Hilton Head didn’t recycle beach waste for months. A new company is sorting it out

For the past few months, those walking off Hilton Head Island’s beaches could often find waste bins overflowing with plastic bottles and aluminum cans. Maybe they balanced their own on top of the pile, contributing to the more than 677 tons of waste collected from Hilton Head beaches and parks in a year.

Despite the overfilled containers, often none was recycled. The town didn’t recycle any waste for six months between May 2023 and May 2024. In total, it recycled 20 tons or 3% of the total waste during those 12 months.

A new contractor has set out to change that.

The town switched its waste management contract from Shore Beach Services to i2recycle on July 1. With the new contractor comes bright green pick-up trucks instead of Shore Beach Service’s red, different bin lids and a modified system aimed at the island recycling a higher percentage of its waste.

For 32 years, Shore Beach Services collected trash, provided lifeguards and rented chairs through a contract with the town that bundled all three together. This year, the town separated waste management from that contract, allowing more specialized vendors to bid.

The switch ended years of ineffective recycling processes. During the first week of the i2recycle company’s $136,136 yearly contract, i2recycle recycled 13% of what it collected, about nine percentage points higher than the 4% under Shore Beach Services in July 2023.

The new company started on Fourth of July weekend with one small tweak: new container lids with circle cutouts and an informational sticker, which immediately upped the town’s recycling percentage, according to i2recycle CEO Mike Bennett.

Over the next two months, i2recycle is set to analyze the town’s recycling process, and “then we’re going to put in a proposal to revamp the entire beach,” Bennett said. He predicts the town will recycle 10-15% of its waste in the first year. After that, he predicts the town will recycle 25-30% of its waste.

That is if the town sticks with its contract.

i2recycle’s contract is for one year, with the possibility to be renewed for another four. It will take over Beaufort County’s convenience centers on Aug. 1. The company isn’t responsible for residential recycling; although, i2recycle contracts with Sea Pines and Palmetto Bluff for their commercial recycling.

“We don’t do the resident residential side of recycling,” Bennett said. “It’s a mess.” This results from residents having to meticulously separate the right recyclables from the wrong ones — a habit change that is difficult to standardize.

With residential recycling, a few households not recycling properly can ruin an entire neighborhood’s collection, he said, making the recycling too difficult to sort through and not worth the time it would take to get to a point where the recycling could be sold. With commercial recycling, Bennett can ensure that companies adhere to collection standards, meaning that he won’t collect waste if it has higher than a certain level of “contamination.”

Contamination is mostly what Bennett calls “evil” contaminants: food, foam and plastic film, such as a plastic bag. The rule is that recyclables must be “loose.” People shouldn’t throw bottles and cans away in plastic bags, even if they collected them that way.

“We spent a lot of time on the front side to try to make sure that people know,” Bennett said of the recycling standards needed to make the process feasible.

What is the process now?

From when beachgoers throw their recyclables in the bin to when it’s at the i2recycle facility in Hardeeville, the process is changing.

Visitors will see a change in signage on recycling cans and lids on the beach and in parks to protect the recycling and limit contamination. They also might soon notice color-coded bins to distinguish between trash, black, and recyclables, blue, Bennett said. Everything else happens away from the beach. The first spot the recycling goes is a service yard.

“What we try to do is control the waste from point A to point B,” Bennett said. “We manage the service yard, protect the recyclables, and make sure it doesn’t get contaminated by anybody else. It’s our service yard, we control it.”

From the service yard workers bring the recyclables to i2recycle’s facility in Hardeeville, where it is weighed. After the digital scale flashes its numbers, the recyclables are dumped into a pile and placed onto a conveyor belt. And the facility doesn’t stink.

“I could leave this pile all day,” Bennett said, explaining that there are never rats or foul smells because those mostly come from food, which isn’t in the recycling for the most part. Although food is considered a “contamination.”

When the recyclables make it to the Hardeeville facility it is about 15% “contaminated,” according to Bennett. Workers then sort the recycling by type and weed out “contamination” so that the material is at most 5% “contaminated” and ready to be sold.

The aluminum and plastics are crushed into bales, and one bale weighs about 1,500 pounds, or the equivalent of one dumpster full of recyclables, according to Bennett.

The bales are sold to local facilities such as Greif, Pratt Industries and Sonoco. The recycling that Hilton Head residents and visitors toss into cans could be given new life as aluminum sheets, cans, bottles or low-grade paper such as paper towels.

Why wasn’t the process working before?

Previously, what could and couldn’t be recycled wasn’t up to the collection company, Shore Beach Services. Now, i2recycle directly collects and sorts the recyclables and then sells them to companies that will use them.

Shore Beach Services used to collect the waste from beaches and Waste Management, a Texas-based waste management company, would pick it up. Waste Management would decide whether the waste could be recycled based on what level of “contamination,” the bags had, Shore Beach Services Operations Manager Mike Wagner told the Island Packet and Beaufort Gazette in June.

Waste Management’s “contamination” requirements prevented Waste Management from accepting the intended recycling from Hilton Head beaches, according to Wagner.

“It just became so difficult,” Wagner said at the time. “It was hard for us to find perfect bags. We’ll pick through it to a limited degree, but not go through and sort stuff.”

Wagner said that with the new contract, he is hopeful that i2recycle would be able to recycle more. “I know that’s their plan,” he said.