Waste Management’s new Cleveland-area plant will test if pesky plastic bags can be recovered from recycling s - cleveland.com

Waste Management’s new Cleveland-area plant will test if pesky plastic bags can be recovered from recycling stream - cleveland.com

OAKWOOD, Ohio – Beth Biggins-Ramer likens a recycling plant to a cell phone.

Give it a year and the technology will be new and improved, said the executive director of the Cuyahoga County Solid Waste District.

Case in point is the new Waste Management plant – called a materials recovery facility in the business – that recently opened off Interstate 271 in Oakwood.

The supermarket-sized, shed-like building takes in recyclable materials from all over the region. Its expansive conveyor system inside employs magnetics, optical scanners and other devices that will allow it to process 144,000 tons of material a year.

But it’s also designed to do something new - capture plastic film, including those pesky single-use grocery bags that don’t belong in the recycling stream, but often wind up there anyway.

“I’m confident we’ll get it to work,” said Aaron Johnson, Waste Management’s Great Lakes area vice president of the technology. “It’s something new that we’re piloting. Most plants do not have this. I’m not sure if any plants in Ohio have it right now.”

The conveyor system also comes with reengineered screens and rollers that are thicker and shaped differently than before so that they are less likely to snag a plastic bag or piece of shrink wrap as they move through the system, Johnson said.

When plastic film gums up the works it can result in costly shutdowns. It’s why recycling advocates continue to admonish consumers to keep those items out of the recycling stream.

Waste Management celebrated its new sorting facility earlier last month during a ribbon cutting that came complete with the requisite pair of giant scissors and a host of elected officials praising the company’s investment, which replaces an older facility in Akron.

As material flows through the conveyor system, humans grab and remove oversized items that don’t belong. Things like garden hoses and plastic toys..

But technology does most of the work. Cardboard and glass are the first recyclables to be separated and recovered, after which the flow divides into two streams, one for paper and the other for plastics and metals.

Optical scanners segregate the various forms of plastic while magnetic fields remove the aluminum and tin. What’s left passes over an open area that has air blowing up from below and suction drawing up from above. The lightweight plastics, which include everything from bags to shrink wrap to candy wrappers that are floating in the air, are then gathered and cleaned. Finally, they are bailed.

Johnson said there is “a very valuable market” for such materials but they need to be “pure and clean.”

“They can’t have any contaminants,” he said.

Biggins-Ramer said Waste Management wouldn’t have invested as much money as it has in film recovery if it didn’t think it would work, but it will likely take a while to prove it.

“I suspect they will want to put this through the paces a bit to really understand the parameters,” she said.

Meanwhile, Waste Management, which competes locally with Rumpke, Kimble and Republic Services, is reticent to say too much about what it’s doing and is still telling customers to keep plastic bags and other types of plastic film out of their recycling stream.

A spokesman for Rumpke, which has a sorting plant in Medina County, said it’s scheduled to open a new facility in Columbus next year that will have technology to address the challenge posed by plastic film, but wasn’t more specific as to how it may function.

Joe Kickel, service director for Brecksville, which contracts with Waste Management to take its recyclables, said he wasn’t aware that Waste Management was trying to recover plastic bags and other film until learning about the technology at the ribbon cutting. But he’s not about to change his tune as to what’s acceptable and what’s not.

He said that unless film recovery becomes standard throughout the industry, he will continue to tell consumers to keep their bags and shrink wrap out of the recycling stream. Otherwise his city could wind up contracting with a firm in the future that doesn’t have the capability to remove them.

“I don’t think we want to confuse people,” he said.

Peter Krouse covers the environment for cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer. Read more of his work here.