Are the Birmingham suburbs really recycling? We tracked the trash to find out

Bill Dawson doesn’t believe that there’s much recycling going on anymore in the Birmingham suburbs.

“It’s a perplexing situation, because my neighbors think recycling is going on, and it seems like it’s sort of a farce,” Dawson said.

Like others, he’s been told to drop his plastic bottles and cardboard into the bin with his trash, and someone else will sort it out later. But he doesn’t believe there’s so much sorting and recycling happening down the road at the “magic garbage machine” in Montgomery.

That’s where RePower South supposedly takes and sorts the material from cities in the Birmingham metro, Montgomery metro, and even out of state.

But Dawson said he visited RePower South in north Montgomery in February and didn’t see much going on. He’s so skeptical, he doesn’t use the curbside option given to him by Vestavia Hills and instead takes his recycling directly to another facility.

RePower South opened its Montgomery facility in 2019. Billed as a “magic garbage machine,” the company is supposed to sort garbage from recyclables, diverting more trash from landfills. The company also promised to turn hard-to-recycle paper and plastics into “re-engineered feedstock,” which they say can be burned for energy.

Six years after opening, the company has struggled to keep the promises it made. A fire in August worsened matters and prompted RePower South to close for a few months. Since it re-opened last fall, city of Montgomery officials say they’re sending less recycling to the facility. One RePower South employee said waste sent to the facility will be transferred to a sister site in South Carolina.

And an AL.com investigation found that plastic bottles and soda cans from Birmingham suburbs may not be finding their way to Montgomery or any other recycling facility at all.

No clear answers

AL.com began investigating where recycling was going last fall, while RePower South was closed following the fire.

But calling several small cities didn’t lead anywhere.

“We do not see nor deal with the recycler,” Steven Boone, finance director and incoming city manager in Mountain Brook, said last fall in response to questions about RePower South.

The cities employ a middleman, AmWaste, to pick up the trash and haul the waste to a recycler.

Cinnamon McCulley, assistant city manager in Vestavia Hills, told AL.com last fall that, when the city learned of the fire, officials contacted AmWaste, who said they had a backup plan. She said the mix of trash and recycling would be taken to Big Sky Environmental and then on to a company called VLS Environmental in Bibb County.

Big Sky Environmental operates a large landfill in Adamsville near the old coal mines just north of Birmingham. It once earned statewide notoriety for accepting the foul-smelling “poop trains,” rail cars full of sewage sludge from New York.

But a call to Big Sky last fall brought more confusion: a Big Sky employee told AL.com that they “didn’t know anything” about recycling from over-the-mountain suburbs, and they “wouldn’t think” the company would take recycling from those areas. When the employee learned they were talking to a reporter, they hung up.

If RePower South is closed, what happens after AmWaste picks up a mixed bundle of trash and recyclables? Where does it go?

But RePower South is open again now. So what is happening to your recyclables?

AL.com decided to use trackers to find out.

Lack of use

Leah Nelson, a researcher based in Montgomery, became skeptical of RePower South, like Dawson. And, like Dawson, she decided to visit the facility in January of 2024.

When she arrived at RePower South, Nelson said trash was overflowing from loading bays at the site. There wasn’t a lot of human activity. Most jarring to her were “countless” pallets of expired COVID-19 testing kits.

In February of this year, Nelson visited the site again, and this time there was no overflowing garbage. This year, there were pallets of a different kind of COVID-19 test. There were just two or three cars in the parking lot.

“It’s frustrating to me because we should be recycling,” Nelson said. “Last year, there was a lot of junk overflowing, but this year, there were even less signs of it being used.”

Brian Gilhuly, CEO of RePower South, says he believes the complaints about the site looking closed are due to the company getting rid of onsite bins that the public was able to use as a recycling drop-off. The company got rid of those because people were dumping trash, not recycling, he said.

During a July 2024 water quality inspection, a state inspector noted that “waste product did not appear to be properly managed” at the site.

