Once upon a time early in my career, I was in the audience at an educational conference when a speaker informed a room full of environmental advocates that the little numbers within the chasing arrows on the bottom of their plastic bottles were the number of times the bottle was recycled. Needless to say, it was uncomfortable to watch as the speaker was brought up to speed in real time.
Giving the aforementioned individual the benefit of the doubt, they had received their information from someone, somewhere, at some point in time. The fact is that, like a real-life version of the children’s game of telephone, a miscommunicated message manifested itself in the spread of misinformation over time.
In my opinion, this example can serve as a warning to recycling managers on the need for clear and direct communication when speaking to residents about what goes in the recycling bin.
Undoubtedly, the waste and recycling industry is facing substantial change when it comes to what is and what is not recyclable. The Resin Identification Code system (the No. 1-7 on the bottom of plastic containers) was introduced in the late 1980s. That means an entire generation has grown up with it. This generation has solidly entered the workforce and, in some cases, is now raising a new generation of its own. This new generation is also growing up with the internet and access to a slew of information from infinite sources. While misinformation abounds online—one look at social media will tell you that—countless opportunities to educate and inform also exist.
There is a phrase attributed to being an old Chinese proverb (again, you have to read everything online with a grain of salt) that says, “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now.” In my estimation, this phrase can be applied to recycling education today. While we can’t go back in time and educate our communities on recycling best practices and what is and is not recyclable, the good news is that we can start today.
These recycling education efforts need to be responsive to a variety of audiences and factor in how diverse subsets of the population consume information. Recyclers need to come to their audience in the places and ways that the message is most likely to be received. This means choosing the right forum and constructing the right message in the right language with the right context.
So, while industry insiders may argue whether a material recovery facility can or should accept a No. 1 plastic container with or without a neck, for instance, let’s consider that the basic fundamentals of recycling aren’t yet wholly understood by many in our communities across the country.
When planning your next recycling campaign, I urge companies and recycling personnel to remember to explore all feasible channels in order to improve the industry’s education and outreach efforts. Because if one thing is certain, it’s that we can’t remedy the problems of the past—we can only work to do better in the future.
Why experience matters when building a transfer station
Features - Transfer Stations
For constructing a facility that can stand up to the rigors of the job, finding the right architects and contractors is a must.
I hear it all the time: “I’ll get an architect to design my transfer station, and then it will be easy to just find anyone to build it.” I’m here to tell you it’s not that simple. Some people think these facilities are just concrete and steel—they can’t be that difficult to build, right? Well, there are myriad factors that come into play during construction where the intent of the design just can’t be made clear enough. During these times, experienced and knowledgeable professionals are needed to take the lead.
The tipping floor
While many people think the tipping floor is just a concrete floor with rebar, so much more goes into the design and the makeup of the concrete itself. I would venture to say 99 percent of the architect and engineering firms out there don’t know how to design a tipping floor to withstand the abuse it takes on a daily basis. On top of that, 99 percent of contractors don’t know how to properly pour the concrete or place the rebar in these facilities. By using a general contracting firm to design or build transfer stations, it is highly likely that a basic tipping floor installed by inexperienced contractors will wear down too fast (sometimes within three to seven years) and cost a lot of money in inefficiencies and repairs over the life of the facility. By contrast, a proper concrete mix design can keep tipping floors intact for over 15 years without the need for repairs.
In terms of pouring the floor, the contractor must have experience with the right mix in order to do it correctly. Contractors need to understand how many control joints should be placed and where, why the floor should slope a certain way, how the rebar needs to be placed, why testing is important and how many tests are necessary for the mix during placement, how to cure the floor to limit stress cracks, and various other considerations. With all these job-specific requirements, being able to rely on a building team that has specialized in transfer station construction or other similar types of jobs is critical.
The cast-in-place walls
Similar to the exacting nature of pouring floors, transfer station walls require steel embeds placed in specific locations. Whether it be for push, scrape, curb or pit walls, these require placement at precise locations for a very specific purpose. The contractor must have experience with these walls since they are responsible for the guidance and verification of the placement on all embeds and must understand the reasons why they are to be placed in specific locations. Otherwise, general concrete contractors who don’t have experience with them may arbitrarily change steel placements because they don’t understand why a wall was designed in that particular way.
Photo Credit Cambridge Companies
Push wall footing subgrade
During building, I have heard of inexperienced contractors advocating for using tilt-up, precast walls instead of pouring the embeds in place. This is never the answer, as these will not hold up or take the abuse of the facility. Additionally, contractors must understand the pour sequence and placement of the cold joints in order to maintain the integrity of the wall. This kind of information is not included in the design drawings and is another reason why operators must hire a competent, experienced contractor for designing and building their facility.
