When San Francisco-based Brightmark was looking for shredding equipment to use in its feedstock preparation system at its Ashley, Indiana, plant, the company prioritized consistency of particle size at the throughput rate required for commercial operation. Its turnkey system provides that consistency despite variable feedstock as well as redundancy, says Mike Dungan, the company’s feedstock development director.

Mixed plastics to fuel

In the late 2020 profile that appears in Plastics Recycling, a supplement to Waste Today’s sister publication Recycling Today, Brightmark CEO Bob Powell says the company is developing “holistic solutions that are closed-loop and tackle the most pressing environmental challenges.”

Those solutions include Brightmark’s $260 million “plastics renewal facility” in Ashley. That plant, which is ramping up operations as of early 2021, will recycle 100,000 tons of mixed plastics annually into ultra-low-sulfur diesel, naphtha and wax using a form of pyrolysis invented by RES Polyflow, which Brightmark acquired in late 2018.

“Brightmark was attracted to the flexibility of the technology” RES Polyflow had developed, says Jay Schabel, president of Brightmark’s Plastics Division and the founder of RES Polyflow.

Unlike similar technology, Brightmark’s can accommodate up to 3 percent polyvinyl chloride (PVC) by weight in its mixed plastics feedstock.

But before the mixed plastics can head to Brightmark’s plastic conversion units (PCUs), first they must be processed by the company’s feedstock preparation system, which was supplied by Vecoplan LLC, Archdale, North Carolina.

All in the prep

Mixed plastics bales that enter Brightmark’s Indiana facility are dewired and audited, with the baling wire and the obvious contaminants removed while the material is still on the tipping floor, Dungan says. The material is then blended and loaded onto a conveyor, where sorters further remove obvious contaminants by hand. The material then passes through optical and magnetic sorting technology. At this point, the mixed plastics encounter the first of two shredders manufactured by Vecoplan.

Dungan says the VAZ 2000 MFTV preshredder achieves a homogenous particle size before magnetic separation is employed for a second time.

“The first shredder is a little more robust,” Dungan says.

After the metals liberated by the preshredder are removed, the plastics are fed to the second shredder, a Vecoplan VEZ 2500T, where they are reduced to a 2-inch-minus particle size.

Additional system components include drying, pelletizing and material handling equipment that was integrated by Vecoplan, as well as an optical sorter to identify and remove PVC.

Dungan says the systems’ fluidized bed drier removes excess moisture from the plastics before a pelletizing system reduces the bulk density of the material.

“Drying is the final step before we pelletize,” he says. “High-moisture material is run through there,” he says of the fluidized bed drier, “and we can turn the heat up or down based on the condition of the material.”

Dungan says Brightmark’s minimum processing requirement for the system is 6 tons per hour of throughput with continual operation. However, the system is rated for 12 tons per hour, meaning it can produce up to 280 tons in a 24-hour shift. The finished pellets can be bunkered and stored, he adds, “so that we always have a raw material hedge operationally,” or they can be surged directly to the PCUs.

The facility is permitted to hold days of pellet inventory on-site, Dungan says.

Brightmark began shopping for the feedstock preparation system five or six years ago. The company issued a request for proposals but received few offers that proposed turnkey solutions, he says. The company tested equipment from four shredder manufacturers, running material in a series of trial shredding campaigns. Brightmark assessed the machines’ performance, ease of operability, construction and maintenance.

“The turnkey aspect of the system was the most appealing, but it was supported by good equipment,” Dungan says of the company’s decision to hire Vecoplan for the project. He adds that the equipment met Brightmark’s requirements from a throughput and robustness standpoint and features an “operator-friendly” design.

While Dungan says all the shredders Brightmark looked at during its comprehensive search were “good” and all the companies that supplied them were “solid,” the turnkey aspect of Vecoplan’s system as well as the equipment stood out.

“The reason we selected a turnkey system provider is, based on their experience and installations around the world, we figured they were domain experts, so we didn’t have to become domain experts initially,” Dungan explains.

While Brightmark is still commissioning the equipment, installation was substantially completed as of the start of the year. The system will be tasked with creating the final specification for the pellets, including their “size, shape, bulk density and moisture level that will be used in Brightmark’s PCUs,” Dungan says. These pellets will be derived from an ever-changing stream of incoming material that includes mixed plastics from material recovery facilities as well as postindustrial plastics, plastics from electronic scrap, car seats and boat wrap.

