A combination of paper maps and driver familiarity with routes was key to the city of Baltimore’s Department of Public Works’ Bureau of Solid Waste’s curbside solid waste and recycling collection efforts for many years. The city’s drivers and laborers knew the routes they had to take to service the city’s 210,000 households each week, and collection became second nature for seasoned operators.

In recent years, this method of routing has become less dependable for the city of Baltimore, though. John Chalmers, head of the city’s Bureau of Solid Waste, says higher rates of employee turnover have made it difficult to train new drivers on the city’s solid waste and recycling collection routes.

He adds that the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic amplified those challenges last year.

“It was a tough time,” he says. “We had our challenges with turnover before COVID. COVID was the last straw. When COVID hit, we had to shut down an entire facility. When that happens, you just don’t have the resources to manage services. So, we had to figure out what was most important.”

Navigating a pandemic

©tish11 | stock.adobe.com

Chalmers says one of the city’s service yards had a COVID-19 outbreak in June 2020.

“I had to shut down so employees could quarantine,” he says of that incident.

As a result, he says, the division went from 230 employees to between 94 and 110 employees out on the road daily. The division had some substitute laborers and drivers come in as well, many of whom were unfamiliar with the city’s collection routes. To make things more difficult, Chalmers says the city’s semiautomated collection trucks lacked electronic routing and GPS, making it difficult on his employees to do the jobs efficiently.

Chalmers adds that training and getting substitute drivers and laborers up to speed was challenging. He notes that “there’s a science” behind routing that a substitute driver or laborer might not pick up on.

“The work routine services folks perform on a daily basis is labor-intensive, whether you are routing the truck or you’re behind the truck,” he says. “Baltimore is unique. It’s a historic city and has very narrow and tight alleys. When we brought on drivers from other operations they: One, were not mentally prepared for the task, and two, they weren’t physically prepared for the task and the drivers had to turn things around fast in areas they weren’t familiar with. You put all of that into one bag, there’s a lot of confusion and frustration. That’s what we had to deal with.”

In response to COVID-19 outbreaks, Chalmers says the city had to suspend curbside recycling collection services in September 2020 to prioritize trash collection. As an alternative, he adds that the city implemented 14 recycling drop-off locations in each of its council districts for residents who still wanted to recycle.

In addition, the city issued an emergency procurement that enabled the bureau to invest in Rubicon Global Inc.’s routing software on Aug. 27, 2020, which Chalmers says was valued at $1,042,053. The software was installed on about 140 solid waste and recycling collection vehicles last fall and winter.

“We’re proud to work with the city of Baltimore,” says Conor Riffle, vice president of Rubicon. “The pandemic hit the city hard, just like it’s hit so many municipalities. Departments have been hit hard by COVID. I think part of the challenge in a place like Baltimore is a lot of those routes they run every day are run by folks who may keep routes in their heads. When new drivers are out [on the road], they don’t know what route to take.”

He continues, “Digitizing the routes in Baltimore for the city was a high priority as the reality of COVID started to sink in.”

The city implemented the technology in its trucks in the fall. Chalmers says he has a goal of right-sizing routes based on data gathered from the software by the end of this summer in order to give his employees a tool that helps them and a tool that helps the bureau improve efficiencies.

Software training

Once the city of Baltimore added Rubicon software to its fleet of waste and recycling collection vehicles, Chalmers says his bureau took time to train employees on the new software. He stresses that it was important he had buy-in from all of his employees when integrating the Rubicon software.

“We had multiple trainings with drivers, supervisors and upper management,” Chalmers says. “I’ve been in this business for over 33 years, and my grandma used to say that you never put the cart before the horse. I always live by that. So, before you start any program, you must get buy-in from the users. So, we started with the drivers and the supervisors.”

Training during a pandemic had unique challenges, as well. Chalmers says he needed to find a training location where he could safely socially distance employees and Rubicon representatives. With schools temporarily suspended due to COVID-19, he says the bureau was able to use local school cafeterias to host Rubicon training sessions.

Chalmers adds that he made sure to kick off each training session by talking about the benefits and needs of Rubicon’s software before Rubicon trained employees how to use the new program.

“The first step in optimizing solid waste operations in any way is by involving the front-line supervisors and explaining the benefit of the new program or change,” Chalmers says.

Riffle says he and his team then provided the city’s employees with best practices on using Rubicon software.

“We’ve trained 100 percent of the drivers in the city of Baltimore, all supervisors, all back-office staff,” Riffle says. “They’re all users on our portal and are using the system every day.”

He adds, “At any point, we are happy to help provide more training to help them get the most out of the software and platform.”

