Tag: McIntire Recycling Center

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Living

Just say no: As recycling becomes less feasible, efforts turn to reducing plastics

Plastics baled for recycling in 2014. Photo: Ash Daniel

By Bonnie Price Lofton

Now that China has closed the door to most of our garbage, recycling plants around the country are closing, or limiting what they’ll accept, and Charlottesville is no different. Starting July 1, the McIntire Recycling Center will no longer take Nos. 3-7 plastics, things like yogurt containers, plastic cups, and bottle tops.

With recycling getting more difficult, it may be time to focus on those other Rs: reduce and reuse (or, as the city of San Francisco has been urging, refuse). Thanks to the Dillon Rule, Charlottesville and Albemarle likely can’t join the hundreds of localities that have tried to stem the flood of plastic by banning single-use plastic bags or plastic straws.

“We can only do community education and awareness,” says Susan Elliott, the climate protection program manager for Charlottesville.

So it’s up to locals to take matters into their own hands.

Take the customers of The Book Room, in the 29th Place shopping center, which practices its own form of recycling by buying and selling used books, CDs, and DVDs. Patrons often bring books to sell in a reusable bag, says clerk Erin Maupin. “They’ll refill that bag with more books and later return with the bag again. Back and forth. At least a dozen folks do this.” 

Maupin herself carries reusable bags in her car but finds it hard to remember to take them into other stores. Sometimes, frustrated at forgetting her Trader Joe’s canvas bags, she’ll just throw her paid-for groceries back into the cart and haul them unbagged to the car, like Costco customers do.

Kroger, which also owns Harris Teeter, has pledged at the national level to stop distributing single-use bags by 2025. In the meantime, however, of 24 shoppers checking out on a recent Wednesday evening from the Kroger and Harris Teeter at Barracks Road Shopping Center, only four filled reusable bags.

On that same Wednesday, our unscientific bring-your-bag count was better at Whole Foods and at Integral Yoga Natural Foods (both of which offer a 5 cent credit for every bag refused), and at Trader Joe’s (which incentivizes the use of reusable bags with a weekly raffle), with one-third to one-half of the customers forgoing plastic.

Wegmans, however, was more like Kroger-—except for one fit-looking guy who packed a grocery cart worth of goods into a massive backpack and set off to hike to his apartment, looking like he was heading out for a week on the Appalachian Trail. “I don’t own a car,” he tossed over his shoulder in response to a hurried query, without offering his name.

For now, the McIntire Recycling Center is still accepting plastic bags in a specially labeled bin. Katie McIlwee of the Rivanna Solid Waste Authority says the bags are hauled to the Trex plant in Winchester to become decking and fencing.

Meanwhile, hometown hero the Dave Matthews Band is doing its part. When the band was in town in December, it offered fans a reusable drink cup, which could be picked up from craft beer stands for a $3 deposit and returned at the end of the night.

And as for straws, the Cville Stops Facebook group, started in April of last year, has 823 members who agree with its mission to “try to avoid using plastic straws and frequent establishments that support the S.T.O.P movement.” Around town, many coffee shops and restaurants have stopped automatically giving out plastic straws, and others have removed them altogether.

MarieBette Café & Bakery began discouraging use of straws of any kind about year ago, with a refuse-the-straw icon on the menu and a sign with a similar message on the take-out counter. Co-owner Jason Becton says he was inspired by Lampo Neapolitan Pizzeria, which he credits for being among the first in the city to try to reduce straw usage.

For customers who want straws no matter what, Becton says he’s bought paper straws, which are more expensive and typically on back order, due to increased demand as people switch from plastic straws to paper ones. “I know plastic straws are not the biggest thing nationally in terms of plastic waste, but it’s a step,” he says. “I think it starts people thinking and makes them want to use less plastic in general.”

So until policymakers come up with better solutions, it’s up to us to just say, “no, thanks” when offered a single-use plastic bag or straw—or even a beer cup.

