 Welcome Sheboygan, thank you for joining us for our first ever program and this is the Sustainable Sheboygan Spotlight. It grew out of the Sustainable Sheboygan Task Force and we were asked by the Education and Outreach Committee of that task force to talk about sustainable topics in Sheboygan and our first topic we're going to feature Recycling and to help us discuss this is Scott Hansen. He's a president of Cardinal Environmental and he can tell us a little bit more about himself. Yeah my name is Scott Hansen. I'm the president of Cardinal Environmental we're a water and wastewater laboratory and we do various types of environmental sampling and analysis. I'm a member of the Natural Resources Committee of the Sheboygan Sustainable Sheboygan Task Force. The task force started in 2008 and I've been on that committee since then. Great thank you and my name is Heather Cleveland. I'm the food justice director for a nonprofit called Nourish where we connect farmers and local food with low-income families and then I have a background. I have an environmental engineering degree where I did environmental engineering work and then I went back to school for urban planning. I've been on the Sustainable Sheboygan Task Force prior to going to school. I was on the Natural Resources Committee with Scott and I'm back and was asked to help moderate and host this program. So Scott could you tell us a little bit more of the history of the Sustainable Sheboygan Task Force when it started, how it started? Yeah originally it started in 2008 and it was a task force developed or created by the mayor at that time. They wanted us to study and make recommendations regarding strategies to be adopted by the city for creating and maintaining a sustainable Sheboygan and we're going to focus on recycling, green purchasing, energy conservation, waste management and sustainable measures that has been done. We've been working on those types of topics for for this entire period of time. The mayor has appointed 18 people. They represent a diverse cross-section of our community and they all sit on the Sustainable Sheboygan Task Force. It changes every couple of years. You're asked to stay on the committee or to bring on someone else. The four guidelines utilized by the task force members are based on the natural step by Sarah James in Tobjorn Latte. Those four guidelines are reduced dependence on fossil fuels, reduced dependence on chemicals and other manufactured substances that can accumulate nature, reduced dependence on activities that harm life-sustaining ecosystems and meet the hierarchy of present and future human needs fairly and efficiently. Great. So when was the task force founded? How many years ago was that? Okay it's been just about six years. It was in the summer of 2008 I believe. Okay great and there's been all of the changes, good, bad, progress. Can you tell us a little bit about what's happened as of late with? Yes, recently we're working on a system called the Green Tier Sustainable Communities Process and this has been an effort for quite some time to develop a process and a direction, a guidebook for the city as a whole regarding sustainability. We started this process specifically regarding Green Tier just in the last three to four months and have finally had a revelation and some wonderful help from some of the staff members to really push this whole process forward. Our effort will be to be a member of the Green Tier City. We're putting together Green Tier Cities and we're putting together our guidelines for that as we speak and they will hope to be finalized within the next month or so. Okay great. So let's move on then to our topic at hand here is recycling. So I know Scott that you started to research this a while back so I was wondering why and when did you begin researching and investigating recycling in Sheboygan? Probably three years ago that was one of the topics that came up in one of our every other month meetings and during the during the discussion a lot of questions came up about the myths of recycling those myths being that well people they don't really recycle that stuff it all just goes to the landfill. I see the truck come they put it in the back of the truck and it drives off they're not separating the stuff they're throwing the blue bags in the same container as the other materials as my garbage. Well we we knew that that wasn't necessarily the case but we needed to follow that from beginning to end and track that process. So we did follow a garbage truck and a recycling truck one day and for the most part people should know they're one and the same. The newer trucks that we have are have two separate compartments one side is for the garbage the other side is for recycling so when the and that's for efficiency when the trucks pull up and and the sanitation worker gets out and collects and throws the bags in he's separating them on the two sides. Those trucks then they both have compactors and then the trucks return eventually when they're full to the local facility which is a materials recycling facility of source it is at advanced disposal on Payne Avenue and they dump those two compartments into two different sections of the the recycling facility location they call this a transfer station. One side is for the garbage and that material is later transferred and then sent to one of the local landfills. The other side is for the recycled material that will continue on to a formal mirf which is materials recycling or materials reclamation facility. So the trucks go they deliver this waste and recyclables to two separate areas and then at that point at a later date a truck comes up and takes the commingled single stream waste recyclable waste recyclable material and transports it to Germantown to a facility owned by waste management that is a formal material material reclamation facility and at that location it goes on an instrument a large device that with the number of conveyor belts and various processes to separate the various types of recyclables that are sent there. That conveyor belt is made up in some areas there is a in area to extract the ferrous material by magnetic processes there's a number where they use an eddy stream and eddy current to remove the aluminum materials and there is another number of other sorting type devices that separate the paper and the plastics. Eventually there's manpower used to as quality control and to separate some of the other items that need to be taken out of the recycling stream. Those materials are then co or batched and bailed based on their recycling types and at some time at a later date are hopefully put back into a reuse of some sort. So what we did conclude after reviewing some of these myths is that no the waste streams are indeed being recycled and the other material