The inspector for the Alabama Department of Environmental Management included photos of trash flowing out of the facility’s loading bays, as Nelson described. A photo inside the facility showed a pile of cardboard boxes on the floor, and photos from around the site show piles of waste.

Within a few days of the inspection, RePower South caught fire.

ADEM issued a letter admonishing RePower South after the inspection — not for the trash, but for failing to submit “discharge monitoring reports” for what it puts into the Alabama River.

Where is recycling going?

Once RePower South re-opened in mid-February, AL.com followed the waste.

AL.com placed Apple AirTags in mixed garbage and recycling collections from locations in Hoover, Homewood, Vestavia Hills, and Mountain Brook. All four cities use AmWaste for garbage disposal.

The AirTags were each enclosed in a recyclable: a plastic water bottle or aluminum can, for example. Three of the AirTags were lost immediately.

But the AirTag placed inside a plastic bottle in Homewood went to Big Sky Environmental, just hours after the garbage had been picked up. And it didn’t move again.

Since only one tracker worked, AL.com tried again in March. This time we dispatched satellite tracking devices from the same four locations, also enclosed in recyclables.

The tracker dropped in Vestavia Hills went right to Big Sky Environmental — the same location as the AirTag — on the same day they picked up the trash.

A tracker from Homewood also showed up at Big Sky Environmental the morning after it was picked up.

None of the trackers appeared to move again after reaching Big Sky. The satellite trackers are motion-activated: they only transmit signals if they move. Apple AirTags only send a signal if they are within range of another Apple product.

Headed north or south?

RePower South and their sorting machine are open again. But initial calls to RePower South were not much help. An employee at RePower South said in March the facility was accepting recycling from AmWaste and other commercial clients, but not the general public.

The employee, who did not give their name, said waste would be transported from the facility in Montgomery to RePower South’s other plant in South Carolina due to the fire.

Eventually, AL.com spoke to Gilhuly, CEO of RePower South.

Gilhuly this month clarified. He said no recyclables are being transported out of state.

As for the trackers, Gilhuly said he doesn’t know why AmWaste wouldn’t have delivered them and why they wouldn’t have shown up at RePower South.

“They have two pickups a week, and one is a trash pickup and then one is a recycling, heavier pickup,” Gilhuly said. “I guess the question is, did they (AmWaste) bring us a Monday pickup instead of a Friday pickup, or whatever days they are? And I can’t answer that…but that’s their obligation, I guess, to make that work. But there’s no reason not to bring us the volume.”

RePower South re-opened in November following the fire, but a few months later, AL.com learned RePower South closed again. Gilhuly said there was another small fire in the facility, causing it to close for a few days, but it re-opened quickly and is open now, though not at full capacity.

David Mowery, a spokesperson for AmWaste, spoke to AL.com this month.

AmWaste collects recycling from the curb as part of a “comingled” collection. That means recycling and garbage can be put in the same can. The convenience was one of RePower South’s selling points when it opened, and AmWaste is required to collect recycling that way in the Birmingham suburbs.

Mowery said the company tries to keep up with the changes in real time: if RePower South is open, the comingled collection goes to Montgomery; if it’s closed, then it goes to Big Sky. But he said RePower South isn’t always “forthcoming” about when they’re going to be closed.

Mowery also said he didn’t know why the recycling would have gone to Big Sky and not RePower South.

“We’re not trying to obfuscate anything. It actually makes the company more money to send stuff to RePower, you know what I mean? That’s part of the contract,” Mowery said. “This is an issue that we would like solved as well…It behooves everybody to get it fixed.”

Big Sky Environmental says it offers recycling services on its website; Mowery says the company is able to recycle on site. But additional calls to Big Sky didn’t yield any more insight. And a representative from the company did not respond to multiple email requests for comment.

VLS Environmental, an industrial waste management provider, uses waste to create an alternative fuel source, like RePower South, according to its website. An employee at VLS confirmed in February that Big Sky is a customer.