The metal building
Metal buildings are another transfer station component that require a more nuanced construction process than what some might expect. The primary objective of the metal building is to construct a safe space away from the daily operations, while constructing it so that there are no pockets where trash can accumulate. This is why having a dialed-in set of parameters is a must during construction. For these reasons, straight columns are preferred. Some other metal building design best practices include ensuring there is a maximum depth on the columns, using straight girt conditions on some walls and bypass on others, having specific girt locations for the closure plate to sit on, installing a piece of tube steel to support the pit deflector that is specifically designed for that purpose, and galvanizing the secondary members for long-term durability.
Contractors should also order overhead door jambs that are heavier duty in nature than their standard counterparts so they can handle the weight and operations of the large coiling doors. Upgrades like these aren’t always known or conveyed properly within the architect’s design, but contractors must know these requirements in advance for them to be built into the facility design operation. The metal building is a key component to the long-term success of a facility, and as such, it is important that these are built correctly the first time.
Choosing a contractor
The operator’s goal when picking a design and build team should be to find one with the experience needed to construct a facility that is operationally efficient, durable and requires as little long-term maintenance as possible. Most owners don’t have experience building these sites, so they haven’t developed the expertise required to tell an architect and contractor how it should be done. Moreover, owners don’t have the time to go over the fine details of the build because they have to focus on their daily operations. Owners put their trust in architects and contractors and should expect that they know what they are doing relative to the project. However, it seems all too often, people in the industry have architects and contractors who don’t even know what a transfer station is when beginning the project. These are not the people who can be trusted with taking on the responsibilities of the task at hand.
Finding the right fit
These facilities are a major investment. Operators need to trust the team they hire and know these professionals understand the operations of the facility and why certain site-specific building specs are important. Undergoing a qualifications phase before selecting a team can be helpful. During this process, it is wise to engage several architects and contractors, bring them in and ask for their statements of qualifications for similar projects, references and resumes of the team members who will be working on the project. Then, select the best fit for your needs. While price is an important part of any decision for businesses, this shouldn’t be the deciding factor when thinking about transfer station construction. This will be one of the most important decisions of your career, and it needs to be managed accordingly.
Jeff Eriks is a vice president of business development & marketing at Cambridge Companies in Griffith, Indiana, a design-build firm working with the waste industry for more than 20 years. He can be reached via email at JeffEriks@CambridgeCoInc.com.
Product spotlight
Departments - Product Spotlight
New and updated products and technology for the waste industry.
Powerscreen, a Terex brand based in Dungannon, North Ireland, has announced the launch of its most recent addition to its jaw crushing range of equipment, the Powerscreen Premiertrak 330. Features include:
a large fixed hopper manufactured from an 8 mm wear plate that is designed to improve setup time and increase the life of wear parts.
a 1,000-by-600-mm jaw chamber capable of producing up to 308 tons of crushed material per hour.
a Pulse Intelligence remote monitoring fleet management system for easy access to key data.
low engine speed designed to improve fuel consumption and provide lower noise emissions.
Hitachi Construction Machinery Loaders America of Newnan, Georgia, has released the ZW220-6 midsized wheel loader. Features of the wheel loader include:
a 200-horsepower Cummins Tier 4F engine.
a heaped bucket capacity of 4.2 to 4.7 cubic yards with loading heights reaching up to 13.5 feet.
Hitachi’s new Power Mode switch, putting a 10 percent burst in engine revolutions per minute.
a front window, rounded engine cowling and redesigned rollover protection structure for a 360-degree line of sight.
Sennebogen eGreen electric drive for material handlers.
Sennebogen LLC, Stanley, North Carolina, has released developments with its electrically powered material handlers, which it demonstrated with its 830 E Series material handler during the Germany-based bauma 2019 event. Features of the eGreen electric drive on the 830 E material handler include:
a 225-horsepower electric motor with power supplied through a large cable connection behind the machine.
an integrated power pack that allows the machine to generate its own power.
more mobility.
ability to quickly switch from electric power to diesel.
At a time when sinking commodity values are sending an increasing amount of material to landfill, a new company is gaining traction in the South for its efforts to reverse that trend.
RePower South (RPS) was born in Moncks Corner, South Carolina, in 2013 to help recover more commodities in an economically feasible way. The company has done so by viewing not only traditional recyclables as commodities, but also waste that typically goes to landfill.