does indeed go to the garbage and that process has been going on for for several years now. We recently changed to a different MRF facility and this facility is able to take a few additional items that had not been able to be recycled in the past. Excellent and I remember when you were initially investigating this you actually you went to these facilities to see how it worked and that it was what was said was being done was actually being done so you didn't just take someone's word for it you actually saw this is how it works. And that's correct I did follow them to the facilities and I followed them as far as Sheboygan to the recycling facility or the transfer station facility here in Sheboygan and and confirmed it that case and that just for my own personal edification it was the first time I saw the two separate storage areas. Now when it went from there to the MRF facility I know more about the MRFs now because I received a very nice nice handout a single stream recycling guide from advanced disposal that shows a video or a PowerPoint definition of how the MRF works. I've not personally seen the MRF that the waste is going to right now. And I understand there was another I guess a bit of confusion in the way the city of Sheboygan picks up their recycling and their waste is with one truck so with that other communities I should back up a little bit other communities maybe have two trucks or two contractors we have one so what happens if the recycling side gets full because this is something people might see happen that's a good point and and what what happens is that they the drivers just contact dispatch and explain at which point they're full if they can continue on further and fill up the other section of the truck before they go back to the facility they may choose to do so it depends how close they are obviously the efficiency is that you'd have the truck completely full before you'd transfer back to the transfer station on the south side of town but what happens it does not eventually get thrown into the other bin just to keep going they do it as efficiently as possible and the trucks were specifically designed based on the typical capacity or the typical percentage of garbage versus recyclable materials so with some thought put into it right and they also have compactors so they can compact to quite quite a degree before they have to return to dump the loads right and I guess the benefit of that is that there's only one truck doing one route rather than two trucks doing two you know so there's pros and cons to any system that you would use that is correct and and Sheboygan moved toward in that direction for that type of truck some years ago and it's it's an efficient process and it's one of those that you don't easily change it's there's a there's a it may take two to four years to change two different type of trucking or a different type of content significant investment the the fact that we can do single stream recycling is extremely important if it if we had to continue to separate paper and blue bag and separate the individual components even that go into the blue bag it would be much more time consuming and costly but the single stream recycling makes it relatively efficient okay so I know you did the invest initial investigations but then for this interview you you interviewed some more people so who did you chat with from the city of Sheboygan to get more information about our recycling program yeah I was very fortunate I was able to talk to Dave Bebel the department of public works director and he directed me to Joel Colsty who is the city of Sheboygan superintendent of streets and sanitation and I posed a number of questions to Joel and these were questions that were developed in our committee our sustainable task force committee where the questions came from all 18 individuals and we submitted those to Joel and he did a wonderful job of responding to each and every one of those questions and tried to explain the decision making on the part of the city moving through all the recycling activities and explained where things go the second person I talked to was a gentleman named Mike Toon who is an advanced disposal and Mike is is responsible for the recycling at the advanced disposal facility at this time and he was the one who was able to explain to me how materials are handling once they get to that part of the transfer station here in Sheboygan and then he told me more about the German town facility and he was the one who provided the PowerPoint presentation both gentlemen were very helpful in trying to answer any questions I had great and I know when the task force put together the questions they were trying to think about the community and what questions they've heard people have so I thought it was a great mix of questions so I guess I'll start with a really broad one why should our community recycle well you know I think it's it's it's probably pretty clear when anyone thinks about it we should reduce reuse and recycle less is better when possible repurpose when we can we have a number of wonderful opportunities to do so in the community whether it's electronics recycling programs or or habitat restore or our good wills our Salvation Army St. Vincent's whatever I don't mean to not bring any of them up they're all good when we have when we go through the effort and the cost to to generate a product if it if it can be reused once again or passed on to someone else that certainly makes more sense than wasting energy and effort to build something brand new once again so it that part makes sense the other thing is there are some state mandates for recycling and the city complies with those and it exceeds their requirements anything that we can bypass from the landfill is potentially a cost savings if for no other reason they call a savings from the aspect that we're not going to be filling up that landfill sooner than we need to right the the budget for recycling and garbage for the city is one point two million dollars that's close to two percent of the city's budget so it's a pretty substantial effort and to keep that cost as low as possible the recycling component needs to stay high now people may think that well if you recycle we should always generate revenue from recycling unfortunately that's not the case recycling recycling is taking waste materials and putting it putting the commodities back into a reusable purpose but it's all on a supply and demand basis so when these transfer facilities and these mirfs receive material they need to receive it from a number of different places to generate an adequate volume of recyclable material to justify someone wanting to take that commodity and make you good use of it and that's why a mirf is usually a regional facility that takes waste from a number of