“The buy-in [from the city] on this technology was instant. I went to them and said, ‘This is what we need.’ It wasn’t a tough sell at all.” – John Chalmers, head of Baltimore’s Bureau of Solid Waste

Eye on right-sized routes

© Contributions from Baltimore Department of Public Works

Chalmers says applying the Rubicon software to Baltimore’s fleet has yielded impressive results thus far. He adds that the city also resumed curbside collection of recycling in January.

Since the fall, Chalmers says his team has gathered data from Rubicon’s software. He adds that he hopes to analyze that data by the end of summer to update the city’s waste and recycling collection routes.

He adds that it has been many years since the city last updated its waste and recycling collection routes.

“I started back here in 1987, and our routes haven’t been updated for quite some time,” he says. “The last time I adjusted routes was basically bringing in the entire team of one section, talking to the drivers, looking at a map and moving a line here and trying to look at tonnage tickets to make it happen. That is not the most efficient way to [update routes], but that’s how we adjusted our routes back then.”

There’s not a one-size-fits-all approach that can be taken to right-size a route, either. Chalmers says each municipality is different and many factors can affect what makes the best service route. Things can even vary within a single city.

“For example, down in parts of southeast Baltimore, they have angled parking,” he says. “Because of that, we have to walk all of the trash to the end of the block to pull them to the trucks. [Employees] spend more time on that route as opposed to working in the northern portion of the city where they have big streets, big alleys. So, you have to roll all factors into play with routing.”

Some other factors include total route times, right turns and tonnage reports. Another factor is exceptions—how many stops have exceptions, such as forgetting to put a bin out on time for collection.

Other factors to consider include the material recovery facility (MRF) that’s used for recycling, the landfill that is used for solid waste, the waste-to-energy facility and the transfer station where the material might be sent.

Chalmers concludes, “I look forward to the day when we gather all of this data. The goal of this is not only to provide our crews with a very good tool to get them through their day, but also to allow us to right-size our routes. Right now, our routes are unbalanced, and we really need to balance our routes. We want to make sure we are not overworking our workforce, and we want to provide efficient services to the residents of Baltimore.”

A version of this article appeared in the September issue of Waste Today. The author is managing editor of Recycling Today, a sister publication of Waste Today. She can be reached at msmalley@gie.net.

A Boulder, Colorado-based private equity firm has invested $100 million into a startup planning to gather methane emissions of landfills in two states and sell it as renewable natural gas (RNG), according to a report from the Denver Business Journal.

The startup, Pittsburg-based Vision RNG LLC, launched last week to develop landfill gas projects in Missouri and Virginia.

The $100 million funding is an initial investment from Vision Ridge Partners to begin scaling the business, and Vision RNG may eventually look beyond the projects in Missouri and Virginia to develop other landfill gas systems, the company said.

Vision RNG is one of the companies funded by investor Rueben Munger and Vision Ridge Partners. The company funded Vision RNG from the Sustainable Asset Fund II, where Munger is managing general partner, and one of three investment funds of Vision Ridge Partners that’s focused on real assets connected to environmental sustainability.

The startup is led by Bill Johnson, previously CEO of Pittsburgh-based ShalePro Energy Services, a company that designs and builds infrastructure for traditional natural gas producers. At Vision RNG, Johnson assembled a team with experience in landfill gas systems, natural gas compression and biogas operations.

“Landfill gas has long created challenges for landfill owners, the surrounding communities, and the greater environment,” said Johnson in a statement. Vision RNG “is determined to be part of the solution by developing projects that safely convert waste emissions into projects that are not only marketable, but also environmentally friendly.”

The startup’s focus is on projects from landfills not large enough to typically draw interest for building landfill gas capture systems, reports the Denver Business Journal.

According to Munger, the leadership team of Vision RNG is what drew the Vision Ridge Partners investment.

“Their deep energy infrastructure and operations experience uniquely positions them to identify LFG sites, address permitting and compliance needs, and develop on-site and off-site infrastructure to create renewable energy for society and value for our investors,” Munger said.

The Sustainable Asset Fund II, launched in 2018, raised more than $600 million to put into environmentally sustainable businesses, according to its U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

Munger started Sustainable Asset Fund III LP earlier this year with the intention to attract investment partners willing to collectively put in at about $1 billion. Vision Ridge Partners just closed the round after raising its maximum of $1.25 billion to invest, the company said.

Established in 1946, Long Island, New York-based Posillico Inc. has steadily grown to become a top engineering contracting firm in the tri-state area and a go-to resource for public works projects in New York.

Founded by Joseph D. Posillico Sr., the now fourth-generation family business started out as a small trucking contractor. Today, Posillico provides a range of integrated services including heavy civil work for the public and private sectors, environmental remediation, paving, drilling and utilities contracting.