Justin Converse, Jim Bohlig and Brian Gilhuly founded the company with a license from Accordant Energy of Rutland, Vermont, for the technology to mechanically convert difficult-to-recycle waste into a non-waste engineered fuel as designated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that can supplement coal in industrial and utility boilers. With processing systems from Bulk Handling Systems (BHS) of Eugene, Oregon, and fuel manufacturing systems from London-based Loesche Energy Systems, RPS’s facilities are offering solutions in areas where recycling is floundering.
“We took a landfill expense, and now we’ve turned that into a revenue stream,” says Gilhuly, who is the company’s CEO. “That changed the overall dynamic of the economic model, and that’s largely what we set out to do.”
Though the company was conceived in 2013, it hadn’t opened any facilities until early 2019. Now that they’re open, though, operations are fully in motion with new opportunities on the horizon.
Gaining ground
Gilhuly says RPS facilities can be tailored to fit into any waste and recycling operation.
“Our focus is to help communities increase recycling recovery by operating within whatever structure or future structure they want to be in,” Gilhuly says.
Photo Credit: RePower South
The two facilities that opened this year illustrate the range of RPS-enabled solutions the company can offer. In February, RPS revived a failed waste processing facility in Montgomery, Alabama, refurbishing it and restoring recycling to the area’s residents and businesses. The facility is publicly owned, with RPS financing the facility refurbishments and fuel production system.
Meanwhile, RPS’s facility in Moncks Corner just outside of Charleston was a greenfield development project that was built from the ground up on 15 acres inside the Berkeley County landfill under 25-year waste supply and land lease agreements. The facility, which opened in April and accepts waste from across the county, is privately owned and was financed by tax-exempt bonds and private equity.
Prior to the Berkeley facility’s construction, residents in the county either had to hire a private hauler to pick up recyclables or drive them to a drop-off center themselves. Now, area citizens have a new resource for diverting material from landfill.
“This innovative approach to recycling is bringing Berkeley County, and South Carolina, into the 21st century,” says Bill Peagler, who served as the supervisor of Berkeley County until late 2018. “This model encourages citizens to do what is environmentally friendly without the hassle of sorting, proving it is possible to increase recycling efforts in communities.”
Both facilities are currently processing about 100,000 to 120,000 tons of mixed material annually, although they each have the capacity to reach about 200,000 tons. More than 50 employees work at the facility in Berkeley, while about 40 work in Montgomery.
“These communities have committed to delivering their waste streams to us for the next 25 years. For us, having that certainty was a critically important part of opening these projects,” Gilhuly says.
Through the system
While the two facilities offer different solutions, both are relatively similar in terms of processing. The Montgomery facility can process up to 45 tons per hour, while the Berkeley facility can handle 50 tons per hour.
The material first heads through a low-speed shredder to break apart any bags and create an even flow into the main system. Then, only a few manual sorters per shift work on the front end to sort out any material that would clog up the system.
From there, it enters a series of screens that remove large, bulky items, organics and other fine material. Additional pneumatic air separation is used to separate lights from heavies. Magnets are deployed to capture ferrous metals, while eddy current separators remove aluminum cans. The material continues through BHS’s FiberPure screen and optical sorters to automate the recovery of clean fiber.
Even in the few months that passed between the opening of the facilities, Gilhuly says RPS made minor improvements on its operating system in Berkeley. The Berkeley facility’s most significant upgrades include nine BHS Max-AI autonomous quality control (AQC) robots.
“Berkeley has additional innovations and sequencing and overall improvements to the process that have evolved over time,” Gilhuly explains. “On a long-term basis, we’ll be continuing to automate and make the process more efficient.”
Once they pass through processing, old corrugated cardboard (OCC), polyethylene terephthalate (PET), high-density polyethylene (HDPE), aluminum and steel are baled with a PAAL Konti 500 to be sold into commodity markets. Meanwhile, lower grade papers and mixed plastics head to the Loesche Fuel System for fuel processing.
Waste to fuel
In the fuel system, after filters remove unwanted materials, the remaining material moves through mechanical size and moisture reduction equipment. After about 15 minutes, the resulting product is a homogenous fuel sized specifically for the end consumer and baled to be sold.
The resulting product doesn’t produce quite enough power to replace coal, but it does produce enough to act as an efficient supplement.
“Coal typically contains anywhere from 10,000 to 12,000 British thermal units (BTUs) per pound,” Gilhuly says. “Our fuel is about 9,000 BTU, so it’s comparable to coal.”
