NWRA to honor 6 at awards banquet in January

The National Waste & Recycling Association (NWRA), based in Arlington, Virginia, has announced that it will honor recycling projects and programs during the NWRA Industry Conference in January.

Winners are to be recognized for work that meets local needs in innovative ways, demonstrates high standards of effective operations, expands public outreach into new areas and implements leading-edge technology. A panel of professionals from the waste and recycling industry selected the winners from 37 applications.

The 2025 NWRA Recycling Awards recipients will be recognized at a Jan. 21 dinner on the USS Midway, held as part of NWRA’s 2026 Industry Conference from Jan. 19-21 in San Diego.

“Each year, NWRA honors those projects and programs across the waste and recycling industry that exemplify our shared dedication to innovation and the implementation of technology in support of efforts to successfully capture, reduce and reuse materials from the waste stream,” NWRA President and CEO Michael E. Hoffman says.

The NWRA will honor six projects:

• Game Changer/Sustainability Partnership, Waste Management (WM) and Major League Baseball (MLB);
• Recycling Facility of the Year, Rumpke Recycling & Resource Center in Columbus, Ohio;
• Recycling Equipment Innovator of the Year, Van Dyk Recycling Solutions and Greyparrot AI; 
• Construction & Demolition Recycling Facility of the Year, WM, Nashville C&D Recycling Facility.; 
• Excellence in Recycling Public Education, Orange County Waste and Recycling’s (OCWR) EcoChallenge Curriculum: Enhancing Sustainability and Benefitting Youth; and
• Organics Management Facility of the Year:, Generate Upcycle, Cayuga Digester and Biogas Plant. 

“With continued skepticism around how the industry functions, the awards give us real-world examples to help tell the story to elected officials and the public that recycling is real and effective, particularly when supported by behavior change, sound policies based on solid research and investment in innovation,” Hoffman says. “The 2025 Recycling Award winners are a great example of embracing innovation and creating confidence in the tireless work done by the waste and recycling industry.”

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MLB and WM forged a multiyear partnership to elevate sustainability-related efforts across all MLB operations during flagship events, like the All-Star Game and postseason, and with individual teams across the U.S. and Canada.

In the partnership, the NWRA says MLB works with WM to identify league-wide initiatives ranging across waste, energy and water management; procurement; travel; community impact; and fan engagement. MLB also provides financial support for WM’s customized advisory services to individual clubs, including developing strategic and operations plans, optimizing recycling programs and helping implement new waste reduction and diversion systems.

The partnership standardizes tracking and reporting of environmental impact metrics and reporting with a shared digital platform accessible to the league and all 30 clubs.

Rumpke Waste & Recycling’s $106 million material recovery facility (MRF), launched in August of 2024 with long-term goals to meet growing regional recycling needs, expand recycling capabilities, increase recycling efficiency, drive the circular economy and provide transparent metrics.

The recycling and resource center processes 11 types of recyclables and achieved impressive milestones in its first year, with almost 175,000 tons processed for a processing rate of more than 65 tons per hour, 90 percent operational runtime and a recycling recovery rate of more than 98 percent, significantly reducing residue sent to disposal.

More than 80 percent of the processed material is delivered to Ohio-based manufacturers, boosting local jobs and the Ohio economy.

The Greyparrot Analyzer system uses artificial intelligence (AI) to identify more than 111 waste or recycling categories in U.S. and European material streams. By mounting Greyparrot camera units on MRF conveyor belts and capturing images of the passing recyclables, MRF owners and operators gain real-time data analyzing 99 percent of the materials processed, including each object’s material, mass, value and potential emissions.

The collected insights contribute to enhanced recovery, greater purity, more cost effectiveness, and increased revenues. Van Dyk Recycling Solutions has mounted Greyparrot AI systems in seven U.S. MRFs to date, including NWRA’s 2023 Recycling Facility of the Year Murphy Road Recycling (a USA Hauling subsidiary) in Enfield, Connecticut. Greyparrot has a global customer base, including 70 percent of the market share for the European waste sector.

In 2024, Greyparrot Analyzer units helped divert more than 125,000 tons of recyclable materials back into the circular economy. Most recently, Greyparrot partnered with Closed Loop Partners to assess the availability of food-grade polypropylene in U.S. MRFs.

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WM saw a need to add capacity for construction and demolition (C&D) recycling in Tennessee. According to the city of Nashville, in 2023 almost 267,000 tons of C&D debris per year were landfilled. According to the city of Nashville, this accounted for about 97 percent of the total C&D debris generated in Davidson County, Tennessee.

NWRA says landfills serving the region were nearing capacity, finding it increasingly difficult to permit expansions. The WM-operated hand-sort C&D recycling program had limited capacity and was accepting material only from projects seeking LEED certification. It became a priority to find a solution to increase recovery, cost-effectiveness, and participation in C&D recycling programs.

WM says it invested $18 million to build a 52,000-square-foot, automated C&D recycling facility designed to handle 1,200 tons per day of mixed loads of C&D debris, including metal, concrete, wood and C&D fines. The facility completed scale-up in the first quarter of 2024. In the remaining months of 2024, it processed more than 100,000 tons of material, of which nearly 50 percent was recovered for reuse.

WM also reached a three-year commitment with Tennessee State University to provide research grant funding and scholarships to students to explore alternative uses for difficult-to-recycle C&D fines.

With changes in California law related to organic waste recycling, OWCR and the Orange County Department of Education identified a need to teach the “why” and “how” of organics recycling through the schools.

The partnership developed the EcoChallenge program in 2022 to translate the state recycling mandates into age-appropriate K-12 lessons and actions. EcoChallenge lessons (offered in English, Spanish and Vietnamese to align with county demographics) increase in complexity as students age. The program begins with an Allison Apple compost adventure for kindergarteners to the analysis of climate science and design of food recovery programs by high school.

Student participation has increased each of the first two full years to 12,247 students in 2024, up from 7,500 in 2023. The next phase of the EcoChallenge program begins in 2026 and will include an option for field trips to OCWR’s landfills and recycling facilities, exposure to industry career paths, and new curriculum topics like renewable energy from landfills and zero-waste lifestyles.

Generate Upcycle transformed an abandoned, inoperable manure digester in Augburn, New York, into an organics facility with a custom-built food waste depackaging system. The Cayuga Digester and Biogas Plant converts 90,000 tons of organic waste per year into 150,000 million Btu of renewable natural gas and 20 million gallons of nitrogen-rich organic fertilizer.

With this recovery, NWRA says the facility avoids releasing more than 57,000 metric tons of CO₂ emissions. The MRF receives and depackages 45,000 tons per year of packaged food waste and highly contaminated source-separated organics. In addition to separating the organic content for processing, the MRF recovers 8,100 tons per year of cardboard, plastics and metals for recycling.