With roars and puffs, recycling plant marks year since revamp

Where do you suppose that Champagne bottle is you uncorked on New Year's Eve?

And whatever did you do with the cork?

The molded Styrofoam that delivered your new laptop, the cardboard cup from Starbucks that held this morning's latte, the Sunday Inquirer, Friday's pizza box greasy with pepperoni, the aluminum foil that wrapped the turkey, and that string of Christmas lights that blinked out over the weekend: Where are they now?

If you live in Burlington County, chances are good that your recent paper, metal, plastic and glass trail has been dumped, tumbled, crushed, and flattened, scanned by infrared light, puffed by air jets, and sorted by magnets at a plant in Westampton.

Some of it might even be on a slow boat to China. And some - like that aluminum foil, the latte cup, the soiled pizza box, and those Christmas lights - was removed as trash.

January marks the first anniversary of the county's "single-stream" recycling operation at its Robert C. Shinn Recycling Center.

Here, white trucks arrive each weekday to deliver 350,000 pounds of recyclable material - and some that is not - to a quiet-seeming brick building on Hancock Lane.

Inside, however, a roaring steel behemoth of conveyor belts and sorting equipment bearing names such as "scalping screen," "glass trommel," "drum magnet," and "air drum separator" sorts a seething river of refuse into wrapped bales of reusable material.

"BECAUSE IT'S THE HOLIDAYS, THERE'S A LOT MORE CARDBOARD THAN USUAL," Ann Moore, the county's recycling coordinator, shouted over the din Tuesday at the start of a tour.

Moore was pointing to a 15-foot-tall mound of cardboard boxes, about 20 feet wide, close by the building's intake doors.

That heap was dwarfed by the mountain of random debris that newly arriving trucks were disgorging every few minutes onto the building's concrete floor.

As quickly as those beeping trucks came and went, crews operating massive, clawlike front loaders plowed into the mountain, dropping half-ton loads of material into a hopper.

Then a steeply slanted conveyor belt rushed the material up to a tumbling drum that "evens out the flow," explained Isaac Manning, director of operations for the nonprofit Occupational Training Center, which owns and operates the facility on a long-term agreement with the county.

The OTC, which trains and employs hundreds of area residents with various physical or developmental disabilities, has run the county's recycling operation since it first began collecting newspapers in 1982.

About 40 OTC employees work at the plant, said Manning, and 25 others operate the trucks that circulate through each municipality every 14 days, picking up the contents of those 160,000 big blue barrels that homes and small businesses put at the curb for collection.

In the late 1980s, OTC, on behalf of Burlington County, began collecting bottles and cans, and in 1996 began collecting plastics. One set of trucks picked up bundled cardboard and newspapers. Another crew went around dumping out small barrels of cans and bottles.

"It was cost-effective," recalled Jerome Sheehan, the county's director of solid waste management. "But it [the recycling plant] was limited in the amount of materials it could take. And it couldn't take certain types of plastics."

Early in this decade, the OTC, Sheehan's office, and the county Board of Freeholders began to study the "single stream" recycling system that several other counties had turned to.

In single stream, each household puts all its recyclables into one large barrel, and a high-tech plant sorts it all out.

The county eventually committed $14 million to converting the Shinn plant to single stream, expanding it from 50,000 square feet of floor space to 80,000. Operations began last Jan. 20.

"We operate a [county] landfill," said Freeholder Director Bruce Garganio, who was visiting the facility Tuesday. "Last year recycling saved our 40 municipalities $3.4 million in tipping fees, and it prolongs the life of the landfill. So it's the right thing to do financially, and for the environment."

After the front loaders dump the material into hoppers, tumblers of varying sizes separate large, heavy cardboard out of the flow, dropping it onto conveyor belts for baling.

The stream then flows into enclosed spaces where infrared sensors "read" the chemical makeup of plastics, and machines sort them onto separate conveyor belts with puffs of air.

A tumbling drum lifts aluminum and steel cans close to rotating magnets, which pick out the steel cans and send them down one belt, while the aluminum continues on to another.

Glass of all colors is conveyed to crushers, to be reused as landfill cover.

What's left, for the most part, is paper and light cardboard, which makes its way to the baling machines.

But then there are things that don't belong in recycling, which OTC sorters pull from the stream as the items fly by.

"We want plastic containers," said Moore. "We don't want garden gnomes, or diapers, or dog poop. We even had a deer carcass come through about three weeks ago. And once we had a 35-pound anchor."

During Tuesday's tour, Sheehan picked a toilet seat from a fast-moving conveyor belt. "First time I've seen one of these," he said, and the others laughed.

What they don't laugh about here are the hypodermic needles that pose a health hazard to workers, who must pluck them from the flow.

Likewise, many residents drop plastic bags, aluminum foil, bottle caps, hardcover books, lightbulbs, batteries, shredded paper, and much more that does not belong in their recycling barrels, Moore and Manning said.

Corks - even from Champagne bottles - belong in the trash, too.

"We know people mean well," said Moore. "But these things slow operations and raise costs." Later she showed off a three-foot length of threaded steel bar that recently "stopped the whole operation for 20 minutes."

"So we ask that people take time to learn what belongs in their recycling," she said, "and what doesn't."

doreilly@phillynews.com

856-779-3841

Examples of what Burlington County households and small businesses should - and shouldn't - put in their big blue recycling tubs:

WHAT GOES IN:

Newspapers; junk mail; paperback books; brown bags; school and office paper; "gray" paperboard, such as tissue and cereal boxes; plastics marked with the recycling symbol (three rotating arrows) surrounding the numbers 1, 2 and 5. (The types of plastic found in most consumer products, these typically include milk jugs, soda bottles, "clamshell" berry boxes, and yogurt cups.) Glass bottles and jars are recyclable if clean unless they contained hazardous materials. Aluminum and steel cans; aerosols, if empty. Refrigerated juice and broth containers.

WHAT DOES NOT:

Plastics bearing the recycle symbol with the numbers 3, 4, 6 or 7; plastic cups; flat caps of plastic containers; heavy plastic bottle caps, such as those on detergent bottles; batteries; plastic wrap and plastic newspaper sleeves; aluminum foil; Styrofoam trays; hardback books; food-contaminated boxes, such as for pizza; light bulbs; motor oils; pesticide or herbicide containers; hypodermic needles or "E-pens"; propane tanks; loose shredded paper.

Source: Burlington CountyEndText