Betting on more plastics recycling in Las Vegas

North Las Vegas, Nev. — Plastics recovery is expected to increase significantly in the months and years to come in southern Nevada now that Republic Services Inc. has opened a new $35 million residential recycling facility.

The Southern Nevada Recycling Center is allowing the company to collect and recycle more plastics than ever, as well as expand the types of plastics the company will accept.

Not uncommonly, the company previously stuck to collecting just PET and high density polyethylene containers from customers in and around Las Vegas.

But these days, says Recycling General Manager Len Christopher, Republic is expanding to accept all plastics except for expanded polystyrene and PVC.

All of those plastics are sorted through a brand-new system that also handles other materials typically found in municipal recycling cart, including paper, cardboard, glass and metals.

The new 110,000-square-foot facility has five optical sorters aimed directly at separating plastic containers from the rest of the recyclables. The first two separate all container types, while three others then zero in on diverting PET and HDPE, both clear and colored.

“Keep in mind, the old facility, I had one optical for PET, and we were doing a lot of hand sorting. These optics are very efficient, so we create a much cleaner-quality product,” Christopher said. “We've seen improvements in recovery and improvements in quality.”

Along with opening the new materials recovery facility, the company also is in the midst of expanding single-stream curbside recycling throughout its service area in southern Nevada. There are still more than 300,000 homes yet to receive recycling carts, which will allow them to mingle all of their recyclables together. That approach, instead of asking residents to sort their recyclables, has proven to push recycling rates and participation higher across the country.

But it puts more pressure on companies like Republic to sort recyclables on the back end. And that's where the new recycling center, which replaced a MRF that opened in 1991, comes in.

The new site has the capacity to ultimately handle about 270,000 tons per year, almost three times as much as the older equipment.

The old, adjacent location, Christopher said, “processed a little over 100,000 tons through there last year, so it was there [at capacity]. And then some.”

The one-two punch of adding new homes to the single-stream recycling program and creating a more efficient sorting facility has Christopher expecting about 175,000 tons of all recyclables to go through the location this year.

And that will continue to rise over time as he estimated it will take about three years to have all remaining customers in his service area converted to single-stream from the old three-bin system.

Christopher estimated that a little less than 10 percent of the recyclables that are run through the MRF are plastics.

“The majority is PET. As you can imagine here in Nevada in the summer time, we run a little bit of PET through the place,” he said.

All of those residents, and all of those tourists, and all of that heat, and all of their water bottles do add up.

While Republic previously only baled PET and HDPE in North Las Vegas, the company is now creating a Nos. 3 through 7 mixed bale thanks to the new equipment. There also are two vacuums that suck up and segregate low density PE film that is baled and sold.

The company keeps this film separate from a cleaner stream of film it collects from commercial and industrial customers. “Clean and clear LDPE film has always fared fairly well,” Christopher said.

But even the lower-grade film coming off of the sorting line has a market.

“It's hard to make a top-quality-grade film when it's coming through a facility commingled because it's run through everything else and it gets dirty,” he explained.

Bulky rigid plastics — think buckets and lawn chairs and crates and even toys — used to routinely get tossed in the trash. But Republic, just like other recyclers around the country, can now pick those materials out of recycling stream and find a market for them.

The Las Vegas site, once workers and equipment have segregated and baled the different types of plastics, loads them onto trucks headed for Long Beach, Calif. From there, they head to the export market in Asia, Christopher said.

“You've heard stories with folks not being able to move certain grades, we haven't had that issue. We're creating a better product. Cleaner quality is a little easier to move, that's for sure,” he said.

Education, not surprisingly, is a key for people to understand about their increased ability to recycle plastics in the Las Vegas area, company spokeswoman Tracy Skenandore said. It's a part of her job to help coordinate community outreach.

“The more we're able to educate the community, we're just going to see the plastics, the ones through sevens, will increase over time,” Skenandore said.

“Remember,” Christopher added, “this is Nevada. This isn't California. This isn't Washington. This isn't New Jersey. We're getting with the times here.”

Customers converting from the old bin system to single-stream carts typically increase their amount of recyclables more than three-fold, according to a recent survey by the company. An average participating home now recycles 10 to 11 pounds per week, up from the previous average of 3 pounds.

“It's a significant jump,” Christopher said. The company has not delved deep into those numbers to see if plastics recycling has increased at the same rate. “You would think its all relative, right?” he said. “We haven't drilled down on that. But you would think, overall, as a percentage, the increase would be the same.”