Recycling managers for Santa Fe say they could handle more

Apr. 21—Santa Fe's Buckman Road Recycling and Transfer Station recycles 10,400 tons of material annually, and much of that goes down a conveyor belt where an attentive employee picks off items that don't belong there.

These non-recyclable items, which range from broken model trains to gas masks to tree branches, make up about 22% of the station's volume, and end up in the landfill, said Randall Kippenbrock, executive director of Santa Fe Solid Waste Management Agency, operated jointly by the city and county.

While station employees are picking out non-recyclable items, too many Santa Fe residents are throwing materials that could be recycled into the garbage.

"Santa Fe can do much better," Kippenbrock said. "There's still more material that could be recycled."

For years, local recyclables were sent to Albuquerque, but in 2019, the Santa Fe Solid Waste Management Agency reopened the Buckman Road facility and contracted with the Albuquerque-based company Town Recycling to run it and market the recyclables processed there.

Town Recycling President Martha Lara noted the company has no control over how much material is brought into the facility, but "once it's on the floor, it's our business."

She said the company has calculated it could currently handle at least 25% more material.

Recycling material from the city's daily curbside collection, for example, is emptied and fed onto a conveyor belt that runs past two people who are "pre-sorting," or picking out as much non-recyclable material as they can and dropping it all down two chutes. Those piles are fed back into the process several times in a day, Lara said, to make sure as much recyclable material as possible is salvaged.

After pre-sorting, a belt of turning gears works to separate cardboard from other recyclables, and eight more human sorters down the line work to pick out certain materials.

Each "commodity" is fed into a baler as a last step before a buyer hauls it away. The company is also in charge of marketing the resulting bales, which lately consisted of either cardboard, mixed paper or mixed containers, which includes both plastics and metals.

The mixed containers are being sent to Waste Management in Denver, where they are further sorted and processed. The destination for mixed paper bales changes depending on the market, Kippenbrock said, but they are usually shipped to one of several locations in nearby states or in Mexico that turn it into a product like cellulose insulation or egg cartons.

Lara said all the cardboard recycling stays within New Mexico after being sorted and baled at the Buckman facility. The cardboard is shipped to McKinley Paper, a mill in Prewitt where it's processed into paper products for packaging, wrapping and newspapers.

Recycled electronics are sent to a Tulsa, Okla., facility called Natural Evolution, which Kippenbrock said maintains the highest certification available for facilities that recycle electronics while preventing additional waste in landfills.

Tires are recycled at a facility in Denver City, Texas, that processes them into crumb rubber that is used in asphalt, Kippenbrock said. The first weekend of each month, city and county residents can bring up to eight tires for free.

The amount of glass the agency has recycled has steadily dropped since the city of Santa Fe stopped collecting it at the curb with other recyclables in 2017. Last year, the agency recycled 1,702 tons of glass, compared to the 2,500 tons in 2016, the last full year for glass collection in the city. Last year's glass amounted to 76 truckloads that made their way more than 400 miles to a recycling plant via a contracted hauler.

The agency recently renewed contracts with a hauler, Pro-Motion Transportation of Española, and a buyer, a recycling facility called Glass to Glass Denver in Broomfield, Colo. Each load costs $1,750 to transport, but the agency receives $35 to $37 per ton of glass it delivers.

All of the agency's glass has for years been shipped to the Denver plant, where it is made into new bottles that have been used by breweries like MillerCoors.

While better recycling habits from the public could help the agency's operations and keep recyclable materials out of the landfill, many in the field recognize an ultimate need for reduced production of things like single-use plastics.

Kippenbrock pointed out the first of the "three Rs" is "reduce."

Policies that extend producer responsibility for the environmental cost over the life of a product is gaining momentum in some parts of the country, said New Mexico Recycling Coalition Executive Director Sarah Pierpont.

"Right now, the burden of managing print packaging at the end of its life is on consumers and taxpayers, so product stewardship shifts that burden upstream to the manufacturers and the producers," Pierpont said.

A bill proposed in this year's legislative session to ban plastic bags statewide failed, but Pierpont said support and momentum behind it demonstrated growing interest in policies that address "source reduction." Santa Fe's Reusable Bag Ordinance bans most single-use plastic shopping bags in the city and requires retail stores to charge a 10-cent fee for every paper bag provided to customers.

Bags are a scourge in many recycling facilities, and where prevalent, they're difficult to keep out of bales of cardboard or paper. That makes Santa Fe's recycling materials more valuable because the bales are cleaner, said Lara, president of Town Recycling..

Some other facilities, she said, invest in expensive equipment specifically to help sorters manage the high volume of plastic bags in incoming materials.

But at Buckman, she said, the amount of plastic bags "is negligible, probably like zero."