Waste Management increases single-stream capacity

No effect on county recycling so far

By TOM KANE

BEACH LAKE, PA — Single-stream recycling at Waste Management’s center has been so successful that the company is increasing the size of its drop-off operation.

Single-stream recycling frees residents and businesses from the sometimes-difficult task of sorting the various classifications of recyclables into separate bins, either at curbside or at the recycling center. This traditional practice was called “source-separation.”

The ease of this new method is greatly encouraging more people to recycle, Waste Management officials said.

The company, which is located on Rosencranse Road just off Route 652 in Beach Lake, sends the recyclables to a facility where new technology has developed machines to sort the material with a minimum of hand separation.

Company officials have increased the drop-off facility from two two-cubic-yard containers (one for cardboard and the other for co-mingled bottles and cans) to a single 35-cubic-yard walk-up container that takes a wide variety of plastics, paper, metals and glass.

The county recycling center is located just a mile and a half from Waste Management on Route 652, but the increased single-stream capacity at Waste Management has thus far not had an impact on the county’s facility.

“We’ve seen no change in our participation rates since they’ve been doing it,” said Randy Heller, Wayne County Solid Waste Director. “We still have the usual activity at our recycling center. There could be an impact from competition in the future but it hasn’t happened so far.”

Heller said that his center has not conducted any new studies on total usages as of yet.

“We don’t take a lot of the things they take, like high-number plastics from #3 to #7, but we recycle things that they don’t take, like scrap metal and appliances,” Heller said. “If they take such items, they would have to go into the garbage stream and not the recycling stream, I think.”

Heller said that it was very unlikely that Wayne County would inaugurate a single-stream system. “It’s extremely expensive,” he said. “Cities and other large users like Waste Management can afford it. We can’t.”

He said it would be unproductive to tell people they can bring in the higher numbered plastics—like from #3 to #7. “Markets for those kinds of plastics can disappear very quickly,” he said. “We don’t want to say yes and then have to say no.”

Recycling at the site was very slow since the economic downturn but is beginning to pick up, he said.

Pike County, which had been experiencing some serious problems at its recycling operations, entered a single-stream contract with Waste Management even though they still own their recycling infrastructure.