A representative for VLS Environmental did not respond to additional requests for comment.

Mowery said that, no matter where it goes, recycling from the Birmingham suburbs is being recycled.

“It’s not being put in the landfill, no,” Mowery said. “It’s not put in there as regular household trash. It is being recycled.”

Cities respond

The Cahaba Solid Waste Disposal Authority was formed in 2023 to pool resources and reduce costs for several Birmingham metro area cities. Each city in the authority has the same agreement with AmWaste for trash and recycling services.

As part of that agreement, waste must be collected twice per week, and one collection per week must be mixed, meaning trash and recycling go in the same bin. It’s up to AmWaste to find and send the collection to a “facility capable of sorting and removing recyclables and reducing placement into the landfill,” according to the terms of the agreement.

“Our recycling is continuing, whether it goes to Big Sky or RePower South,” said McCulley at Vestavia Hills in February.

“The City of Hoover is aware that AmWaste has always had a relationships [sic] with multiple recycling companies, including Big Sky, and that has not interrupted recycling services before,” Melanie Posey, a representative for Hoover, said in an email in February. “The city believes that will be the case again this time. We continue to encourage our residents to use that second pick up day as their recycling day, if they choose.”

Yet there’s also been other frustrations with AmWaste’s service. After delays and lack of service over the holiday season in 2023, the suburbs cautiously gave the garbage provider another chance, after the company promised to improve service.

Issues prior to fire

Early in the morning on August 3, 2024, the fire department in Montgomery was called to RePower South after smoke was reported coming from the building, according to news reports.

Fires are a hazard in recycling facilities, Gilhuly said, but this one was detected and put out quickly.

But even before the fire, ADEM records indicate the company disposed of far more material than it processed.

Recycling facilities submit semi-annual reports to ADEM detailing how much material they receive, how much they ship out to buyers, and how much they dispose of every six months. But RePower South’s reports appear to be incomplete.

In the first six months of 2023, the company did not report receiving any material. But it reported shipping just shy of 100 tons of material to “end users,” companies who use the recycled plastic, cardboard, or aluminum.

Meanwhile, over that same time period, the company said it threw out nearly 200 times as much, sending off more than 19,509 tons of material to go to a landfill.

From January to June of last year, before the fire, the company reported to ADEM that it received around 988 tons of waste material. In the report, the company said it did not ship any material to the end users who buy recyclables.

But in that time period last year, RePower South reported that it sent 13,000 tons of material to the same hauler for disposal in landfills.

Gilhuly called the reports “confusing” and said he would reach out to ADEM for clarification. He said that since 2019, the company has diverted nearly 20,000 tons of waste from landfills. How much the company is able to recycle and how much waste it sends to the landfill depends on what it receives from customers, he said.

ADEM did not respond to a request for comment. Gilhuly didn’t say whether he received a response from the department.

RePower South & Montgomery

Montgomery owns the facility and partners with RePower South for their curbside recycling service. Since the fire, however, the city of Montgomery says it has been sending fewer items to RePower South.

“Work has begun on repairs, however, which will help the facility return to full capacity,” said Cody Clark, a city spokesperson, in an email.

In the meantime, Montgomery is sending some of its comingled collection to the landfill.

Gilhuly estimates that RePower South in Montgomery will be back to full capacity in the next 60 days.

Despite any assurances from AmWaste or RePower South, Dawson remains dubious that when he drops a plastic bottle into his trash bin that it will ever be recycled.

He said he’s not surprised the trackers did not go to RePower South.

But what’s frustrating him the most, he said, is the lack of curiosity from city officials.

“I don’t think the cities that are tied up with them (AmWaste and RePower) either care or want to know the truth,” Dawson said. “They’ve got to figure that all we can hope for is to get the garbage picked up and pay as little as possible.”

AL.com’s John Hammontree, Ivana Hrynkiw, and Sarah Whites-Koditschek contributed to this story.