Napa Recycling makes what's in the blue bins top priority

By KEVIN COURTNEY, Register Staff Writer

A sleuthing reporter has discovered the stunning truth about those pizza boxes and empty milk cartons that you put in your blue recycling cart.

What happens in the hours after they leave your curbside is the equal of the wildest ride at Six Flags or Disneyland, but with more bruising.

Squeezed and compacted, your discards arrive at the Materials Recycling Facility dazed and confused. Before they can plead nervous stomachs, they are shoved onto a conveyor belt and lifted nearly as high as a roller coaster for a mind-blowing, two-minute ride in which they are pummeled, air tickled and spit out chutes into bins containing their own kind.

Plastic with plastic, aluminum with aluminum, paper with paper.

And that's not the end of it. Every hour or two, the grim baler pounces, compacting heaps into perfectly symmetrical, thousand-pound cubes of raw material bound for recycling plants across the Pacific Rim.

Your discard will become tomorrow's Coke can, computer box or bleach bottle.

Napa residents were recycling nearly 18,000 tons of household materials annually before single-stream recycling kicked in Oct. 1 with those big blue carts that some people find not so charming.

With single stream, Napans should recycle even more, said Kevin Miller, the city's recycling coordinator. Residents are no longer asked to bundle newspapers and bunch like with like. Now it's lift the lid and dump.

Combining all recycling in one big bin is easier to do, so more people will do it, Miller said.

Some customers feel robbed. They liked all that home sorting, Miller said. It made them feel socially responsible.

Napa Recycling and Waste Services, the area's new garbage company, expects to handle 20 percent more household recycling than Waste Management, the old company, Miller said.

Napa Recycling has financial incentives to promote recycling that Waste Management never had. Waste Management was guaranteed a 10 percent profit no matter how much or how little Napans recycled.

Napa Recycling can count on only 3 percent profit. To earn more, the company must get Napans to recycle more.

If Napa Recycling can divert 60 percent of the community's waste stream from the landfill, the company could make 20 percent profit, Miller estimated. Last year's diversion rate was 46 percent.

Residents and businesses can also win if they become avid recyclers. Since yard waste and recycling are hauled away for free, customers who max out on these services should be able to go to a smaller, less costly garbage cart, Miller said.

"Free is a magical word," Miller said. "It will turn the whole paradigm on its head." Recyling, not garbage, is now Napa Recycling's core business, he said.

Napa Recycling has invested more than $4 million in state-of-the-art sorting and processing equipment at the city-owned recycling center near the Napa County Airport.

The sorting system can handle 5,000 pounds of recyclables an hour, with humans helping machines to distill mountains of debris into their material essences.

"America is the Saudi Arabia of waste in the world," said Miller, leading a visitor into a thunderous room where paper is blown skyward like bingo balls while cans and glass slip through holes in a steel smashing machine onto conveyor systems of their own.

Every glass bottle is reduced to smithereens, the better to separate it from paper, which is double sorted to make it pure enough for a pulp recycling mill.

The redundant mechanical sorting systems and the eagle eyes of the human sorters are producing purer paper waste, Miller said. This means higher prices from buyers on the West Coast and in Asia.

Napans have been doing curbside recycling since 1990, which makes them pros at deciding what to put in their recycling carts, Miller said. Only 8 percent of blue cart materials don't belong there.

Things like golf clubs and bags of pop corn and a set of blue and gold Napa High School pompons which sailed down the conveyor system last week. People will put an odd item in their recycling carts in the "hope you can do something with it," Miller said.

The conveyor system produces a blur of familiar objects -- Mervyns ads, a broken kazoo, AOL CDs and a spelling test belonging to Brian M. with the notation "good job."

Recycling rejects are culled from the conveyor and dropped into bins. They will be buried as common garbage at a landfill in Contra Costa County.

The other 92 percent can be resold. A 1,200-pound bale of aluminum cans is worth $2,000. Paper commands up to $90 a ton. Colored plastic bottles were worth 6 to 8 cents a pound before oil prices shot up. Their value has now doubled.

Even if recycled materials had no market value, the city and garbage company save $54 a ton when materials avoid the landfill, Miller said.

Besides household items, the recycling center turns yard waste into compost. A phenomenally powerful grinder costing hundreds of thousands of dollars can shred tree stumps.

Napa Recycling will be installing a new composting system that will produce fewer odors, Miller said.

Napa Recycling is currently running into problems as it tries to empty all the new recycling carts on weekly basis. Too many people are putting their 96-gallon carts out every week even when they are less than half full, said Greg Kelley, Napa Recycling's general manager.

By providing larger carts instead of small blue bins, Napa Recycling had hoped customers would put out their carts less regularly. That isn't happening, Kelley said.

Drivers of recycling trucks are working late into the evening to keep up with pickups while the company considers how to handle the workload, Miller said.

Don't recycle less, Kelley said. But if possible, put your cart out less often.

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