Now approaching its 50th year in business, Posillico Materials—the company’s business unit which specializes in producing recycled sand, aggregates and clay—is helping re-imagine how companies manage waste with the support of wet processing technology supplied by Northern Ireland-based CDE.

Cleaning up the island

With its commitment to environmental responsibility, Posillico Materials recognized the need in recent years to help address mounting concerns over Long Island’s ground pollution and landfill capacity.

“There’s a big need to clean up the island,” Thomas Posillico, material division manager for the company, says.

For many years, Long Island has been troubled by pollution stemming from toxic dumping and the improper handling of industrial wastes. With ground pollution having the potential to adversely affect the island’s groundwater and drinking water via three major source aquifers close to the Earth’s surface, the Posillico team identified the urgency of helping fix this problem.

Historically, contaminated soil would be transported off the island where it would be destined for landfill. A decade and a half ago, Posillico began investing in soil washing technology to help remedy this issue without having to transport the soil remotely. While this technology helped Posillico remove contaminants, extract value and return land to good use, the different vendors and equipment the company relied upon didn’t allow for the efficiencies the company hoped for.

“Our history with soil washing goes back over 15 years,” Robert Tassey, a facility manager for Posillico, says. “We had designed a plant. We called it the Frankenstein plant because we took a piece of equipment from here, a piece of equipment from there, and we put it all together.”

Tassey says a chance encounter with CDE representatives at a CONEXPO-CON/AGG conference several years ago helped him see how the company’s wet processing technologies could benefit Posillico by allowing for more uniformity.

After initial discussions, Posillico made the commitment to CDE for the company to design and construct a new wash plant on-site.

First-of-its-kind solution

Using a co-creation approach to develop the system, CDE worked in collaboration with Posillico to understand its requirements and design needs. Once these were understood, CDE built a wet processing solution that would enable the business to realize its vision for sustainable and profitable contaminated soils processing.

“We spent about a year and a half on the design. We have various laws and requirements that we have to meet here, and CDE was absolutely willing to help in making any adjustments we needed to the plant to satisfy our regulatory requirements,” Tassey says

Once the project was conceptualized, installation, Tassey says, was simple due to the fact that the plant was assembled and subject to factory acceptance testing.

“Most of the pieces are modular, so it made the install go quickly and efficiently,” he says.

A first of its kind in North America, Posillico’s new recycling system became operational in May 2019. The system incorporates a multitude of technologies, including: CDE’s R2500 primary scalping screen feed system, AggMax portable logwasher, M4500 with integrated Attrition Cells to scrub fine material and remove contaminants, CFCU for density separation, EvoWash fine materials classification system, an AquaCycle thickener and PlatePress to eliminate waste and increase water recycling.

Posillico Inc. Principal Michael Posillico says, “When I visited CDE, I knew I’d picked the right company to work with, and I could see that from the design floor, to the people that were testing the equipment, to the people that were in charge.”

“This is the largest soil wash plant in the world,” he adds. “Not only is it the largest, but it’s the most sophisticated plant.”

Thomas Posillico says, “This is really a one-of-a-kind operation that can take so many different varieties of soil and run it through the same plant. Nobody is doing anything like this on Long Island or in the U.S. that I know.”

Maximizing material, minimizing impact

Being one of the largest and most advanced contaminated soil washing facilities in the world, Posillico’s wash plant boasts a high material recovery rate. Posillico can now reduce the unsuitable content in its incoming raw material to approximately 10 percent on average, with the remaining 90 percent being diverted from landfill.

The Long Island facility has the capacity to recycle up to 3,000 tons of soil per day while simultaneously recovering high-value recyclable and saleable products such as sand and aggregates that meet New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC) remediation standards.

With the help of the wash plant, Posillico is now producing a range of materials, including concrete and mason sands, as well as three different aggregates: ¼ inch to 5/8 inch, 5/8 inch to 1 ¼ inch, and 1 ¼ inch to 4 inch.

As a vertically integrated operation, over 60 percent of the certified sand and aggregates recycled on-site are used by Posillico Materials in asphalt production, with the remainder sold directly to the market.

Due to the variable nature of contaminated soils, the Posillico wash plant can accept a wide variety of feed material, including excavation waste, recognizable and uncontaminated materials (RUCARBs), contaminated fill, dredge waste, mixed loads and more.

Within its first few months of operation, the plant processed over 65,000 tons of contaminated soil from a 12-acre brownfield site known as Harbor Isle in Nassau County, New York. Located on the land of a former Cibro petroleum storage facility, the site’s soil and groundwater had been contaminated for decades by fuel and oil and was subject to a major remediation project.

Despite the deeply contaminated nature of this material, Posillico’s investment in CDE’s solutions made processing the soil easy.

