Easier single-stream recycling is coming to Bellingham but when will it start?
The company that handles Bellingham’s recycling pickup is gearing up for a single-stream system that will save money.
The City Council in March approved switching to a single-stream recycling system. This means residents will use one bin for all their recyclables instead of separating them into three bins.
The implementation of the program is still being planned out and a start date has not been announced, Ted Carlson, general manager of Sanitary Service Company (SSC) told The Bellingham Herald in an email. The single-stream system was tested in the Edgemoor neighborhood over a six-month period in 2022.
The system allows SSC to reduce the number of trucks used from eight to three or four at any given time, Carlson told the City Council during the Feb. 27 meeting. It will also lower the number of injuries seen in the collection process, as the actual act of picking up the bins is going to be mechanized. Drivers will not have to physically pick up the bins as often now.
“Given the volatility and uncertainty in the market, I think it makes a lot of sense to be as efficient as we can with the collection program,” Carlson said during the meeting. “Control what we can control, which is the collection portion.”
1,500 tons of recycling each month
Collecting, processing and manufacturing are the three steps in the recycling process, and are all handled by different companies. The collection is handled by SSC in Bellingham and parts of Whatcom, and in the north and northeastern parts of the county collection is performed by Nooksack Valley Disposal and Recycling.
In Whatcom County, about 1,500 tons of recycled material are picked up each month, Troy Lautenbach, co-owner of Lautenbach Recycling told The Herald in an interview.
Lautenbach Recycling handles the processing step for most of Whatcom County, and will continue to do so until implementation of the single-stream system is completed and becomes more widespread in the county.
“We currently bail cardboard and mixed paper and even some aluminum cans when we have a clean stream of aluminum cans, and send those to the recyclers ourselves,” Lautenbach said.
However, Lautenbach does not have the equipment necessary to separate recycled materials, and is instead shipping them to Material Recovery Facilities in Seattle. There, the materials are sorted and then sent out to remanufacturers across Washington.
“Right now we are just kinda in an advisory role and just trying to facilitate getting the program going, whatever the city and SSC would like to do,” Lautenbach said. “We want to be good partners in that process. We are also exploring what it would take to actually process all the material in our community rather than shipping it down the freeway to Seattle.”
The cost to purchase and install the equipment necessary to turn Lautenbach Recycling into a material recovery center capable of separating recycled material would be a multi-million dollar investment, he said.
Lautenbach Recycling processes the items it receives into usable materials that can be remanufactured, and sells them to businesses across the state. However, there has been some problem recently with the supply overwhelming the demand, Lautenbach said.
This is especially true with things like cardboard, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, people were ordering a lot more things online, and as a result, cardboard manufacturing skyrocketed. Now, there is more cardboard ready to be recycled than there is demand.
