The Northeast Resource Recovery Association is a non-profit organization that helps its member municipalities in the Northeast aggregate their recyclables and manage their waste streams to lower costs. In essence, the NRRA acts as an agent between various recycling vendors, waste disposal companies and local town governments.
Because of their organization's structure and their 30 year history in the business of recycling, they are uniquely qualified to provide insight on the status of recycling in the region and economic impact it has on every consumer. I caught up with Michael Durfor, the Executive Director of the NRRA at the 30th annual Northeast Recycling Conference and Expo, which they sponsor. He spent some time with me explaining how recycling works and how it impacts town budgets and the local tax bills.
This is your 30th year?
Yes, it's our 30th anniversary.
How much have you grown over that time?
Back in 1988 we had 185 members and did 5,700 tons (of recycled material). Now we're up to almost 400 members and last year we did over 73,000 tons.
Can you tell me what function the NRRA plays in the municipal waste stream?
For the most part, our members are municipal members. So, it's a small transfer station that's collecting material and keeping it out of the waste stream. Then, what do they do with it? If you've got a 55 gallon drum of crushed aluminum cans, what do they do? We try to get them grant money for balers, so they can bale it up, because it's more valuable in bales than unbaled.
We try to put their bales together with bales from other little towns so they get the benefit of a full load. If you're only shipping a partial load you still pay the full freight, but if you ship a full load of 40-44,000 pounds, the freight cost is the same and you're getting a much better price for it. So we keep track of that, we actually pick up the material, we trans-load it into a full load, and pay them back, based on the full load pricing, so they get the best available on the market, comparable to what the big guys do.
So you're essentially making recycling easier for the small towns?
Easier and more profitable. That's what supports our program, because if it doesn't make sense economically, they're going to throw it in with the garbage.
The figures you quoted are for New England?
We're northeast. We started out in '81 in just New Hampshire. We changed, I think in '93 to Northeast Recycling. We handle material from Massachusetts, Connecticut, some Rhode Island, Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire.
How many exhibitors do you have at the conference this year?
I think we have about 55 or 60. We actually had to turn people away, we ran out of space in the hall. It was great, oversold.
Yesterday, you had municipal waste stream managers as your primary audience and today you have students?
We have both. We have a second day of municipal and the students are doing the same type of workshops at the same level. They are right on top of these vendors and right on top of recycling. They want to know what's really going on. I just talked to a gal from California and she's presenting. She's talking about the whole recycling matrix. We have a fellow from EPA DC and he's showing them what's happened up through this 30 year period and projecting out through the next 30 in the closing speech. It's a really great conference.
From the time you started in '81, what are some of the biggest changes in recycling that you've seen? The willingness to recycle, the finances of recycling -- ?
Finances are a big part. I think the technology has changed quite a bit. This was a fledgling non-profit probably for the first 5-15 years or so, and now it has developed into something that just got an environmental merit award from the EPA, not for any one program, but for the integrity with which the operation operates as a non-profit. Whenever you're in a for-profit business, people always suspect that there's a profit motive in everything you do. I joke that we can lose money every day and make it up on volume.
Our job is to protect the little guy and make sure that every penny we can make for them goes back to them. At the same time, we have that tension of having to keep the lights on, so you're there when the calls come in at 7:00 in the morning until 5:30 at night to try to move material.
I think over the years, the organization has grown to the point where it's respected throughout the Northeast. This conference is respected, and you hear that as you talk to the vendors, as the one to go to. In fact, we heard some folks today say that they'll do this conference and no other from now on. It's not just to do the conference, but I think they get the benefit of meeting with the numbers of people here. There are over 550 people here this year and that's a huge increase. I think it's double over the last six years.
Every one of those 550 people is a potential client for the exhibitors?
Absolutely. The way it works is that they recognize the value added, as do the members. The members can call us for anything from tires to Freon to fiber to aluminum cans. The aluminum can vendor doesn't have to go to 400 members. We're doing all their sales work for them, provided their pricing is right.
