‘What happens to this stuff?’

Stacy J. Willis and Steve Kanigher

Saturday, Aug. 26, 2000 | 4:10 a.m.

Improving recycling

In a series of town hall meetings in Las Vegas last fall sponsored by the Sierra Club and Citizen Alert, participants made numerous suggestions to improve recycling. Among them:

On a hot Thursday morning homeowner Kelly Dixon is sitting on his recently emptied and upturned recycling crate, pulling weeds from the edges of his well-watered lawn, sorting through his environmental conscience.

"Sure, we recycle. It makes you feel kind of good for helping the environment. But you don't get any personal benefit from it because they don't take anything off your trash bill," Dixon said. "And we really don't know where it goes. I mean, I guess it goes into the trash center and people go through it again, and somebody makes a lot of money off of it. But not us," Dixon said.

Dixon is not alone in his mixed feelings -- and lack of information -- about recycling in the Las Vegas Valley. A stroll through Dixon's neighborhood near Desert Inn Road and Durango Drive reveals that few recyclers know the answers to Dixon's question: "What happens to this stuff after we put it on the curb?"

The recyclable material -- aluminum cans, tin cans, and plastic bottles in the red basket; newspapers, telephone books, and magazines in the white baskets; glass bottles in the blue baskets; corrugated cardboard and containers of used motor oil stacked on the curb -- is picked up by Republic Services of Southern Nevada, which has the exclusive contract for residential recycling in Clark County.

Homeowners who pay Republic for garbage collection -- roughly $30 per quarter -- may request baskets at no extra cost. This year about 12,000 sets of baskets were distributed, including those that were delivered without request to newly constructed homes.

But while there is no cost for the baskets, customers get no discount on their bill if they participate in recycling -- they pay for the service whether they participate or not. About 10 percent of the customers' bills goes toward the company's recycling operations, according to Steve Kalish, Republic president.

"The recycling portion of the bill is about three dollars or less (of the $30 quarterly fee)," Kalish said. "The bulk of our recycling business is resale. What we get from the residents barely covers costs."

Kalish said it costs Republic between $5.5 and $7 million a year to pick up residential recyclable material -- just to send the trucks out -- not including the costs of operating the recycling center, which he would not divulge.

Industry experts estimate that in Southern Nevada where outlying space for waste is abundant, disposing of garbage in a landfill costs roughly $20 per ton. Collecting, sorting and packaging recyclables costs roughly $40 per ton. Recyclables are picked up once every two weeks.

The Lakes neighborhood off West Sahara is home to some of the most diligent curbside recyclers in Clark County -- motivated by conservationism or conformism or some mix of the two.

"Everybody recycles up here," said Joe Cassese, digging through his recycling baskets in search of an issue of the New York Times he wasn't yet ready to part with. "I think it's good for ecology."

Cledous Dexter, a Republic recycling truck driver, dreads the days his collection route includes recycling-conscious neighborhoods like The Lakes.

Dexter is one of about 45 workers who drive one of 26 recycling trucks in the Las Vegas area. Like all the drivers , Dexter works alone -- at each house that participates, he gets out, picks up and dumps the crates into separate compartments inside the truck, gets back in the cab and drives to the next participating house.

Levels of participation vary widely from route to route. A normal route covers about 1,500 houses a day, meaning the entire fleet could service about 39,000 potential recycling participants daily, more than enough to service existing demand.

Dexter and Kalish said The Lakes, along with other middle-class neighborhoods or retirement villages, have the highest rate of recycling, while working-class neighborhoods participate less.

"Some people don't have time, and some don't recycle because they figure, 'Why should I keep something here for two weeks to make someone else some money?' " Dexter, who recycles at his central Las Vegas home, said.

Kalish says Republic's curbside program -- considered independent from recycling programs for Strip hotels, business, and construction sites -- is improving.

Republic's residential collection program accounted for about 40 percent of the residential and commercial recycling in the valley last year, and increased slightly from 82,888 tons collected in 1996 to more than 85,000 tons in 1999.

"I consider our participation rates are very good, especially in areas like Summerlin and Green Valley," said Kalish.

"But the danger in even writing a story like this and answering these questions is that people get discouraged. They may think, 'There's nothing in it for me, I don't matter.'

"But I suggest they do matter," Kalish said. "What each person contributes means a lot to us. And there's also an environmental benefit to it."

Sorting the trash

The industrial area a few blocks west of Interstate 15 on Cheyenne in North Las Vegas is crawling with Republic's garbage and recycling trucks.