Between the two facilities, RPS is currently selling its fuel to three cement manufacturers. “We’re at the earlier stages of those relationships, and that will continue to expand over time,” Gilhuly says.
"On a long-term basis over the next 25 years, we will continue to work with that waste stream and see if we can find a higher or better use for it.” –Brian Gilhuly, CEO, RePower South
He adds that cement plants have a history of experimenting with alternative fuels to supplement their coal power, making them the most receptive customers to work with up front.
Accordant Energy developed RPS’s fuel technology over a period of more than 10 years through extensive research, pilot trials and a full-scale trial in a coal-fired utility power plant, where it was able to replace more than 10 percent of coal by energy, Gilhuly says.
The resulting fuel quality led to the EPA approving the fuel, known as ReEngineered Feedstock (ReEF), as a non-hazardous secondary material. This means plants can burn it under existing fossil fuel permits as opposed to a Commercial and Industrial Solid Waste Incineration permit.
RPS says up to 50 percent of the carbon in ReEF is biogenic and considered carbon neutral.
Just getting started
For now, RPS is aiming to turn about 35 percent of its waste stream into fuel, while about 15 to 20 percent is recycled and the rest heads to landfill. Material that heads to landfill is typically inert material, diapers, textiles, organics and other non-recyclables.
“On a long-term basis over the next 25 years, we will continue to work with that waste stream and see if we can find a higher or better use for it,” Gilhuly says. “We are motivated to divert and remove as much as we can from the waste stream.”
In addition to improving recovery rates, Gilhuly says he also wants to expand upon the types of consumers who use the fuel product to power their facilities. “I think over time, with more history, data, proof of consistency and with the quality of our fuel, others will be more receptive to it,” he says.
As for additional facilities, RPS has the license to use Accordant Energy’s technology in seven different states across the southeastern region of the U.S. Now that two facilities are up and running, Gilhuly says RPS is back in the market pursuing new projects, looking to build “as many of these as we can.”
But for the immediate future, RPS is focused on honing its process and diverting as much material from landfill as possible.
“Our challenge is to extract as much material as we possibly can, so to be as efficient as possible is our daily challenge,” Gilhuly says.
The author is the assistant editor for Waste Today magazine and can be reached at tcottom@gie.net.
Learning at the landfill
Features - Landfill Safety
Blue Ridge Services outlines safety best practices landfill operators can implement to help identify and eliminate hazards on the job.
Improved safety is something everyone in the waste sector strives for, but successfully implementing site-specific protocols that generate results is easier said than done. Thanks to the confluence of heavy machinery and a mix of professional hauler and residential customers, landfills can be especially precarious places to navigate.
At Blue Ridge Services, a solid waste consulting firm based in Mariposa, California, Kasem Cornelius, an operations consultant and manager of the company’s safety division, and Jason Todaro, an operations consultant and manager of its landfill division, work with operators to help assess, and ultimately improve, safety practices at landfills.
According to Cornelius and Todaro, a few overarching best practices can help reduce the number of accidents and foster an improved safety culture at waste dump sites.
A comprehensive safety program
Although it may seem obvious, having a comprehensive plan in place is the cornerstone of improving landfill safety, but many sites simply haven’t taken the time to prioritize putting these protocols on paper.
According to Cornelius, Blue Ridge Services has conducted a number of polls over the last several years during the company’s webinars and training sessions, and roughly 90 percent of respondents indicate they don’t have the fundamental elements of a safety plan in place. He says there are five main facets of comprehensive safety plans that operators should be mindful of.
“Landfill operators need to have an injury and illness prevention program (IIPP), a health and safety plan (HASP), standard operating procedures for how things are done, and then a training program to train the employees on all these things. Finally, you ultimately need to have a program that tracks and reviews all safety-related issues being undertaken at a site. That tracking and review helps to close the loop because it allows operators to see what actions they’ve taken, but it also allows for tracking so companies get a read on how they are actually doing, and it lets them know if they need to change their approach,” Cornelius says.
In addition to sites that have no program at all, Cornelius notes that many landfill operators may have protocols in place, but they are outdated or not properly communicated to staff.
“I wish that I was joking, but I still see a lot of safety plans that are decades old and written on a typewriter,” Cornelius says. “Many are older than me and have spiderwebs in the binder. I literally pull it off the shelf that way. You have to make sure these are updated and frequently referenced if you want them to be effective.”