We're also doing a service for the towns. We act as their purchasing department. We don't go out and do RFPs; we don't do contracts. We'll send out an email and say 'We want your best price on this load, today,' and we'll get three prices back within a half an hour. We pass that bidding back to the member, who got the best price, knowing that they're going to get picked up or the service will get done properly.
All of the material you move is done on the spot pricing market?
For the most part. We do enter into contracts when the communities require them or when they want them. The danger of the long term contract is that you may get locked into a price that ends up being too low or too high. That's not saying that your spot market price will be better, but over the long term, you may be able to react to the market a lot more quickly.
From the municipal standpoint, the long-term contract gives them predictability --
It does. Specifically with their MSW they want that. You know we also deal with municipal solid waste. People think we only deal with recycling, but we've been handling municipal solid waste for the last 20 years. Construction and demo, we deal with as well. In terms of the municipal solid waste, they like to lock into a price every year so they can budget for that. They know their tonnage on that. They don't necessarily know the recycling tonnage, but we're getting to that point so both can be done.
For municipal contracts, you're better off, if you can time it right. Market timing, like the stock market, is tricky. We just looked at a contract a month ago, and that was locking in a price with transportation that was definitely a good deal, a five year deal. If you can find those, absolutely we'll do it. What we'll do is put the deal together for the town, with the vendor or hauler and make the deal with the town. We'll just make sure that it stays done and that the contract is made.
What is the actual revenue stream for your organization? Is it government grants?
That's a big part. We take so much per ton as a co-op fee, as opposed to a percentage. We probably would do better if we took a percentage. We've got to look at that at some point, but for the most part, it's very minimal. I don't even think it really covers the cost of the transactions. We've got the membership fee to about a nickel per person that's covered in the recycling program. I don't think that's too much for a recycling program that covers 30 programs and you can pick up the phone anytime and do one-stop shopping. Probably we're not charging enough for that, but they're our members so we shouldn't charge. The co-op fees are probably 50 percent of our revenue. The rest is from grants and the conference certainly is one of the projects we work.
Have you done any cost comparisons between the communities in which you work and communities that prefer to do things on their own, so that you can show how much a community might save by using the NRRA services for recycling?
No, we honestly haven't had time to do that. There aren't too many that don't work with us in one commodity or another. They may do all of them with us. The challenge we have is to get them to do all of it. The advantage to that is that at the end of the year we give them a report of all the stuff that's moved through us, and we actually calculate the number of trees they've saved and they can include that in their annual reports. They can look at that and the community can say, yes, we are doing a good job. They don't have time to keep track of that on a day to day basis certainly. The database that we use is able to do that for us.
From an individual citizen's perspective, it's their diligence in separating out recyclables for transfer stations that keeps their dump fees low and provides, in some cases, revenue streams to local towns?
Absolutely. Every time that I've done the study, it shows that it costs about $80-100 per ton [to dispose of municipal solid waste]. If you pull a ton of recyclable material out of there, you've saved $80-100 from the town budget, plus you get paid for it. It's definitely an economic argument that we're trying to make. We try to work with all the town managers, with all the town administrators, the select boards to say that it's not just because you're hugging trees that this is a good thing to do. It's also saving you a ton of money.
We did a school program where the New Boston Central School with the town transfer facility bought a truck, a box truck, split it in half. The custodians put all the trash in the back, the kids put all the recyclables in the middle. The transfer station guy comes and drives it down twice a week and dumps the trash in the hopper where it's going to go anyway, and then weighs the recyclables and throws it in with his recyclables. When those ship out, we keep track of it. We cut a check to the transfer station for their share, and we cut a check to the school for their share and the kids get to decide what to do with the money. Most importantly, the four dumpsters that were out behind the school are gone and the school saved $8000 in disposal costs.
It's a great example of using the existing infrastructure, because every school can't develop a transfer station pact, but this one is a mile and a half to the transfer station and that's all we need to take care of. Once, it's there it's good to go.
From a citizen's standpoint again, there are very few things they can do to actually influence the taxes in their towns other than voting people in and out of office, but by diligently recycling, they're actually able to lower their taxes?
Every time. It's either going to cost them $100 per ton, or they're going to get paid for it.
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