Republic's full recycling trucks come into the fenced property, dump the glass in bins on the side of the building, and then drive inside. The remainder of their load is dumped into piles inside that will be pushed onto an assembly line for further sorting. Many residents errantly throw nonrecyclable waste into their recycling baskets. (Says Dexter: "One time a guy tried to get me to take a bag with a dead cat in it. Lots of people don't know what they can recycle.")

About two dozen employees stand along the assembly line inside the recycling plant, wearing gloves and goggles or glasses, apparently unbothered by the plentiful and relentless flies.

"We are a materials recovering facility," said Butch Hurst, Republic recycling plant manager. "That's all we do. Collect and bail. Then it gets shipped out to wherever the broker finds a market for it."

In 1999, Republic reports that in Clark County it collected 41,184 tons of cardboard, 19,176 tons of newspaper, 10,484 tons of magazines, 1,377 tons of telephone books, and 521 tons of mixed paper.

Republic also collected 431 tons of aluminum containers, 2,781 tons of tin or steel containers, and more than 1,100 tons of plastic.

In that same year it also collected 2,257 tons of clear glass, 1,328 tons of green glass, and 1,375 tons of amber or brown glass.

Commodities

From the loading dock at the recycling center, semi-trailer trucks pick up the bales of material and take them out of Las Vegas to processing companies.

Kalish said the Las Vegas plant's main broker is Chicago-based Smurfit-Stone Inc., the largest paper packaging company in North America. Smurfit also sells other types of recyclable material to processing companies.

Among the companies that purchase the material through Smurfit include American Num Chang, of Pomona, Calif., one of the largest exporters of recyclable materials to Asia, and the Vernon, Calif., Container Recycling Alliance, a subsidiary of Waste Management Inc. Republic would not provide a complete list of buyers.

According to a 1999 annual report, parent company Republic Services Inc., of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., generated $153.3 million in revenue from its recycling and composting operations around the nation -- 8.3 percent of its total revenue.

Kalish said the sale of local recyclable material rakes in some $4 million to $8 million a year for Republic, depending on fluctuating markets.

Aluminum pays the most per ton -- bringing in as much as $1,000 per ton.

"But sometimes we don't even get aluminum cans. They get stolen from the curbs by people who want the money themselves," Kalish said.

There are more than a dozen smaller recycling companies in Las Vegas where people can sell their recyclable material directly to a buyer.

And while aluminum is a hot commodity, others have less of a market.

"Sometimes it does happen that Smurfit can't find a buyer for a certain commodity this month," said Hurst. "We may not ship right away. We hold it up until they do have a buyer."

"Glass has never been a high commodity," Hurst said. "You'll find it is a break-even situation for what it costs sometimes."

"If I had to depend on glass, I'd be in a world of hurt. But there's a lot of glass bottles to keep out of the landfill, so basically, you go after the high-volume items, the newspapers, the cardboard, and you hope it evens out at the end of the month. "You get a lot of weight with glass, but depending on which color we're talking about, you get anywhere from $8 to $20 per ton. That doesn't always cover costs. For what it costs you to ship it, compared to what you collect, there's not a lot to be made," Hurst said.

"When it costs you $300 a load to ship it and you get about 20 tons on a truck, you make $160 and that's clearly not a good profit margin. But when you make $400, you make back what was lost in the first load's costs." Nevertheless, he said, "It always has a market somewhere. We never bail it and have them drop it in a landfill."

Dumping "doesn't even come into the equation. It will always be marketed," Kalish said. "That would be a slap in the face of people who took the time to sort it."

Much of the glass collected by Republic in Las Vegas is sold by Smurfit to Container Recycling Alliance and shipped to Vernon. "We send a truck to Las Vegas every day," said Dennis Hinson, regional manager of Container Recycling Alliance.

Hinson wouldn't quote the financial terms of the relationship with Republic. He said that "Las Vegas is a good-sized customer. In the whole scheme of things though, it's a just a small portion of what CRA does."

After the crushed glass makes the road trip to the Vernon plant it is dumped into a series of machines that remove contamination, grind it and process it into cullet -- a uniform 5/8-inch material that will be sold to yet another company.

CRA's largest customer is Ball/Foster Inc., a Muncie, Indiana-based food container maker that has two Southern California plants.

Ball/Foster receives orders from companies such as Anheuser Busch for a specific number of containers. Ball/Foster takes the cullet it has purchased from processing centers, sends it through a furnace and shapes it into bottles made according to its customers' specifications.

"So if Anheuser Busch buys it, they make beer bottles, put them in cartons and ship them to Budweiser to be filled with beer," Hinson said.

"And from there, the process starts all over again."

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