Identify common hazards
Enforcing safety is important throughout a landfill site, but observing best practices is especially important in the areas where the most incidents take place.
“In our travels, we find that the tipping area of the landfill is usually one of the most dangerous zones. The tipping pad and overall spotter safety—if the landfill is large enough to need a spotter—are probably the areas where there is the most room for improvement. This is where we really find a lot of vehicle and equipment proximity issues that need to be corrected,” Todaro says.
Todaro says that Blue Ridge Services works with its medium-sized and larger landfill customers to teach an optimized process called a typewriter tipping pattern. He notes that through this process, the spotter determines where the next vehicle is going to go in a manner that they have the heavy equipment pushing off the tipping pad as far away from the customers as possible.
Todaro says beyond this training, landfills (especially larger sites) can benefit from having a spotter for customers to rely on for direction. This person can navigate traffic and orchestrate activity on the tipping floor to keep individuals out of harm’s way.
Customers, especially residents, should also be singled out with targeted training and communication initiatives, Todaro says. Often, these customers aren’t familiar with landfill operations and don’t know what is expected of them, leading to a higher degree of risk. Actively engaging them on the topic of safety, according to Todaro, can help train customers on how to navigate a site and avoid risky situations.
“We see oftentimes the customers aren’t receiving any type of training,” he says. “And something that we’ve identified in the industry specific to landfills is the need to address the public and the customers and educate them on where they should be and where they shouldn’t be. And one of the ways at Blue Ridge Services that we’ve been doing that recently is developing site-specific customer safety videos to really show the public what’s expected of them from a safety standpoint at specific landfills. We really walk them through the process, even going as far as detailing how the tipping pattern works on the active tipping face and showing the customer how that process works and what’s expected of them at the unique location they’re at. If the landfill staff is following a plan and following the protocols that we establish, the next step is getting the customers to do the same.”
Additionally, Blue Ridge Services instructs its clients to think about implementing a safety vest program for its public customers that requires any customer who gets out of their vehicle to have a safety vest on.
“This protects them not only from the heavy equipment that’s near the face, but even from other customers. At Blue Ridge Services, we have a lot of photos and videos of customers getting way too close to each other or walking around their vehicles where it may be difficult to see them. Then, you’ll see this other public customer nearby trying to back their trailer up that they only use a couple times a year into a slot. It’s not a recipe for safety. Just simply having the safety vest program does a lot to make customers more visible. It also creates a safety culture amongst your customers, and it gets them involved in knowing that this is a potentially hazardous site and they need to be safe,” Cornelius says.
Make safety a priority
Cornelius says the way management emphasizes safe practices is what separates the safest companies from those more prone to accidents.
“The ones who are really operating safe sites go beyond simply checking the boxes of those minimum OSHA requirements,” he says. “Because the truth is, OSHA requirements are essential, but they don’t say a lot about landfill operations—there is no landfill section in the OSHA regulations. So those who truly want to be safe implement additional planning and procedures that address the things that their workers are actually doing. They really get operation-specific.”
The other differentiating factor that helps distinguish the safest landfills are those that have what Cornelius calls “safety champions” on the staff. He says these individuals are ideally in a management position and constantly work to reinforce a culture of awareness on-site.
“There are plenty of sites out there that might have plans or procedures that check a box, but it’s about more than just having a book on the shelf about it. There needs to be someone in the operation who really wants to make that change and trains employees on best practices. When we work with operations that have a safety champion, there is a very clear difference. They are much safer operations,” Cornelius says.
He says whether it’s through regular safety-specific meetings or brief “tailgate talks” with crews before the start of the day, an emphasis on constantly improving and learning from mistakes is critical.
Coming full circle, Todaro says that having a third-party trainer come in to periodically fine-tune safety processes can help improve a landfill crew’s behavior, but it is just as important to formally document this information to institute lasting change.
“On-site training is critical. While a lot of this might be about operational processes, such as training a landfill spotter on how to execute their tasks on a daily basis or training equipment operators on how to construct a cell efficiently, everything comes back to safety. Everything has a safety element to it. But any training you’re going to do is going to be most efficient when it’s coming back to, or tying in with, a site’s safety plans and documents that are in place. A trainer can go on-site and say, ‘OK, this is how you should do it,’ but if there’s not a plan in place or a written standard operating procedure in place to really follow through, that training is meaningful, but it’s not as meaningful as if there’s a plan in place you can reference and fall back on,” Todaro says.
The author is the editor of Waste Today magazine and can be reached at aredling@gie.net.
Adam Redling
