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Fredericksburg recycling crew member Joeann Fleming collects recyclables in a single stream--no sorting required--along Bakersfield Lane in the Bragg Hill area of the city. |
If you live in Fredericksburg, you'll soon see your recyclables dumped into what looks like a plain old garbage truck.
That doesn't mean they're headed for the landfill, though.
Sorting cans from bottles from newspapers used to be an enterprise that took up rows of plastic bins in many households.
These days, though, a lot of sorting is done on giant conveyor belts by the companies that purchase municipal recyclable goods.
The Rappahannock Regional Solid Waste Management Board--known as the "R-Board"--has been collecting recyclables in a single stream since August 2008, according to regional landfill superintendent Andrew Mikel.
The R-Board serves Fredericksburg and Stafford County. Private haulers that use the regional landfill have been collecting single-stream recyclables since August 2008, but the city has been slower to adopt the new process because it needed a new truck to make the switch.
The money for a new $115,000 compactor truck came from the R-Board. Some of it was a dividend from the methane gas operation the regional landfill recently started.
The compactor truck will allow the city to take its two curbside sorter trucks off the street. One is so old it needs to be taken out of service, anyway, and Public Works Director Doug Fawcett said the city would look at what to do with the other one.
The truck looks like a regular garbage truck. The city has used cleaned-out garbage trucks to pick up recycling in recent months when its old recycling truck has been in the shop.
The garbage truck always sparked a few calls from residents wondering whether their recycling efforts were a waste of time.
To try to avoid confusion, this new garbage truck has a giant logo on it with the word "recycling" written in big letters.
"We want to make it very obvious to folks that when we pick up the recyclables and put them in this truck, it's not just going into the trash truck," Fawcett said.
Mikel said the single-stream collection has allowed the regional landfill to increase the amount of material it recycles, and to escape some of the market declines that have made recycling hard for other localities in recent months.
Before single-stream collection, the regional landfill was selling two streams of recyclables--one of mixed paper, and the other of mixed plastic, glass and other materials.
Earlier this year, the market for recyclable paper dropped significantly, as paper mills cut production. As a result, many localities were paying to have paper hauled away.
That wasn't true for mixed, single-stream recyclables, though.
"It just so happened that we could still sell the product at a decent price," Mikel said.
The quantity of recycled goods also has increased. Before single-stream, Mikel said, the landfill was sending out four to six tractor-trailers of recyclable goods each week. Now, he said, it sends out two or three a day.
The materials are sold to Waste Management's Recycle America in Maryland, where they are sorted using a combination of magnets, blowers and other technology.
Fawcett said the new truck will make recycling collection safer for city employees, because they won't have to lift boxes of materials as high.
He said the city is hoping that single-stream collection will increase recycling in the city by making it easier.
That, in turn, could save the city money.
If city residents recycle more, they're likely throw away less, and Fawcett said that could allow Fredericksburg to reduce its garbage collection from twice a week to once a week, a money-saving move City Council members have been eyeing for years. But in the long run, anything that slows use of the landfill is good for taxpayers.
The regional landfill's operations are supported entirely through commercial hauler tipping fees, recycling and other revenues, but Stafford and Fredericksburg both have an interest in making the landfill last as long as it can.
"Every bottle, can or newspaper that doesn't just get buried but instead results in some amount of revenue is certainly a taxpayer benefit," Fawcett said.
Emily Battle: 540/374-5413
Email: ebattle@freelancestar.com
Single-stream recycling does not change what is accepted Stafford and Spotsylvania counties do not offer government-run curbside recycling. County residents should contact the private haulers who perform this service in their neighborhoods to ask whether they need to sort recyclables. |
