IIY IP,III

by Ken Schlossberg

One year and counting, an upstart operation believes that specializing in food scrap composting could be its meal ticket.

omposting in an urban environment is a challenge. Permitting, financing, property acquisition, management, operations and sales all represent tremendous hurdles in systems engineering. Recycle Away Group Services in

New Bedford, Massachusetts is attempting to meet these challenges with the support of state and local government, private financial hstitutions, suppliers and clients.

Massachusetts recently approved a solid waste disposal plan that establishes a 10-year goal of 70 percent recycling and composting of organics, primarily food scraps. By percentage, organics represent a relatively small proportion of the total waste stream, but by weight they are a greater landfill problem and generate methane gas, which contributes to the "greenhouse effect." Meeting the 10-year goal depends upon developing composting capacity. Given the rapid pace of sub- urbanization, high cost of hauling and disappearing rural composting capacity, the ability to compost large amounts of organics in urban areas is critical to the suc- cess of the plan.

Gary and Keith Braverman, brothers and RAGS co-owners with their father, Herb Braverman, began looking into composting food scraps when they realized that landfill capacity was being used up quickly in Massachusetts as a result of a - .

ban on the development of new sites.-c hey believed the rising cost of disposal might make the reiative cost of compostin~organics economic~lly feasible:

Getting started The first step was to acquire a suitable piece of property. They secured an eight-acre brownfield site in the Weir Industrial area of Taunton, Massachusetts. The site was con- tingent on an environmental cleanup by Bay State Gas (Taunton). The site is bounded on one side by the Weir River and the Taunton Waste Water Treatment Plant, and by Silver City Aluminum that extrudes aluminum products, a CSX railroad line and protected wet- lands on the other sides. Single-family housing is being constructed beyond the railroad line within view of the RAGS site.

Concurrent with the site cleanup, the company initiated the permit process working with the Massachusetts Department of ~nvironhental protection (Boston). DEP expressed serious concerns that previously permitted compost operations had to be closed down because they failed to bperate within approved guidelines and encountered serious com- plaints from abutting properties, especially concerning vectors and odor problems. It should be noted that most of these problems were associated with open, windrow com- posting. RAGS, however, was planning to use an enclosed system.

The brownfield cleanup and permitting process took several years, during which RAGS identified the composting process it intended to implement, the CT-10 System from Ag-Bag International (Warrenton, Oregon). The Ag-Bag system includes modules 200 - - feet long by 10 feet wide that are filled kith organicmate>ai - food scraps, yard debris,

Continued on page 35.

Ken Schlossberg is a consultant in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. He may be reached at (617) 469- 4063 or ken70000@aol.com.

~esource Recycling June 2001

Resoulre Recycling June 2001

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Due to cash flow problems last ye&, Wise Alloys was unable to pay Tomra fully for nans shipped from its western operations to :he Alabama smelter. As a result of being owed $33 million, Tomra ceased shipments,

- although a truce since has been announced and Tomra has resumed shipments. Wise Alloys was forced to lay off 160 workers late last year. RR

Recycling market conditions for aluminum cans are described extensively in Container Recycling Report, the monthly newsletter. To receive a sam- ple copy, call (503) 233- 1305.

dozen processing plants and 400 buy-back trailers. Subsequently, another WMG affili- ate, Wise Alloys, bought Reynold's huge sec- ondary aluminum smelter and rolling mill in the Muscle Shoals region of Alabama.

-Toma ultim y took over the western stem. Weak market con-

ating costs forced WR

price from the prevlous year. I

to sell off most of and Tomra was lion for its investnent

to sell its reportedly is

ing plants.

prices have risen, yet the recycling level has declined (see Table 3). This has happened before. For example, when can prices went to a record high in 1995, the consumption of cans actually declined.

Hard times for independents In such a going-nowhere-fast industry, the market has moved more and more toward the giant integrated companies, such as Alcan (Montreal), Alcoa (Pittsburgh) and Kaiser Aluminum & Chemical (Houston). For instance, Anheuser-Busch Recycling

.ts Midwest plants last year, fcrced to write off $43.5 mil-

inWR after first try- : to WMG for $12 million. ~ i n g to sell its 13 remain-

//'

i

UUlm Millenium Rotor Series I (St. Louis), the nation's largest handler of UBCs, has become linked more closely with Alcan. The arr

sales and use. Independent actors in th

business have had tough ti example, IMCO Recycl

the first quarter of this year, In comparison, the company made $2.6 million in the corre- sponding period in 2000. Net revenues in the first quarter of $187.4 million were down 16 percent. Higher expenditures for natural gas and lower processing volumes were the pri- mary causes of the loss. The firm had a net loss from operations of $1.0 million in the fourth quarter of 2000.

As another case, ORMET has moved out of UBC melting at its Friendly, West Virginia aluminum recycling mill.

In a final example, the venture in the mid- 1990s by Wise Metals Group (Baltimore) to move from being an aluminum trader to also being a can recovery operator and melter has been less than successful. WMG purchased the can recycling assets of Reynolds Metals and, along with Tomra (Stratford, Connecti- cut), established Wise Recycling (also of Bal- timore) to operate the can buy-back and proc- essing system, which included about two

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Continuedfi-om page 18. wood, cardboard, waxed cardboard and paper - and kept under contsolled temperature and moisture conditions for 12 to 16 weeks.