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News

YOU Issue: Single-stream recycling

Here’s what readers asked for:

I’ve heard that it’s all a sham and it all just goes into a landfill, that the processes are super inefficient compared to regular recycling programs. I know many folks who don’t bother recycling at all because they don’t believe the city separates the recyclables from the garbage.—Kathleen Herring

By Jonathan Haynes

Charlottesville’s recycling system has confused many of our readers. Here’s what you need to know.

In short, residents who “don’t believe the city separates the recyclables from the garbage” are correct, and if your office claims to be recycling but doesn’t provide a separate recycling bin, it is probably just throwing everything in the trash.

Single-stream recycling means you don’t have to sort your recyclables (i.e., you don’t have to separate glass, paper, cardboard, and plastics), but you do have to keep recyclables separate from general trash. The term has been a source of confusion since Peter van der Linde used it to describe his processing plant, which accepted waste and recyclables in the same bag and tried to separate them later, resulting in high contamination levels for the recyclables. Van der Linde closed his household waste processing facility earlier this year.

Charlottesville offers free curbside single-stream recycling collection except at buildings that have dumpsters. That means recyclables must be in a separate bin from your regular garbage (the city provides carts for this, which it collects every two weeks). Albemarle County, by contrast, does not provide collection services at all. Residents must contract a private service, and many of those offer single-stream recycling.

Another option for recycling is the McIntire Recycling Center, which is operated by the Rivanna Solid Waste Authority, a joint city-county program.

McIntire uses a source-separation model, which requires patrons to deposit glass, paper, plastics, and general waste into different bins. According to the RSWA website, it processes 98 percent of recyclable materials.

RSWA sells reusable material to private buyers and ships the remaining waste to a landfill in Amelia County.

“What we’re really doing with recycling is creating feedstock for certain industries,” says Phillip McKalips, director of solid waste at the RSWA. “Companies that produce aluminum cans would want recycled cans, because they’re at the right alloy levels.”

According to McKalips, single-stream is popular among trash haulers because it expedites the drop-off process. “Certain trash haulers only do single-stream recycling because they don’t have time to source separate at McIntire,” he says.

But critics say the single-stream method makes it harder for plants to categorize and process their recyclable inventory. “The quality of the materials is so poor, there are no real buyers,” says Albemarle Supervisor Liz Palmer. “The recovery rate is too low; China doesn’t buy it anymore.”

While McKalips doesn’t know the recovery rate for the city’s single-stream operation, he confirms that between 25 percent and 40 percent of recyclables in similar programs across the country are bound for the landfill.

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News

Van der Linde dumps its recycling program

Peter van der Linde, owner of Van der Linde Recycling, announced the shuttering of the company's household waste processing facility to focus on construction and demolition debris. File photo

By Natalie Jacobsen

On February 19, the area’s main transfer station for trash and recycling haulers, Van der Linde Recycling, abruptly shuttered its household waste processing facility. The sudden halt jolted Charlottesville and the counties that have relied on Van der Linde as the focal transfer station for processing recycled materials placed into customers’ all-in-one-bins. In a statement, founder Peter van der Linde promised 30 more days of service and invoice fulfillment.

Liz Palmer, the Samuel Miller representative on the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors, says she and local municipalities were unaware of any decisions until the press release. “Van der Linde did not alert anyone ahead of time, as far as I know,” she says. Haulers such as Time Disposal may have “been somewhat aware ahead of us,” she says.

Time Disposal had not returned C-VILLE’s phone calls by press time.

Van der Linde, which opened in 2008, is continuing most of its operations with a shifting focus on construction and demolition debris, according to the release. The decision to close the household waste processing facility “was not an easy one, as much time, effort and expense have gone into it,”  Van der Linde says in the release, and the company decided to concentrate “efforts in areas of business that are more profitable.”

What does that mean for household waste and all-in-one recycling items?

“[It is] all going to the landfill,” says Palmer. “I believe that their faulty machinery led to them taking most of [the intake] to the landfill anyway,” she says.

