The functions and future of Fairbanks recycling

On a cold November day the Fairbanks North Star Borough Central Recycling Facility is busy with beeping forklifts and chomping balers, paper sorters and a steady flow of drop offs are rolled in through the garage door.

“These people, they’re committed to dropping off their recycling. Some come twice a year because they’re able to save it up, some people are here every week,” said Matt Pearson, recycling manager for the borough.

In honor of National Recycling Day, Green Star of Interior Alaska and Fairbanks North Star Borough gave people a chance to peek behind the plastic curtain during a tour of their facility where trash goes to be reborn.

Located at 1855 Marika Road, the facility sees an average of 100 cars a day. Last year they took in over 30,000 drop offs from individuals and 2,000 from businesses. The facility recycled a record amount, with this year’s numbers suggesting they could surpass it.

The recycling facility is open for drop offs from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturdays.

The facility takes #1 and #2 plastic jugs and bottles, cardboard, aluminum and steel cans, paper both mixed and office, electronics, household batteries and toner. They also collect eyeglasses for the Lion’s Club.

Everything is sorted by hand and compressed by balers into pallets which are then sent down to Anchorage by train where they’re shipped out to buyers that repurpose the material, often back to its original form.

Recycling in Alaska is difficult for many reasons, but not having any companies that use recycled materials in the state makes getting rid of things that much harder.

“A lot of those places down south, where people are used to being able to put everything in one place, are highly contaminated by the time it gets to the end use. There’s some studies that suggest about a third of that [recycled material] is unusable because it’s so contaminated,” said Joe Torma, general manager of the facility. “So we’re really meticulous about making sure that whatever we have talked somebody into letting us get out of this state is just like they want.”

To avoid contamination, sorters remove caps from water and pop bottles, paper labels from aluminum cans and binder clips from stacks of paper.

The central facility only accepts two types of plastic, so even if something is labeled with a recycle symbol, it doesn’t mean it’s accepted anywhere. Some companies label their products as recyclable when they’re only processed in a few plants across the world, Pearson said. This is called green washing, the marketing of a product as more environmentally friendly than it is.

Aluminum is one item that’s relatively low effort with the biggest value. Most cans can be crushed as is, and as long as they’re empty, the residue doesn’t matter to buyers. Right now it goes for $1,600 a ton on the open market and the borough gets a portion of that, about $1,000 a ton. Last year they moved around 18.6 tons of the stuff. And unlike plastic or cardboard, it’s indefinitely recyclable.

“Aluminum really helps pay for the other commodities that cost us money. We will always take more aluminum here,” Pearson said.

Fairbanks North Star Borough contracts recycling to the non-profit Green Star who operates out of a building rented from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Torma said the building and equipment they have is not suited to handle the full load of the borough. While a few companies work with them to drop off major loads, they can’t handle the cache from Fort Wainwright or Eielson Air Force Base.

In a perfect world the borough would have a recycling route for trash trucks, collected at transfer sites, but the building definitely couldn’t handle that.

“To do it in a meaningful, large-scale, borough-scale way, the facility is not equipped,” Torma said.

This is partially because of the equipment. Two vertical balers crush everything down into compacted pallets for shipping, and they have to be loaded by hand. Most recycling centers use horizontal balers, they’re faster, easier to load and better at compacting.The borough purchased one in 2020 from Fort Wainwright but it doesn’t fit in the building.

Space is a big obstacle as it means there’s less storage for palates. Pearson is constantly watching the commodity price of different items to see when the most profitable time to ship them out is, but without a place to hold them, sometimes they go in the red for items like #2 plastic, which has cost money to ship out for over a year.

The borough has allocated money to scope and plan for a new location out of the solid waste fund, work will start this winter. In the borough assembly’s latest capital improvement project list a new build was estimated at $14 million.

While they can’t handle major loads, the borough still wants to encourage recycling, especially for businesses. If they bring materials to the facility in a pick up truck, it’s free to drop off.

The facility diverts about 1% of the trash in the borough from going into the landfill. Including scrap metal from cars and other large items, which are handled separately, the borough has about a 2% diversion rate. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency the average diversion rate in the country is 32%.

Pearson said if the city had a composting facility that would bring the percentage up a lot, taking care of brush, food waste and soiled paper.

The borough’s landfill is slated to close in 2080 and while it sounds far off, the day to start planning for the closure is sooner than people think, Pearson warns. Location, legality and water are a few of big questions that require decades of forethought.

“Everything that we divert at this facility gives us time at that,” Pearson said.