As the module fills, aeration piping is placed inside, and an applicator adds starter bacteria to speed the composting process. DEP required a detailed site plan showing how the modules would fit onto the property and how the com- posting process would work as an integrated system, specifying daily amounts to be processed, hours of operation and limits on retaining finished product on the site.

In the spring of 2000, the composting com- pany was awarded $49,500 from the DEP's Recycling Industries Reimbursement Credit program, a new grant program to increase recycling and manufacturing of new prod- ucts. The grant defrayed the cost of equip- ment for a pilot project using the Ag-Bag sys- tem. Other critical equipment purchased by RAGS include a grinder from CMI (Okla- homa City, Oklahoma), screening equipment from McCloskey Brothers Manufacturing (Ajax, Ontario) and a truck scale from Weightronix (Faismont, Minnesota).

RAGS received a pesmit from DEP to con- duct its composting operation in June, author- izing the facility to take in 90 tons of food waste per day. The RIRC pilot project guide- lines called for beginning at 25 tons per day and then expanding beyond that as RAGS

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gained experience with the Ag-Bag process. RAGS spent the sum- mer preparing the site for composting operations, including the con- struction of a concrete pad, negotiating the purchase of equipment and bringing it onsite.

--

Before beginning actual operations in October, RAGS began mar- kTt in ing i t s iWto food ~ E F a p ~ n i a t o ~ w i t h i i l i i i g s X n d per- sonal sales visits. Key concerns to potential customers were price and reliability. The decision-makers about disposal for supermarkets especially were interested in the trade-offs between lower disposal costs and increased costs of labor and dedicated Dumpsters associ- ated with segregating food scraps from plastics, glass and other con- taminants.

Operations and production RAGS hauls some food scrap feedstock loads itself, but the compa- ny also works with American Waste Brokers, which directs loads from major supermarket and restaurant chains as well as local haulers. Currently, RAGS serves a half-dozen customers and accepts as much as 40 tons of feedstock per day.

Loads are weighed on a 100-ton truck scale and then dumped onto a concrete sorting pad. Incoming material is graded by RAGS employees to estimate the percentage of contaminants in the load. The fee to the hauler is adjusted according to how "dirty" the load is estimated to be.

RAGS uses a Cat-930 Wheel Loader to push the load together and break it apart. Then a Bobcat 853 or a Swinger 3000 loads the material onto the feedbelt of the grinder. The picking station is right beside the infeed conveyor belt. Employees remove large pieces of plastic and smaller pieces of metal. Plastics and other residuals are disposed at local landfills and incinerators at a cost of $80 to $86 per ton. Assorted met- als go to scrap metal yards for a net of between $1 and $10 per ton.

The most serious machinery problem in the whole process occurs at the grinding stage. The grinder teeth are broken by metal contam- inants, concrete and other nongrindable objects, causing downtime I

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m ~ e s o u r c e Recycling June 2001

of the equipment. RAGS has had to replace numerous teeth and even change the entire mill once; since, the firm has retrofitted the grinder with custom-designed teeth for greater longevity.

Once the material comes off the discharge conveyor, it goes into roll-off containers. A roll-off truck picks up a full load, goes across the scale and then dumps the material in thestaging-area whercthe Cat-930 transfers it into the Ag-Bag machine, which stuffs the processed materials into the module.

RAGS' experience indicates that the average time for the com- posting process is up to three months, meaning four to six weeks in the module and four to six weeks out of the module. RAGS close- ly monitors temperature and moisture content of the material in the module. Once it determines that the process is complete, staff open the module, screen to size, then transfer the material to the curing pile. The composting operation produces a two-thirds reduction by weight between the material going into the module and the mate- rial coming out.

At this point, RAGS has multiple project priorities. The first is to increase the quantity and quality of incoming feedstock. The single greatest cost factor is labor to remove contaminants, especially plas- tic, from loads. Working with waste generators to remove contami- nants at the source is critical, and clean loads reduce costs and fees charged to haulers.

Sales and marketing RAGS now is ready to begin marketing its compost and is in discus- sions with area landscapers and landscape construction companies. RAGS also is working with these companies to ensure that the mate- rial meets state and local guidelines. The company is talking to the city of Taunton about composting its yard debris. Finally, an amend- ment to the solid waste ban statute is being proposed that would divert all organics from the waste stream of generators that produce more than a ton per week. RR

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mixed construction and demolition (C&D) debris processing facility located in Raleigh, North Carolina, officially opened for business o-inch grate to separate last December. down to a temporary

o inches continues across the vibratory screen and passes through an air knife. This agitates the light fraction,

it takes in. The processing facili attracting an average of more than

ty, This is a serious concern because of a simul- taneous drop in C&D disposal capacity, includ- ing the recent closing of a 1,000-plus-ton-per-

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Material Reclamationiontinues to fine- tune its current operation while looking for other markets in which to expand. The firm is considering partnerships with local gov- ernments as well as additional independent processing sites in North Carolina and throughout the U.S. Also on the horizon is a landfill in Wake County to use as a disposal site for the residual materials generated from the C&D processing facility.

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North Carolina Recycling Business Assistance Center (Raleigh)

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~esource Recycling June 2001