Two new recycling facilities, one in Colorado and the other in Florida, with advanced equipment will increase materials recovery in their respective states.
Momentum Recycling is set to open a bottle-to-bottle recycling plant (pictured) in Boulder, Colorado on Feb. 22. The facility, which will be Colorado’s first bottle-to-bottle recycling plant and the Salt Lake City-based company’s first facility outside of Utah, and up the glass recycling rate in Colorado to over three times its current level, Momentum says.
In Colorado, more than 320,000 tons of glass bottles and jars were thrown away in 2015, with only 20,000 tons — or 6.25 percent — recycled. Momentum’s new facility will recycle an additional 49,000 tons of bottle glass each year, increasing the glass recycling rate in Colorado to 21.65 percent.
In the US, 34 percent of all glass containers were recycled in 2013. However, these numbers are skewed by the high glass recycling rates in states with container deposit laws. States with container deposit legislation have an average glass container recycling rate of just over 63 percent, while non-deposit states (like Colorado) only reach about 24 percent.
Earlier this month Waste Pro opened a new 14,000-square-foot material recovery facility (MRF) at its Regional Operations Center in Sarasota, Florida. The single-stream recycling plant will have the capacity to process up to 2,000 tons of mixed glass, metals, plastics, paper and cardboard, per month, from residential and commercial sources throughout unincorporated Manatee County.
The project is a result of the need to process the large volume of recycled materials collected curbside by Waste Pro’s vehicles, the company says.
The SRQ Material Recovery Facility is equipped with single-stream technology and safety equipment from CP Manufacturing, a recycling manufacturer based in California, including disc screens that detect and mechanically separate recyclables based on material, size and density.
As WasteDive reports, the Waste Pro facility in Florida is the latest in a series of new or expanded MRFs driven by increased recycling tonnage. Another recent MRF, Resource Management Group’s new San Diego facility, also worked with the CP Manufacturing and uses the company’s advanced recovery technology.