He says the feedstock preparation system is broken into two lines to create redundancy.

“In the event one machine failed completely, we’d still be able to operate at 50 percent capacity on the other line.”

Brightmark can “turn up” the system following planned downtime to produce more pellets during a shift to “catch up quickly,” he adds.

Plastic conversion

The resulting pellets are placed in the PCUs, which are heated stainless steel vessels that measure 8 feet in diameter and 60 feet long. The vapor produced in the heating process is captured and cooled, creating fuels and the building blocks for future plastic products.

The ultra-low-sulfur diesel and naphtha the plant produces will be supplied to BP, which has a refinery nearby. The naphtha the plant produces can be blended into gasoline or even used to make new plastics. The waxes generated in the process will be marketed by Am Wax, headquartered in La Mirada, California.

In Ashley, the company will consume 100,000 tons of plastic per year and will create 18 million gallons of diesel or naphtha and 6 million gallons of wax. And its feedstock preparation system will play a key role in the overall efficiency of the process.

The author is editor of Recycling Today and can be reached at dtoto@gie.net.

According to ReFED, a nonprofit focused on curbing food waste, roughly 35 percent of food in the U.S. went unsold or uneaten in 2019. Most of this waste ends up being sent to landfill—current EPA estimates state that food and yard waste compose roughly 30 percent of the municipal solid waste stream sent to landfill every year.

Because this waste is left to decompose, it gives off a notable greenhouse gas (GHG) footprint equivalent to 4 percent of total GHG emissions in the U.S. (8 percent of GHG emissions when measured globally). These emissions have been directly linked to global warming.

Coupling this data with the fact with one in seven Americans remains food insecure, it is no wonder why organic waste bans and regulations have gained traction in recent years.

Some states such as California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont—and municipalities—Austin, Texas; Boulder, Colorado; Hennepin County, Minnesota; Portland, Oregon; New York City; and Seattle—have already passed organic waste bans or mandatory organics recycling laws.

With the advancement of these state and local regulations comes an obvious trickle down that affects waste industry participants, commercial businesses and residents alike.

In this issue’s Organics Waste Management supplement, we highlight how stakeholders are embracing a shift to more responsible food waste practices.

In “Leading the Way,” Republic Services Director of Organics Operations Chris Seney shares some of the best practices that go into handling the 1.7 billion pounds of organic waste the company processes annually. Specifically, Seney highlights what Republic is doing to build advanced composting facilities, preprocessing sites and food diversion programs in California.

In California, where SB 1383 legislation will require every home and business in the state to recycle their organics when the policy is officially implemented on Jan. 1 of next year, the ramifications for the waste industry are clear—ramping up investment in organic recycling infrastructure is a necessity, not a choice.

To this end, CalRecycle has estimated that the state will need approximately 100 to 150 new compost facilities and anaerobic digestion facilities to achieve the state’s target of diverting 15 million tons of organic waste away from landfill by 2025.

Of course, not all states will take as stringent of an approach to managing organics as California or some of the aforementioned states that already have regulations in place; however, the move to more diversion-centric hauling requirements is clearly only trending in one direction.

And while managing food and yard waste comes with new challenges in these progressive states and localities—namely in the form of building collection and processing infrastructure in conjunction with existing routes and facilities—those haulers able to meet the guidelines laid out in their respective territories will have a clear leg up to win work and the recognition that comes with facilitating a greener approach to waste.

Check out Waste Today’s Organics Waste Management supplement to read more about how food waste management is getting prioritized throughout the country.

Carving out his own path in the waste industry is something that Willie Goode aspired to ever since he was young.

Goode, who started working on the back of his uncle’s waste truck at the age of 15, took to the industry right away. Blessed with a football player’s size and an even bigger work ethic, he got accustomed to doing whatever it took to service the company’s customers.

Whether it was getting up early to spend the day throwing trash in the back of a truck, or jumping behind the wheel to drive the truck at the age of 15 before he technically had his license (Goode says he was a better driver than his coworker his uncle partnered him with), he was committed to getting the job done right.

With plenty of years of practice behind the wheel, Goode eventually took a job as a roll-off driver at AmCo at the age of 20. Then, in 1991, Waste Management purchased the company.