“You name it, this CDE plant can process it,” Tassey explains. “We can now feed ourselves with not only contaminated material, but our unsuitable fill from job sites that’s left over, our excavation waste and our drilling spoils.”

In addition to processing material from its own operations, the plant is available to process material from other local construction and engineering companies. This helps lower the cost of waste disposal, divert potentially valuable material from landfill, and lower a company’s carbon footprint due to reducing the need to transport material off the island.

Tassey says, “With the population expanding, [New York’s] infrastructure is getting old. The emphasis has to be on rebuilding and investing in our infrastructure. With that, there’s going to be a ton of material that needs to be processed, and it needs to be processed responsibly and efficiently. The way to do that is to recycle it through a plant like ours.”

The beginning of something important

Sean O’Leary, CDE CustomCare manager for North America, says that the changing nature of the material stream is one of the reasons that CDE’s relationship with customers like Posillico is an ongoing one. This includes regular follow-ups and support.

“What we do is we maintain that relationship with the customer through parts, through service, through technical advice, and just overall operation of the plant,” O’Leary says.

“It’s never a steady feed material, so you’re always making adjustments to the plant to make sure you get the requirements you need,” O’Leary continues.

It is this symbiotic relationship between CDE and Posillico that has been so vital for helping the company manage its plant during its initial years of operation, Michael Posillico says.

“We believe in a sustainable future, and with our partners at CDE, we are uniquely positioned to ease the burden on virgin materials in the tri-state area through our wash plant,” he says.

“We are looking at every aspect of our operation to see where we can minimize our environmental impact and reaffirm our commitment to sustainability on Long Island,” he continues. “These are attributes that are reflected in the very design of the plant, too, which operates all-electric drives and recycles up to 90 percent of the process water we use. Not only that, but we collect and recycle 3.6 million gallons of stormwater annually to maintain our top-up water supply. What we have here is the beginning of something really important.”

This article originally appeared in the Sept./Oct. issue of Construction & Demolition Recycling magazine. Darren Eastwood is the business development director for CDE. He can be reached at deastwood@cdegroup.com.

A proposed energy-production system based, in part, on cow stomachs could generate 40 percent more power from municipal waste stream and provide a viable alternative to sending waste to landfills.

The $6.8 million effort is being led by the University of Michigan (U-M) and includes partnerships with Argonne National Laboratory, Northwestern University and others. The U.S. Department of Energy is providing $5 million of the funding.

“It’s time for us to shift our thinking as a society. These organic materials are only waste in the sense that we bury them at landfills or compost them. We’re throwing away a valuable feedstock. We believe we’ve come up with a highly scalable solution to match the needs of an urbanizing world,” said Steve Skerlos, professor of mechanical engineering at U-M and a co-principal investigator on the project.

The endeavor, headed by Lutgarde Raskin, the Vernon L. Snoeyink Distinguished University Professor of Environmental Engineering at U-M, hopes to expand the types of organic waste materials that bioreactors can break down beyond food waste and wastewater sludge.

“A cow’s stomach is really good at degrading lignocellulosic material—things like the grass and hay that cattle eat,” Raskin said. “Those materials can’t be digested by the anaerobic bioreactors commonly used today. We’re looking to develop a new bioreactor that can also digest yard waste and paper waste.”

The cow stomach (rumen) bioreactor represents one part of a two-phase anaerobic bioreactor system, called anaerobic because it doesn’t require oxygen. The first, rumen bioreactor converts organic waste into simpler compounds like acetic acid, the main component in vinegar. The second reactor converts those simpler compounds into methane. Their combined footprint is much smaller than typical bioreactors now in use, making them more affordable to build and operate, the researchers say.

U-M’s system is able to efficiently generate biogas—a mixture of methane and carbon dioxide. Converting that to pipeline-ready renewable methane is the job of researchers at Argonne National Laboratory and Northwestern University. They’re developing a system that converts the carbon dioxide in the biogas to methane as well.

“Argonne’s electrochemical technology provides a pathway of utilizing renewable energy to directly upgrade biogas into cost-effective renewable methane,” said Meltem Urgun-Demirtas, group leader of Argonne’s Bioprocesses and Reactive Separations in Argonne’s Applied Materials Division.

All three aspects of the project will start and progress separately at first. A lab-scale assembly of the integrated system will be hosted by Argonne. Later, a pilot system will be built at the Great Lakes Water Authority (GLWA) water resource recovery facility in Detroit.

Utilities like GLWA’s recovery facility stand to benefit since they do not currently have systems to recover energy from the sewage sludge and organic wastes they produce. In keeping with GLWA’s goal to become energy neutral, the pilot program run by the utility’s personnel will be crucial to establishing that the system can be implemented full scale