Transferring to Recycling

In Northern California, just south of Oakland, the Davis Street Station for Material Recycling and Transfer (SMaRT) operates on 53 acres. Today, Davis Street SMaRT is a model of up-to-date recycling practices, but it has gone through a long evolution to attain this status.

The facility, which sits on top of the former Davis Street landfill that operated from 1942 until l979, opened in 1980 in conjunction with the Altamont Landfill about 33 miles away, and was originally operated by a local firm called Oakland Scavenger. In 1986, Waste Management Inc., Oak Brook, Ill., purchased the company and took over the management of the Davis Street SMaRT through its subsidiary, Waste Management of Alameda County, San Leandro, Calif.

When it first opened, the Davis Street SMaRT was really just a huge waste transfer station, with minimal recycling taking place. Then, when California passed its landmark recycling law AB 939 in 1989 mandating that communities achieve a 50 percent recycling rate by the year 2000 – and the county of Alameda followed with mirror legislation titled "Measure D" requiring communities to set a date by 1999 to achieve a 75 percent recycling rate – drastic changes began to occur at the facility. The result has been an ongoing transformation of one of the nation’s largest transfer stations to a full-service recycling center. The transformation is not over yet, according to Kevin McCarthy, divisional recycling manager at WMAC.

Since the early 1990s, WMI has gradually implemented a number of material diversion initiatives at the Davis Street SMaRT site that have resulted in a huge jump in the amount of materials recovered. In 1992, the facility only recovered about 12,000 tons of recyclables. This year, it is expected to recover more than 150,000 tons of recyclables. And projections for 1997 are for more than 225,000 tons of recovered material.

The big jump in recycling is due to a pattern of equipment upgrades to the facility and initiatives by WMAC officials to make waste diversion a major goal. The result is a facility that is now a showcase of full-service recycling.

Specifically, in 1991 the facility initiated a wood and yard debris recycling project for municipal and public customers. From that initiative, a mulch and compost sales program was started in 1994. The facility is now the largest private sponsor of agricultural field trails in California, has a full-time organic products specialist on staff to market yard material and soil products, and operates two on-site demonstration gardens. The facility also delivers high volumes of compost and soil amendment materials directly to customers as another service.

Oil collection at the facility began in early 1994 when officials say they opened the nation’s first drive-through waste oil collection center for curbside and public vehicles. As a result of its collection efforts, all facility vehicles now use re-refined oil – in 1995 more than 11,000 gallons of re-refined oil were used by a total of 120 site vehicles.

A buy-back center was implemented in 1994 to buy back any California redemption containers, papers, wine bottles and used Levi-brand jeans. The same year, an appliance recycling partnership was initiated, and last year more than 11,000 appliances were recycled.

A large scale paper sorting and baling operation began at the facility in November 1995.

The facility also has what it calls a Convenience Area for Recycling. This is a section of the facility where people can drop off bulky items for recycling such as appliances, concrete, dirt, scrap metal, porcelain toilets, sinks, mattresses and box springs, furniture and carpeting.

The facility’s most significant upgrade occurred this past October when three new processing systems were installed at a cost of more than $3 million. The upgrade included a first-of-its-kind green/wood waste processing system; a bottle and can sorting line; and a mini-material recovery facility sorting line.

The green/wood waste processing line has the capacity to process up to 117,000 tons of yard materials, including grass, leaves, prunings and branches. The materials are processed into a variety of organic products that can be used by farmers, landscapers and parks. The system was designed, manufactured and installed by Bulk Handling Systems, Eugene, Ore., and includes a series of screens and conveyors and a large grinder from Processing & Recycling Machinery, also in Eugene.

The bottle/can sorting line is an automated system that can handle up to 20,000 tons of plastic, metal and glass containers annually. The system was put together by Carl Schmidt & Co., Denver, and Ptarmigan Machinery, San Antonio, Texas. The line is a four-step system that includes a finger screen to sort out broken glass, a magnet to remove ferrous metal, an eddy current separator to remove aluminum cans, and an air classifier to sort out all light plastic bottles. Manual sorters then separate the different types of bottles.

"If the market is favorable, we have employees sort mixed colored glass bottles, but right now we are just putting the glass in one mix," says McCarthy.

The line is designed to handle mainly curbside recyclables collected by WMAC One Pass Collection Vehicles in Oakland and central Contra Costa County communities. Various paper grades from the line are baled on site or transferred to a sister division at Recycle America of Northern California in Oakland.

Finally, a mini-picking line was installed at which eight people manually sort out recyclables from certain public and commercial loads. The system was put together from equipment in-house and basically is just a conveyor with several manual picking stations.

"This line is used for loads that we know we can recover a lot of recyclable material from," says McCarthy. "The loads mainly come from commercial dumpsters that have high volumes of cardboard and other recyclables, but also an occasional trash bag. The line also sorts through material brought in by self-haulers."

Currently, the facility accepts more than 30 types of items, including aluminum cans, appliances, lead-acid batteries, computers, corrugated cardboard, textiles and jeans, furniture, concrete, dirt, carpet padding, glass bottles and jars, polyethylene terephthalate and high density polyethylene plastic bottles, mattresses, aseptic packaging, newspaper, mixed paper, computer paper, oil, antifreeze, wood, steel cans, empty aerosol and paint containers, yard/green waste, tires, toilets, a variety of scrap metals, wine bottles and even wine corks.

The breakdown by tonnage recycled at the Davis Street SMaRT for 1995 reveals that 61,139 tons were yard debris; 10,374 tons were concrete; 7,856 tons were collected through the facility’s buyback and drop-off center; and 1,896 tons were wood.