It was at this time that Michael Magee met Willie Goode.

Magee, who was Waste Management’s president of the Washington, D.C., metro area, was told by Goode’s boss that Willie was someone with a bright future.

“I was told by his boss that Willie was a sharp young man that really needs to be in management, and that we should consider giving him a job,” Magee says. “We had just bought the company, and were looking for talented managers and supervisors. After meeting with him, I thought he’d be a great fit, so I offered him a job as a supervisor at Waste Management, and he turned me down.

“He said, ‘Mr. Magee, I really want to have my own business. I think that this is a good opportunity for me to go out and buy a truck. And, if everything goes well, I’m going to have three trucks—one for me, one for my brother and one for my cousin—and we’re going to start a little trash company.’ I instantly liked the guy.”

Goode quickly put his dreams into action. After purchasing a truck, he set off on his own, founding C and G, a D.C.-based commercial waste management company. In 1992, Goode changed the name to Goode Trash, and a few years later after noticing that none of the top waste companies had “trash” in their name, changed it again to Goode Companies Inc.

A partnership formed

Shortly after Waste Management purchased AmCo, Magee was faced with a problem.

Magee says that Waste Management was under a collective bargaining agreement with the Teamsters in D.C. and there was a significant amount of collection work set aside for minority businesses, as well as labor-intensive manual pickup work that the union would not do.

Faced with the problem of finding a suitable subcontractor to take on the work, one name came to mind.

“I offered that work to Willie as his first big book of business as a minority subcontractor to Waste Management, and he took that on and that started our business relationship. I’m not saying that it launched his business, because he already had bought his truck and was doing his own thing, but that really forged our relationship, and he did a great job,” Magee says.

After Magee was transferred back to the Colorado market in 1996, Goode Companies continued to grow its operations and customer base. With an eye on further expansion, Goode partnered with Bruce Bates in 1996. Bates, like Goode, also grew up in the waste business, working for his father’s trucking company from the time he was a teenager. At the time Goode partnered with Bates, Bruce was running Bates Trucking on his own following the death of his father and older brother.

Shortly after partnering together, the pair won a contract to service Montgomery County, Maryland, after which Bates and Goode formed Unity Disposal. They then partnered to form Team Transport, a long-haul trucking business that hauled waste from New York and Philadelphia to landfills in Virginia.

After years of building these businesses together, they decided in 2014 to combine their two roll-off operations, open up a construction and demolition (C&D) recycling facility that they dubbed Recycle One, and blended the Team Transport division all under a new banner—WB Waste Solutions LLC.

In 2015, Magee says he was ready to retire and settle down in Colorado after decades in the waste business. That’s when he got a call from an old acquaintance.

“Willie and Bruce wanted me to make an investment in WB Waste, and asked if I would come along and help them try to continue to grow,” Magee says. “At the time, they had just received a permit to expand Recycle One from a C&D transfer facility to a MSW and C&D transfer facility. So, they were expanding their footprint, and I agreed to make my investment and became a partner in WB Waste.”

A combined effort

Besides Magee, Goode and Bates—who serve as the company’s owners—WB Waste now employs a staff of 220. Together, the company serves the D.C. metro region, including Baltimore, as well as customers in Maryland and northern Virginia, Richmond and Chesapeake, Virginia. To handle the company’s hauling needs, the company boasts a roster of 170 collection trucks and tractor trailers.

Presently, WB Waste owns and operates four transfer stations, a material recovery facility and a landfill that have been acquired or purchased through a combination of organic and M&A activity.

In all, the company now owns and operates Steel Street Transfer Station in Chesapeake, Virginia, which is a C&D transfer and processing facility; Skinquarter Landfill, which is a greenfield C&D landfill in Richmond, Virginia, that opened in August 2019; Tri-County Recycling, a single-stream and clean recyclable and C&D transfer facility in Hughesville, Maryland; Olive Street Processing, a single-stream material recovery facility in Capitol Heights, Maryland; Recycle One Processing, which is a C&D and MSW transfer facility in Hyattsville, Maryland; and Federal IPC, which is a C&D and MSW transfer station and processing facility in D.C.

The company also has six truck terminals that double as offices and garages where the company conducts business and where its vehicles are serviced.

