2009-064 Solid Waste - NCDENR - Grant Contract

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Attachment C DENR Contract 2333 2. One page description of proposed grant project. The project is to increase recycling opportunities at drop off and convenience center sites in Orange County to include all rigid plastic containers such as large buckets, tubs, lawn furniture, cups, flower pots and similarly made rigid plastics e.g. some toys made from acceptable plastics. These materials would be placed in separate containers to facilitate effective materials marketing. Most processors do not want rigid plastics mixed with bottles. Plastics delivered this way are downgraded and many non- bottle items are discarded. This recycling opportunity would be created by placing one each 30 cubic yard closed top roll off containers with side openings at each of the County's five unstaffed dropoff sites or a minimum of two each 6 cubic yard open top dumpsters at each of the County's five staffed convenience centers. That would enable the public easy access to recycle these types of plastics. There is a high demand for non-bottle plastic recycling collection in our community and markets are emerging in our region e.g. Blue Ridge Plastics, able to consistently accept and process these materials. Orange County will continue to research all markets in an ongoing, dynamic way to determine optimal ways to process and deliver material to maximize efficient diversion and, secondarily, increase revenues. Orange County would use existing equipment and personnel to haul the plastics collected from drop off locations back to its recycling processing facility at Eubanks Road or possibly to a third party baler. We want to compare the effectiveness of collecting from dumpsters in front loaders v. in rolloffs and we have open-top dumpsters we can repurpose but need to purchase rolloffs and the grant funds will be used to support this capital acquisition. We will utilize existing front-loading trucks and rolloff trucks to collect with. The collected materials will be delivered to our facility where we would dump, pick over the loads to further improve quality, as is our general custom with drop off materials, then bale the materials using the existing downstroke baler. While not the most efficient equipment available, this vertical baler is County-owned and has functioned adequately for almost ten years densifying steel cans and more recently also used for the scrap plastics that have fallen off recycled electronics, to make shipment to market more efficient at a relatively low cost. We have also informally explored trucking unbaled rigid plastics to a third-party such as SONOCO and paying a toll baling cost or selling them the unbaled plastics for them to bale and resell. This option may still be considered as an alternative approach depending on market and operating conditions. Once the project is established, Orange County would conduct a public education campaign using picture-based large signs on containers, point-of--use /one-to-one education by trained recycling assistants during the first two weekends containers are set out, PSA's, news releases, articles, local radio, our web site and other means commonly employed to inform the public about our programs. The only other county we are aware of collecting mixed rigid plastics in NC is Iredell and they use a large two-ram baler they already had to bale garbage. We are using this project to test and evaluate several approaches to handling these materials that might be suitable to those who do not have atwo- ram baler. There are an estimated 4,500 tons of non-bottle, non film plastic in the Orange County waste stream, so if 5% were captured in this program, that could be an estimated 225 tons per year, These materials are typically light and bulky thus representing a potentially very high landfill volume diverted. Orange County is trying very hard to conserve air space as our landfill reaches capacity in 2011. This program would continue after the landfill filled and we convert to a transfer station.