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In the News
They separate so you don't have to
By Leslie Moriarty
Special to The Seattle Times
The Cascade Recycling Center is filled with the constant clanking of cans shooting through the air in a nonstop flurry of "foul shots."
But at the other end of the recycling stream, Snohomish County residents may be scoring, too.
With the arrival of 96-gallon big blue totes, residents no longer need to sort recyclables. All of it — cans, bottles, newspapers, cardboard and plastics — go in the blue carts.
In the past month, most residents of Snohomish County have switched from using separate bins for recycling to the large can where all their recyclables can be tossed. Previously, recyclables had to be sorted by residents.
Now, the sorting of recyclables is done at the Cascade Recycling Center in Woodinville.
Officials for Waste Management Northwest, which contracts with Snohomish County for trash collection, predicts the change will make recycling easier and increase the amount of materials that are recycled.
Steve Goldstein, a principal planner for Snohomish County Public Works, said it will be early next year before the county has data to show whether participation in recycling has increased.
Waste Management Northwest has brought online a new recycling center with mechanized sorting equipment.
The center, at Northeast 190th Street and Woodinville-Snohomish Road, just south of the Snohomish County line, is considered a "single stream" plant in which all recyclable material can be gathered together, loaded on a conveyor belt, and then separated mechanically by spinning discs and screens, said Tim Crosby, the district manager for Waste Management Northwest.
"It automatically senses the difference in weights and textures of the various products," Crosby said. "And depending on what it is, it sends it a different way."
A matrix of conveyor belts travel throughout the 80,000-square-foot building. Trucks dump their recyclables at one end of the building, where a front loader scoops the material onto a conveyor belt.
As the recyclables start moving down the line, newspaper gets sorted and dropped to a conveyor belt below. Cardboard and mixed paper head another way, and the cans, bottles and plastics travel on their own routes.
Aluminum cans are the last thing to be sorted out. At the end of the line, the cans are sensed by a magnetic separator that picks them up and "flicks them like good foul shots" into another bin, Crosby said.
"This is my favorite spot," he said, watching can after can being tossed. "I just keep waiting for one to miss, and it never, hardly ever, does."
In the midst of all of that, anything that doesn't belong, small pieces of glass or other trash, gets dropped to a bin and flows to what is called the "out throws."
"That's the stuff that can't be recycled," Crosby said. "We get anywhere from 3 to 6 percent of that every day."
It goes to the landfill with the rest of the regular garbage, he said.
The new system has been operating for only the past four weeks at the recycling center.
"Overall, we're really pleased at how it's going," Crosby said. "Anytime you have a new operation, there are going to be unexpected things happen. But there's been nothing that we would call major."
There are about 40 employees who work as "sorters," watching over the conveyor belts as the recyclables pass by. Their job is to pull out any wrong items that get past the system.
By the end of the year, all Waste Management Northwest customers in unincorporated Snohomish County, and those in the cities of Mukilteo and Stanwood, will use the 96-gallon wheeled cart for their recyclables, Crosby said. The company hopes to have all its 70,000 customers throughout the county included in the one-cart recycling system by next summer.
Part of the new system is an every-other-week pickup of recyclables, rather than weekly, which Crosby said saves the company and the customer money.
"It will save us money in fuel and labor costs, and in turn, that savings will be passed on to consumers by allowing their rates to stay down," Crosby said. "That's the whole goal, to keep from having to make rate increases."
Crosby declined to put any dollar figures to what the company expects to save, but trash is a big business. Waste Management Inc. had $7.5 billion in revenue from garbage collection in North America in last year, and recycling brought in $635 million more. The company has roughly 20 million residential and 2 million commercial customers.
Waste Management Inc. operates 146 materials-recycling facilities where paper, glass, metals, plastics and compost are recovered for resale. It has 18 secondary processing facilities where materials are reworked into raw products.
Although it is too early in the new recycling project to know whether more recyclables are being collected in Snohomish County, Crosby said the first indications are positive.
If previous statistics prove out, the company expects to see participation in recycling increase from 15 to 30 percent throughout the county, Crosby said.
"Initially, there's an excitement, and participation jumps up about 30 percent," he said. "After a couple of months that drops some but still remains up about 15 to 20 percent from the time when we were using the three-bin system."
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For more information about Waste Management's Cascade Recycling Center, contact the CRC at 425 485-8145 or e-mail cascaderecyclinginfo@wmnorthwest.com?com.
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