While all of its facilities complement one another, Magee says the opening of the Skinquarter Landfill was especially instrumental in giving the company the autonomy it needed.

“It gave us a tremendous amount of freedom,” he says. “Now, being vertically integrated, like with many of the big public companies, it gave us the flexibility to be able to internalize waste that we were otherwise paying somebody else to get rid of, so it was huge. It was probably the single-biggest strategic move that we have been able to make over the last five years.”

Despite the company’s recent history of strategic growth and expansion, one thing WB Waste couldn’t plan for was the downturn in business created by the COVID pandemic.

Magee says that being a company focused on commercial roll-off work and waste processing in large metro areas resulted in a substantial drop in volumes.

“We saw our volumes drop pretty significantly last year, especially in the months of March, April and May, which are normally some of our busiest months,” Magee says. “The hotels closed, the restaurants closed, so a lot of our trash volume went down. Initially, we were probably down close to 35 percent right out of the gate. It recovered since then a little bit, but we were still down at the end of the year. When comparing March 2019 through December 2019, to the same period last year, we ended up down about 20 percent in volume year over year.”

Compounding this hit in volumes were challenges brought on by riots in Washington, D.C., in summer 2020 following the death of George Floyd, as well as the Capitol riots at the outset of this year.

“Between the riots last year and this year, and disruptions around the presidential inauguration, we’ve had some difficult things to deal with that are not exactly friendly to us trash guys working in Washington, D.C., but we’ve weathered those storms pretty well,” Magee says.

“One thing I’m proud of with WB Waste is that our employees were very well taken care of throughout all this upheaval—we didn’t lay off one person through this whole thing,” he continued. “We’ve kept our employees and our payroll intact. And we are hoping that this year, as we come out of the winter, business is going to be a lot more robust than what we’ve had over the last year, and we’re prepared for that. So, we’re hopeful for the rest of 2021, but certainly are optimistic about 2022.”

When looking forward to the company’s prospects for the future, Magee points to WB Waste’s recent history as an indication of its upward trajectory. He says that the company has quadrupled in size over the last five years and that its plans are to continue to find avenues to advance the business.

“I would say that there is a lot of runway ahead of us, and a lot of room to maneuver, and we’re going to continue to pursue opportunities for growth over the next few years,” he says.

Asked what has helped the company find success in the competitive landscape in which WB Waste operates, Magee says that the unique structure of the company and the people involved have been instrumental in allowing the company to flourish.

“We bring a unique history. Willie and Bruce grew up in this city, and I have an intimate background in running a big waste company here,” Magee says. “So, from solely an owner’s perspective, there’s probably no group that knows this market better than we do. I also bring some of the back office [knowledge] and other discipline of the public companies with my background. Willie and Bruce have taken the risks and have been tremendously successful from an operations perspective, which is why we complement each other so well. It’s all any of us have ever done in our adult lives, and we just know this market, so I would say that that’s really what sets us apart.

“We’re also all very accessible as owners and all active in the day-to-day business. We don’t build a lot of layers within the company, and we’re not big on titles. We have great managers and employees, but we are truly all teammates that take care of each other. There’s not a day that goes by that the three of us aren’t deep in the trenches asking questions and being involved in decision-making. It’s probably a nontraditional structure than what you would see in a lot of big organizations or other organizations of our size, but it works really well for us.”

The author is the editor of Waste Today and can be contacted at aredling@gie.net.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but when it comes to curbing recycling contamination, its value is much greater for Waste Management (WM), based in Houston.

WM Vice President of Recycling Brent Bell says the company first began taking pictures of the loads coming into its material recovery facilities (MRFs) around the time China began cracking down on contaminated imports of recyclables in 2016 and 2017.

He says that by taking pictures of the material unloaded at the company’s MRFs, WM was able to then communicate with its customers regarding loads that contained foreign materials.

“We figured if our outbound customers were telling us the material is too dirty or has contamination, we needed to notify our inbound customers that are bringing in material where there was contamination,” Bell says.

WM first had workers on the tipping floor take photographs of the loads as they were dumped, he says. However, in an effort to keep workers out of harm’s way, the company instead had its wheel loader operators take these pictures from the safety of their cabs.

Now, WM has deployed stationary video cameras at a handful of sites. Workers can assess video and still-frame footage from a remote office setting and then share issues with drivers directly or forward them to management via email.

