When Ann Arbor switched to single-stream recycling in 2010, the single biggest expense was the $3.6 million the city spent gutting its Materials Recycling Facility on Platt Road and completely refitting it with new machinery to sort even more kinds of paper, plastic, glass, and metal. Before, the MRF (say “murf”) processed 100 tons of recyclables per day; now it processes 300 tons. Only about 10 percent of the increase comes from Ann Arbor, though—the rest is from Toledo, Lansing, Ypsilanti, and over two dozen other municipalities that now contract with the ReCommunity, the company that operates the MRF for the city.
The city expected to recoup its investment in seven years, but at this rate, it may take less than three. The city’s share of sales of recycled materials more than tripled in the first year after the expansion, from $365,000 to $1.3 million, due to both increased volume and rising commodity prices—in the summer of 2011, plastic was up to $760 a ton and aluminum was $1,665.
The city’s environmental money machine is a four-story steel shed containing a series of conveyer belts, a bunch of incredibly cool machines, and thirty hardhat- and earplug-wearing workers. To keep up with the surge in materials, ReCommunity is running two eight-hour shifts Monday through Friday and sometimes Saturday.
Trucks full of recyclables pull up on one side of the building to be weighed, then drive to other side to drop their loads. A front-end loader scoops up the material, and drops it into a machine at one end of the line that shakes apart the compressed loads. That machine sends a steady stream of material up a wide conveyor belt, where workers pull off large metal and plastic objects. The rest goes into a long room where corrugated cardboard is yanked and glass is smashed, then passes through two diagonal machines that sort it further—the dual conveyor belts that emerge from them carry small plastic and metal containers, and lots of paper. Workers pull out the paper and any remaining large objects, sending them all through slots to huge holding cages below.
The incredibly cool machines sort everything else. The first one generates a huge magnet field that snaps ferrous metals off the line; the next generates a huge negative electrical field that does the same thing to the aluminum; and the third optically scans the plastics’ chemical composition and divides the number one from the numbers two through seven plastics with powerful blasts of air. The last machine at the end of the line bales the sorted recyclables with steel wire in three-by-six-foot blocks weighing up to half a ton each, which are then stacked by forklifts until they’re purchased by remanufacturing plants.
Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis, Missouri, currently purchases all the aluminum—and calls Ann Arbor’s MRF the “King of Recycling” for the quality of their product.
