Absolute Waste Removal in Clear Lake has been in the process of building an on-site 8,000-square-foot Material Recycling Facility (MRF) since July and will be ready to move in the conveyors, sorters and balers next week. Up to this point all the recyclable materials collected have been transported to their parent company in Ankeny, Iowa.
AWR General Manager Dave Massey said that for a while now their Commercial Sales Associate Michelle Bowden has been fielding questions such as, “Why are we doing this when it gets landfilled,” and his reply has always been, “None of it goes to the landfill. We’re very adamant about that.”
He assured that there actually is a use for recycled materials, even if they haven’t been doing it in-house. AWR currently owns a building in Mason City where, “…we’ve been transferring our recyclables from our communities.” He explained that all the mixed residential recyclables (glass, plastic, tin, paper and cardboard) are dumped together into compactor boxes and once they have two filled boxes they are shipped by truck to a large-scale MRF in the Des Moines area. All the sorting of materials is done at this facility and, “…it is quite the price tag for them to separate,” Massey said.
Massey said they made the decision to build this facility because, “we needed a solution for our customers.” AWR has contracts for garbage and recycling with Clear Lake, Rockwell, Ventura, Garner, Britt, Hanlontown, Grafton, Plymouth, and Meservey. And just recently they have contracted with the cities of Mason City and Forest City to pick up their recyclable materials.
“We just need to do our own thing, compared to counting on a third party,” Massey said. He said the advantage with having their own MRF is they will be able to source-separate and bale the mixed materials, which will maximize the cost of shipping of the materials to Des Moines. With their new process they will be able to load a semi trailer with up to seven 1,500-pound bales vs. two, five-ton compactor boxes. In addition, they will be able to send their baled, clean cardboard directly to the Cedar River Paper Mill in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
Massey said that part of the new MRF in Clear Lake will be dedicated to the baling of clean cardboard only. On the other side, “When the ‘mixed residential’ is brought into the facility by dump truck, it will get loaded into a glass separator. The glass will drop down into a container and the conveyor takes the rest on to be separated and baled,” he said. Since the glass can’t be baled he said it will be stored on-site until they have 22-tons, approximately two roll-off dumpsters full, before it will be shipped by semi to a glass recycler, such as Ripple Glass Recycling in Kansas City, Mo.
It will take several days for the conveyors, compactors and balers to get set up, tested and running smoothly. “But once we get going, and get the kinks out of that whole flow, I can see us having an open house come springtime or so,” Massey said.
