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How does recycling in Nashville work?





The machinery that sorts recycled materials at the River Hills MRF.Ashley Perham / Main Street Nashville

The machinery that sorts recycled materials at the River Hills MRF.Ashley Perham / Main Street Nashville

Let’s say a local reporter drops a bit of her peanut butter and jelly sandwich onto her notebook. After she rips out the page and recycles it responsibly in Nashville, what happens to it?

Pickup

Every Nashville resident has options for recycling. Around 140,000 residents living in the Urban Services District get weekly curbside recycling. Just over 109,000 homes take advantage of the free recycling carts available at Nashville.gov.

Those in the rest of the county can take advantage of the 14 Metro Waste Services convenience centers and drop-off recycling locations throughout the county. (Private trash haulers also offer recycling.) These locations are best for materials like glass, which can’t be recycled in the curbside carts.

Recycling picked up curbside and recyclable waste collected at the drop-off and convenience centers are taken by Metro Waste Services to a facility run by WM (formerly known as Waste Management).

Most material, like that piece of paper from the notebook, is taken to the River Hills Material Recovery Facility, located off Lebanon Pike by the Cumberland River.

The tipping floor at the River Hills MRF, where recycled materials are dumped before being processed.Ashley Perham / Main Street Nashville

The tipping floor at the River Hills MRF, where recycled materials are dumped before being processed.Ashley Perham / Main Street Nashville

(Glass shouldn’t be recycled curbside as it presents safety risks. It can be taken to most drop-off and convenience centers, where it’s taken to another WM facility, processed and sold to make insulation.)

Delivery

Once arriving at the facility, our jelly-stained piece of paper would get deposited on the “tipping floor,” a large warehouse filled with recycled materials. The name “tipping floor” comes from the trucks that “tip” their loads into the building.

Materials also come to the River Hills MRF from other recycling companies, other Middle Tennessee counties and cities and even from out of state occasionally.

This MRF is a single-stream facility, which means recycling is sorted at the facility rather than at the curb.

“Historically, some of the challenges that people have run into with recycling are availability and accessibility and convenience,” said Molly Morrisey, senior community relations specialist at WM. “Single stream really checks a lot of those boxes and opens up the convenience, so you’re not having to do all the work yourself.”

Paper being sorted at the River Hills MRF.Ashley Perham / Main Street Nashville

Paper being sorted at the River Hills MRF.Ashley Perham / Main Street Nashville

Once on the tipping floor, our piece of notebook paper is mixed up with thousands of pounds of other materials. The mixing, done by a worker on a loader, helps diversify what’s going through the system. Too much of the same material at one time will bog down both the machine and human sorters.

Sorting

Within a week of arrival, our intrepid (and now crumpled) piece of paper is placed on a conveyor belt and lifted across a small alley to the sorting facility next door.

At the sorting facility, materials are sorted by material, so they can be baled and shipped off. The MRF tries to process about 20 tons an hour, depending on staffing, weather and other conditions.

  1. Pre-sort 1 – At this station, workers look for anything that could damage the system or workers. They’re looking for things like bagged recycling, which takes too long to open, or garden hoses that can get wrapped up and damage equipment. These items go to the landfill.
  2. OCC screens – Here, large rotating metal disks cause large pieces of cardboard to float up and out of the recycling line.
  3. Pre-sort 2 – Workers again check for things that could harm the machines or workers. They also pick out any small pieces of cardboard that got through the OCC screens.
  4. Paper screens – This is where we say goodbye for now to our piece of notebook paper. A combination of disks and air jets blow paper out of the line. Sorters in this area also pull off flat sheets of aluminum or plastic that may have gotten through.
  5. Plastic line – An optical sorter scans the density of materials on the conveyor belt with an infrared light. A jet of air shoots plastic over to its own conveyor. Some sorters also separate dyed and undyed plastic.
  6. Metal – Different types of spinning magnets pull out cans and aluminum.