Photo courtesy of Waste Management

The value of detection

Bell explains that being able to provide real-time evidence of contamination eliminates disputes over the responsibility for the foreign material.

“By providing visual documentation of loads, you don’t have someone saying, ‘Oh, you guys just took these pictures on your own,’ or, ‘This wasn’t my truck.’ These images clearly show the truck number and the time of day because, ultimately, what we want to do is make sure that they can go back and identify the routes they were on or those customers on the routes and notify them of the contamination,” he says.

By being able to show municipalities and third-party haulers what their loads contain, he says, these customers can have conversations with specific clients who may be the source of the issue. This information also can help haulers identify which communities might need to be targeted for recycling education initiatives.

WM has worked with several camera monitoring vendors as it tests different systems, Bell says, but the most sophisticated systems allow for operators to take still shots or video and then send this visual proof out. These shots detail exactly what type of contamination is present, the estimated percentage of contamination within the specified load and any guidance on corrective actions the customer needs to take in the future.

Additionally, WM communicates any issues with incoming loads directly to drivers while at the site. “We want the drivers to be able to leave the site knowing that, if they were supposed to be bringing in clean cardboard, for instance, they’re not going to get paid for that because they had tires, batteries and all this other stuff that was not supposed to be in the clean cardboard load,” Bell says.

For extreme cases of contamination, he says the wheel loader operator could deem a load unrecyclable and push it to the side to be treated as trash.

In addition to cutting down on contamination for economic reasons, Bell says WM works to reduce contamination at the source to help improve the efficiency and safety of its MRFs.

“Whether it’s tangling from a garden hose or a chain or the presence of a propane tank in a load, these contaminants could all cause downtime or even fires within these recycling plants. So, we definitely want to prioritize [clean loads] and make sure we don’t get in materials that are perhaps going to injure an employee or cause a fire,” he says.

Bell adds that large-sized contaminants are the easiest to identify and purge from incoming loads.

"I think, more than anything, what this technology brings to the table is it shows our willingness to help fix the problem.” –Brent Bell, vice president of recycling, Waste Management

“It’s obviously really easy to see the large items that don’t belong, whether that’s a couch or a basketball goal or something similar,” he says.

Perhaps above all, Bell says, WM is on the lookout for cellphones, electronics and other items that could contain lithium-ion batteries because they can easily start fires if left undetected. Bell says he’s hopeful the company’s emphasis on targeting items containing lithium-ion batteries will result in a reduction in this incoming material similar to when the industry worked to crack down on needles in the recycling stream in recent years.

A deeper dive

Although WM’s camera imagery provides undisputed evidence of contamination, sometimes it doesn’t tell the full story of what a load contains. Bell estimates that the foreign materials a camera can detect usually only represent about half of the contamination that is in a load because much of the heavy materials fall to the bottom of the pile.

To better understand the contents in loads, WM performs regular audits where workers examine loads closely. Along with the images it takes, Bell says WM can paint a detailed portrait for its customers of what they’re bringing into its MRFs.

To help effect behavioral change, Bell says he thinks WM’s load-monitoring efforts speak to the company’s commitment to help customers stop problematic behaviors before they become a bigger issue.

“I think, more than anything, being able to have these discussions based on documented instances of contamination alerts customers to the fact we’re willing to take on the investment on our side and encourages them to partner with us and make investments on their side to [complete the process],” he says. “I think, more than anything, what this technology brings to the table is it shows our willingness to help fix the problem.”

An organizational change

Bell says essentially all the company’s MRFs use cameras to capture the contents of incoming loads, but only roughly 10 sites have automated cameras that can be accessed and managed remotely.

WM plans to roll out this technology over the next year to more of its MRFs to cut down on the waste it is processing.

Beyond the technology the company is currently using to monitor materials, Bell says he believes the next phase of load monitoring in recycling applications will be influenced by cameras with artificial intelligence capabilities, similar to those used on its sorting lines to identify and target specific materials.

“Ideally, what we want from these cameras is to make judgments on their own with the artificial intelligence and learn to say … that based on the camera’s memory, ‘This looks like something that does not belong.’ I don’t think we’re quite there yet, but I could see that being a very real possibility in the future,” Bell says.

The author is editor of Waste Today. He can be reached at aredling@gie.net.