Bale out

Transfer stations play an integral role in waste collection, but baling has become a smaller part of their operations.

Now that recycling centers are more prevalent across the U.S. and have evolved further with advanced sorting technologies, the role of the transfer station has changed to the point where the need for baling has decreased.

“Transfer stations are a convenient location for the trucks to offload and to get back to collecting materials, whether it’s recycling or garbage,” says Jim Marcinko, director, field and recycle operations, at Houston-based WM. “Our evolution of them is to make them more user-friendly—better traffic flows, faster scales, more scales, things like that—because we know the most important [thing] is to get the truck in and out of the facility and back working. We’re just an interim point, and we’re there really for convenience so that truck doesn’t have to come off the route and drive an hour to the landfill. Instead, that truck will go back to service many more customers.”

Baling limitations

Marcinko adds that 30 years ago, it was common to find a baler at the transfer station because there weren’t as many traditional recycling facilities. But now that recycling centers are more prevalent throughout the country, there are more options for recyclables, and it makes sense to send that kind of volume to the recycling center.

One of the limitations of baling at transfer stations is the lack of sorting for certain commodities. Marcinko says a baler at a transfer station is going to handle one or two different types of material, while material recovery facilities are faced with a broad range of commodities, such as cardboard, paper, bottles, cans and other metals.

“What’s replaced baling is we’re bunkering the material up, just like any material, and we’re going to outload it with a wheel loader,” Marcinko says. “Some of them have compactors or trailers to compact material to maximize payloads. And then when that material is transferred to the processing facility, that processing facility will have all kinds of different technologies to handle the material to really perform good separation.”

More often than not, Marcinko says, certain transfer stations accept waste and recyclables. Then the station will transfer the recyclables to a sorting facility, which in turn would separate the material and bale it there.

“That’s generally what we’re doing nowadays,” Marcinko says. “Instead of baling, if we have a transfer station that has room, we’ll generally consolidate materials now. It gives us a much wider spread of materials we can take versus [the] very limited scope if you’re just trying to bale and not really sort.

“We want to get the material to the sorting facility. We want to get as much from the customer as we can because that makes it as easy for them to recycle as much as possible.”

Investment in technology

WM has invested heavily during the past three years to enhance the sorting capabilities of its recycling facilities. The company is on track to surpass $1.4 billion in building new and upgrading existing recycling facilities with advanced technology by the end of 2026.

Marcinko says that investment was designed to grow automation and modernize its recycling process, which includes screens to remove cardboard, optical sorters with the capability to separate different plastic grades, magnets to pull any ferrous metal and eddy current separators that sort nonferrous metals out.

The firm also can sort paper by color and grade, helping it recover more cardboard for its customers and making cleaner grades. Prior to the sorting technology, WM had to rely on people manually recovering material. Now, optical sorters can sift through more than 1,000 items per minute.

“The optical sorters really give us a big step up to separate very many different grades because we can program them to run different materials,” Marcinko says. “One will shoot out the milk jugs, one will shoot out the soda bottles, one will shoot out butter tubs and one will shoot out the brown pieces of paper. They’re all super effective.”

“The problem is scale; you need a lot of volume to make them affordable,” he continues. “Some of these facilities have 20 of them. And so that’s why just a baler at a transfer station is kind of an old way to doing it now that the industry has evolved.”

Marcinko says optical sorters also produce mountains of data that WM can use to refine its process.

“We have a lot of information available because the machine has seen it all, recording it. Now, we bring all that information back in and use it to maximize how we’re using it for the system,” he says. “We use it to create a nice dashboard on the performance to show us how we’re doing. Are the opticals performing right? What is our quality [being produced] today? All those things. There’s a ton of information available now that we didn’t used to have.”

The right situation

Baling might not be as prevalent as it once was at transfer stations, but it still has its place. Marcinko says most baling at these facilities is going to occur in a safe place and when there is enough volume of a steady type of material to justify the cost.

However, Marcinko adds, those situations are few and far between now that recycling centers have been heavily invested in.

“Balers are very expensive. If I spend that kind of money, I’m going to have to have a lot of material to put through it. And, generally, if I have a transfer station, that’s not going to have a lot of [segregated recyclable] material, and I don’t have space to safely sort, either.”

One example where it might make sense to bale at a transfer station is if a customer has large volumes of one type of material. Cardboard is generally the most prevalent one as distribution centers tend to produce a steady stream of compacted cardboard every day, and the transfer station might be the closest site in the area.

“We’re generally going to be looking for material we don’t have to sort or we don’t have to do much preparation with, just because the sites aren’t designed for that,” Marcinko says.

“We’ve invested, not only ourselves but really as an industry, on recycling facilities,” he adds. “That’s really the end destinations versus transfers for recyclables. And that’s why I think baling is kind of waning in the transfer station. We put a lot of really cool equipment out there to really do its work. And it’s working; it’s awesome to use nowadays.”

The author is the managing editor for Waste Today and can be contacted at chsweeney@gie.net.