a surprise that Penn Waste actually sees fewer non-recyclables come in on trucks since it began the single-stream process. While it does make life easier for customers, company President Scott Wagner says the company puts a lot of effort into teaching the public that a recycling bin is different from a garbage can. Customers are urged not to leave old papers out in the rain (they get wet and stick to everything else) and to keep broken glass out of the bin (it's easily mixed in with other materials). Any non-recyclables that end up at the sorting facility are considered trash and hauled away.

Despite the name of his business, Wagner insists the material Penn Waste processes isn't trash.

"We’re doing this to make money," he says.

He says it's not hard to find people to buy the materials, either – customers tend to find them. An Ohio company started buying cat-litter buckets to turn into plastic guardrail blocks, then began purchasing used shrink wrap. Used paper heads to China for new life as packing material for Chinese-made consumer goods.

Circuit Boards and Precious Metals
Pennsylvania innovators are also finding new uses for things that aren't usually thought of as recyclable.

Contractors that need to get rid of leftover construction products, like drywall, are paying more attention to their impact on the environment, Bylone says. Plus, companies that need to get rid of materials they're no longer using often save money by finding someone who wants castoffs rather than a hauler who's simply willing to take them to a landfill. "In many parts of the state, the costs of recycling can be less than the costs of disposal," he says.

Electronics recycling is one of the areas with the most growth. When people buy new game consoles, TVs and computers, the old ones have to go somewhere – and they contain hazardous substances like lead, mercury and cadmium. Starting in 2013, state law will prohibit people from putting certain electronics or their components into a landfill.

A 2008 expose by TV newsmagazine 60 Minutes showed a Chinese city where thousands of computer components were piled on the ground and laborers dismantled components by hand. Stories like that drive demand for domestic facilities that dismantle these components.

It so happens that Kuusakoski, a multinational recycler based in Finland, had hoped for years to open a new location in the U.S. It asked employee Barry Sweet to check out potential locations on the East Coast. Sweet met Richard Burgess, third-generation scrap dealer who'd branched into electronics recycling at his facility in Philadelphia. In 2009 Kuusakoski bought Burgess' business and is now in the midst of an expansion project and equipment upgrade estimated at $10 million. The company hopes work on the site will be done by July.

At that point Kuusaskoski will be able to process more than 132,000 tons of electronics each year and double its workforce here to about 30. Now, it gets deliveries from companies that disassemble discarded fans, vacuums, computers and printers. Workers break them down further and sort them before they're sent to those who make new products. Steel goes to mills to be melted, aluminum heads for smelters in Europe and circuit boards are sent to overseas refineries where precious copper and gold are extracted. Burgess, now CEO of Kuusakoski's Philadelphia facility, explains that no American refineries are equipped to remove these precious metals.

"The circuit boards are the most valuable component of the PC," Burgess says. "We consider ourselves miners of the waste stream."

Anyone who wonders how long that stream will flow just has to step into a metal building at Kuusakoski's property on the Delaware River. Inside a 30-foot mountain of broken plastic and circuit boards waits for new life.

"Just look at all that," Burgess says. "That would be in a landfill it if wasn’t for us."

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Rebecca VanderMeulen is a freelance writer who lives near Downingtown. As she tells friends out of state, that's between the cheesesteaks and the Amish. Send feedback here.

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PHOTOS:

Penn Waste's recycling facility takes inbound truck loads of mixed media, paper, plastics,  cardboard and metal and begins to sort each product into bins for disposal and resale.

Penn Waste's Owner Scott Wagner discusses his business during an interview at their corporate offices.

Employees sorting inbound truck loads of mixed media, paper, plastics,  cardboard and metal.

Waiting for a good sorting.

Penn Waste's recycling dumpsters are staged outside the facility.

All photographs by BRAD BOWER