Baled recycled materials at the River Hills MRF.Ashley Perham / Main Street Nashville

Baled recycled materials at the River Hills MRF.Ashley Perham / Main Street Nashville

The baler is the last stop on a recycled material's journey at the River Hills MRF.Ashley Perham / Main Street Nashville

The baler is the last stop on a recycled material’s journey at the River Hills MRF.Ashley Perham / Main Street Nashville

Once materials are sorted into large piles on the floor, a loader pushes a pile onto a floor conveyor, where our piece of paper faces the last step of its MRF journey: the baler.

The baler is an automated machine that crushes material into bales that can be sold to companies. After all, recycling is part of the economy.

Sale

“As much as I would love it, they’re not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts on the back end,” said Jenn Harrman. “It is part of economics. It fits into a supply chain and a process.”

Harrman is the Zero Waste program manager for Metro Nashville.

For example, paper and cardboard, the most common recycling materials received by the MRF, are sold to WestRock to make boxes. Paper is also sold to Pratt, who makes paper board — like cereal boxes. The plastic is sold to Mohawk, who makes carpet out of the bales.

 

 

Everything stays within 4-5 hours of Middle Tennessee, said Dilan Lynch, operations manager for the River Hills MRF. For the past 20 years at least, the River Hills MRF has not shipped waste out of the country.

“We have a really robust recycling market here in the Southeast, so there’s not a reason to send it further out,” Harrman said.

What can be recycled

WM has to make decisions on what to accept or not accept at the MRF. There’s not a lot of money in paper or cardboard, but the MRF gets so much of it, it makes sense to keep processing it, Lynch said.

If WM gets items it can’t process, those items go to the landfill. WM has to pay fees for shipping and dumping it — a cost that gets passed on to their customers.

“We’re the most expensive trash guys,” Lynch said.

A recent audit found that contamination, or the rate of non-recyclable material being sent to the MRF from Metro Nashville, was 21.6%. This is a vast improvement over two years ago, when the contamination rate was 46%, Harrman said. The national average is 17%.

She attributed the positive change to consistent messaging and community education. She wants people to focus more on the quality of their recyclables rather than the quantity.

Because of changes in the industry, such as not shipping waste to China, recycling materials need to be cleaner for domestic markets.

“I think it’s good because I can say materials are actually being recycled, and I know what’s happening,” said Harrman.

A tricky question for many recyclers is what plastic numbers are recyclable. The numbers are actually more for the manufacturers, and not all types of plastic in a certain number are all the same.

Harrman asks recyclers not to focus on the numbers. In Nashville, the MRF can use bottles, jars and jugs and items with a wide base and smaller neck. Items with a lid should be recycled with the lid on.

“These are high quality materials that were designed for recyclability,” Harrman said.

Other types of plastic may have been designed to meet a certain need, like food safety, but the recycling part of the economy hasn’t found a use for them or the market is not available to Nashville yet.

Metro Waste Services has made an app that lets recyclers check a database of over 400 items to see whether they can be recycled. New items are added regularly.

Through the Zero Waste program, Nashville is trying to reduce the waste sent to landfills by 90%. In the last fiscal year, Nashville sent almost 170,000 tons of trash to landfills. Around 27,500 tons of recycling were collected.

“Reduce, reuse, recycle — in that order. Reduce first, then reuse, then recycle,” Harrman said.

DON’T recycle glass in your curbside cart. It will get broken in the process and can harm the sorters. It can be dropped off at the convenience and drop-off centers around the county.

DON’T recycle garden hoses. These can get caught in machinery and damage it.

DON’T look at the number on plastic materials. The Nashville MRF is looking for plastic bottles, jars and jugs.

DO keep lids on the plastic bottles, jars and jugs you recycle. If they are recycled by themselves, they will be discarded.

DON’T recycle wet or greasy cardboard. Wet cardboard can damage machines, and cardboard that is sold needs to be clean. Cardboard can be taken to a drop-off composting location.

DON’T recycle prescription medication bottles. These do not have a skinny neck and are not considered a bottle, jar or jug that the MRF is looking for.

DON’T bag your recycling. It will not be processed.

DON’T recycle shredded paper in a curbside cart. It can be composted or recycled at a drop-off site only due to its smaller size.

DON’T recycle plastic bags, bubble wrap and other plastic films. 

DO check Nashville.gov or the Nashville Waste and Recycling app to learn more about what can and can’t be recycled.

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