Also, 40,995 gallons of waste oil were collected; 5,750 used oil filters; 4,012 appliances; 979 milk crates; 926 wooden pallets; and 844 pairs of jeans. The company even recycles the methane gas collected from the old landfill underneath the station. The gas is sent to a wallboard recycler called Domtar in San Leandro, and used as fuel for that company’s boilers.

"It’s a big challenge to handle the amount and number of different types of materials that we currently do, especially when markets for many recovered materials are depressed," says McCarthy. "But by being diversified in the non-traditional MRF markets such as green waste, construction and demolition debris and scrap metals, we are able to balance out the wild swings in paper, glass and plastic prices."

The facility began to offer full-service recycling in response to demands by the surrounding public. "Waste disposal rates in this region keep going up and up, and people want a place that they can turn to for recycling," he says.

Although the facility will pay for used Levi jeans, wine bottles and California redemption containers, all other items are received gratis. Items that cannot be processed onsite are shipped to various other processors. For instance, the company recently shipped four truckloads of old computers and audiovisual equipment to Computer Recycling Center in Mountain View, Calif. In this fashion the SMaRT station acts as not only a transfer station for waste, but as a transfer station for recyclables.

"We realize that we cannot process everything here, so a lot of the materials are sent to other recycling companies," says McCarthy. "Sometimes we begin accepting material before we have a processor or market lined up, and that is only because of public demands. With other commodities, such as the green waste, we made sure that our markets were there before we invested in processing equipment."

There is a lot of entrepreneurial spirit in the San Francisco Bay area, says McCarthy, and he is not worried about finding companies to process or demanufacture whatever the SMaRT facility can take in. However, operating like this can be a bumpy ride occasionally.

"Since we started accepting old mattresses, we have had to shut down that part of our program several times because of processor problems – we are now on our third mattress demanufacturing company," says McCarthy. "The key is to keep looking for a processor and an end market. Despite any difficulties, that can be a fun challenge."

One of the biggest components of the Davis Street SMaRT is the facility’s education center, which opened in 1995. The 1,500-square-foot center was developed in conjunction with local environmental educators and waste management professionals. It currently houses seven museum-quality exhibits that stress the four Rs, according to McCarthy, which are "reduce, recycle, reuse and rot." The center also has an exhibit that teaches visitors how to "close the loop," and there is information available on the history of garbage and landfill disposal.

The interactive exhibits were made almost exclusively from recyclable and recycled-content material. To date, more than 4,000 visitors have toured the center.

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In addition, the center has developed its own teacher’s guide kit for educators to take back to the classroom. The kit contains four pre-tour classroom projects: conducting a recycling survey, making a mini-landfill (parts one and two), and planning an ecological picnic; and eight post-tour projects. The kit also contains a glossary of recycling and waste disposal terms, and an illustrated poster of the Davis Street SMaRT.

Both the center and the teacher’s kit have been widely praised by educators and those in the recycling industry, and this year the center was the winner of the 1996 Solid Waste Association of North America’s Excellence in Solid Waste Education award.

While WMI has made the Davis Street SMaRT facility a showcase, McCarthy says that more needs to be done to increase the facility’s recycling rate. On the waste side, the facility receives and transfers about 2,800 tons of household and commercial trash per day, including construction debris and other non-hazardous wastes. Refuse materials are delivered by Waste Management, other collection company vehicles, and the general public. Materials are offloaded in either the 55,000 square-foot transfer building or in the public disposal area. After being compacted by bulldozers, the material is then loaded into 25-ton capacity transfer trucks and hauled 33 miles to the Altamont Landfill in eastern Alameda County.

"I know there are still a lot of recyclables in there that we could pull out," says McCarthy, "and we are going to try to target those materials."

WMAC is looking at three major areas to boost its recycling efforts. The first is to expand the mini-picking line it currently has established. "I would estimate that we are losing about 1,000 tons a day of recyclables because this segment is not large enough to handle more loads." If the line is expanded, McCarthy says that it will still only sort mainly dry trash. "We don’t want to get into a situation where people have to pick through wet materials," he says.

The second area of targeted expansion is to recycle more organic waste. Davis Street SMaRT officials will identify commercial and school sites that generate large amounts of food waste and set up programs to recover and process the material.

Finally, company officials plan to expand construction and demolition recycling efforts. "We are looking to recover more construction job-site waste, and to go after more demolition-type debris," says McCarthy.

In addition to these three main areas, McCarthy says that there will also be more of a push to reuse items that are dropped off. "We plan to open a reuse retail store in the future where these items can be resold," he says.

The Davis Street SMaRT will continue its unique role as a transfer station of recyclables, too. Adjacent to the SMaRT facility, in addition to a 177-acre park that is also laid out on top of the old Davis Street landfill, are several acres set aside for what McCarthy calls "recycling partnering." There are as many as 25 acres available for processors to develop, he says, with the goal of eventually creating a kind of recycling industrial park.

"We are in discussions with two companies right now to set up recycling operations on vacant land next to us," says McCarthy. "One company is Raisch Products, San Jose. They are looking at establishing a portable crushing plant for concrete and asphalt. If that happens we’ll just send material over our fence to them. The other company is Parko Tire, Los Angeles. They are looking to set up a tire crumbing plant on the same street as our facility."

To help with ideas for guiding the facility into the next century, officials recently held a workshop and forum consisting of local and national recycling leaders. The workshop addressed sustainability, non-traditional recycling perspectives and a plan for what the Davis Street SMaRT should look like in the next five years.

The author is managing editor of  Recycling Today.