In 2011, Van der Linde was plagued by vandalization of its equipment, and earlier, in 2009, the company was blindsided when the Rivanna Solid Waste Authority filed a RICO lawsuit, typically used against organizations like the Mafia.

Peter van der Linde said at the time that RSWA’s decision was creating a “waste war.”

Out of all materials picked up from consumers, Palmer recalls Van der Linde reporting that around 20 percent was successfully recycled. She believes the number in reality was much lower. Van der Linde declined to comment for this story.

“Commodity prices for recycled materials has gone down over the last several years. This is different from single-stream recycling,” she says. “When you do all-in-one-bin mixes, the quality of the material is poorer and harder to get rid of.” Dumping prices are lower at a landfill, making that a significantly cheaper option.

Commodity pricing woes are echoed in Van der Linde’s press release, saying “the bleak forecast” played into the company’s “economic decision to close our household processing facility.”

These issues are not restricted to Charlottesville, or even Virginia. China’s tidal wave decision to cease to accept foreign waste in December 2017 caused a ripple effect. Nearly one-third of the U.S.’s waste is exported, with half of that having been shipped to China. Now that relying on China is no longer an option, companies and cities have scrambled to reduce their waste, and increase local programs to process and store it.

This is where the problem lies: “Everyone wants it, but nobody wants it near them,” says Palmer, of processing facilities.

Currently, Charlottesville has two other sites where city and county residents can take recyclables: McIntire Recycling Center and Ivy Material Utilization Center. (The city’s contracted trash and recycling program will be unaffected.) “McIntire Recycling is very user friendly—it is very easy for individuals to take their bags of waste there,” says Palmer. Their websites list all of the materials that can be dropped off with them.

At this time, County Waste serves more than 350,000 customers in the Central Virginia region, both urban and rural.

County Waste currently is the main hauler of single-stream pickups across Central Virginia, with its Chester facility meeting “high expectations and specs, and [it] is producing quality material,” says Jerry Cifor, County Waste principal.

“My hat is tipping off to Peter [van der Linde],” Cifor adds. “His facility did a fantastic job; he put in a lot of effort and maintained it, and it wasn’t easy or cheap.” County Waste will use the former Van der Linde facility and landfill as a transfer point between their other branches and facilities, including Chester and Richmond.

Whether that helps with making recycling programs more accessible to all Virginia residents, however, remains a question.

“Right now, Augusta County has 11 drop-off points, Nelson has six and Albemarle has one,” says Palmer. Time Disposal is working to make arrangements with County Waste to expand routes and service options to both urban and rural citizens, she says.

Cifor says, “the best and more successful recycling programs have high individual involvement. When someone invests and gets involved, that’s when the program becomes most effective.”

Another conflict with the recycling and waste management programs has been oversight.

“Virginia has very few regulations regarding recycling,” says Palmer. “These companies have community-wide services that the cities and counties rely on, but they are totally private. There is no checking.”

As climate change has become an increasingly discussed issue in communities, Palmer says Charlottesville, the counties and Virginia “need to [do it] better.”

“The community wants to reduce [its] carbon footprint, and the city needs to [reflect] that,” she says. “UVA is doing great work in composting, and the city is responding, but we need to do this more appropriately,” she says. If County Waste is able to follow its plan of opening a local single-stream processing facility next year, Palmer says that would help the city immensely.

“The elderly and disabled living in counties have few or no options,” she says. “We need [to have] more source centers, better quality material and to recycle more.”

What’s the difference?

Single-stream recycling programs allow a household to consolidate all of its non-hazardous recycling products (newspaper, plastic, aluminum, cardboard) into one recycling-designated container, which is later separated at a facility. All-in-one-bin allows compost materials, recyclables and garbage to be mixed together and sorted by a processor.

Peter van der Linde, owner of Van der Linde Recycling, announced the shuttering of the company’s household waste processing facility to focus on construction and demolition debris.