different communities so that they can generate a larger volume they will warehouse that material and hopefully if they're lucky they will be able to sell it to someone to use at an appropriate time but commodity that type of commodity is a very much a very much a supply and demand type of product so it's difficult to say that you're not always going to generate revenue by recycling something but you are going to avoid the landfill cost right so in the city of shabuigan we mentioned earlier that we have one truck that collects and I know other communities have carts like the city of Milwaukee has carts we have the blue bag so why did we go with the blue bag system you know that there's that that was certainly that was one of the very important questions that we had and the Joel Colsty gave me a very good explanation of that if I can find it but certainly one of the points was that the city had already started with the dual cycle trucks and these those trucks have have the two compartments if you take containers if you take plastic containers you actually drive two trucks one truck to pick up the garbage container the second truck to pick up the container for the recyclable materials a number of issues in the city make it a little bit more difficult we have a number of multifamily homes we have a number of homes whose street access is actually their alley we have a number of streets that have the city side street parking all of this makes it much more difficult to have a mechanical truck come along and pick up a container and dump it into the load so it would take a while to both educate the community and to be able to make it a workable system the I will redo it says it's more efficient to throw bags in the back of a truck as opposed to tipping containers into a truck the city recently as little as a year ago completed a garbage study related to the collection of garbage and recycling program through that study it was determined at the time that the most cost effective process of the city was to remain with the process of hand collection of bagged garbage and recycling while there are many benefits to utilizing the cart system there are also some drawbacks as I mentioned those drawbacks the current system is pretty effective and efficient and provides the lowest operating cost for the residents the condition of a long-term existing equipment did not allow them to to roll out a new process within any short term it would take two to four years a city provided staff to manage a large the city would need a lot of staff to manage all these carts there's a you would be several carts like this that would be needed throughout the city additional costs to residents for the carts themselves the city of sheboygan has a dense population of two to three family homes alley collection and on-street parking carts limit the amount of material resident can dispose of above and beyond the recycling regulations and the operating cost of automated collection trucks is quite expensive so you know that there were a few other things that came up to me and many of the cities that do utilize the cart system still require customers or require their residents to bag garbage and recycle items before placing them in the cart now we're trying to keep bags out of the landfills and even more so out of the recycling waste stream but if you think of it if you put if you put your garbage directly into the carts the carts become stained and messy if you're not diligent to keeping them clean that can pose an issue as well so there were a number of reasons that at this point the single stream blue bag recycling process is the way the city would like to proceed right and i'm you can buy the blue bags at any grocery store i'm almost certain correct and i know you mentioned single stream earlier could you explain that a little bit more yeah single stream means that all the recyclables the newspapers the aluminum the the cardboard plastics everything goes into one single bin in this case at the at the in the garbage trucks now they go in they go into your blue bag or if you choose to take your paper and put it into a corrugated box or or a grocery bag that is intact and will stay intact that is acceptable as well but single stream means that all of the recycling materials go to one place in this case they go into the recycling bin of the garbage truck and then to the transfer station and then they're separated after the fact that's much easier than having to sort each individual sorting their individual glass one bag for aluminum that sort of thing correct how we started so it makes it more convenient that they i from my understanding is they try to make it as easy as possible right the the the sanitation workers would like to make it easy for the for the residents and hopefully the residents are courteous as well to the sanitation workers you know leaving up a mess of things that are requiring them to make the decision as to which is to go where that's that's not appropriate leaving them a mess to bags that are too heavy it's not good bags that you know we all have problems with crows or seagulls that mess up our bags you know if if you can do something about that double bagging or whatever or keeping the food stuffs out of there and maybe composting them instead that might be very helpful but the city wants to the city employees want to work with the residents as well as possible and they don't reject materials just to be annoying they reject materials because if the wrong materials get into the recycling portion of the transfer station it's it takes a risk at the entire load that goes to the mirf will be rejected because it was a tainted load right and that leads me to the next question is what can't go on the blue bags i know there's some right well you know corr corrugated cardboard is good things but not when it's got greasy pizza all over it anything if you think of the food stuff the the paper paper products can be recycled as long as they're not contaminated themselves so if you contaminate it with food waste restroom waste is not acceptable medical waste is not acceptable electronics are not acceptable batteries or printer cartridges should not be recycled in this process there's other ways to do that you can take both of them back possibly to the manufacturer or to a battery recycling facility light bulbs ceramics heat resistant glass styrofoam and polystyrene are not recyclable at this point although there is a way that you can you can recycle styrofoam now through polyfoam products over in in Plymouth one thing that has to be done there that you have to think of the efficiency aspect of that at this point we don't have a location to composite and compile that type of material and that is probably something that the sustainable task force will be presenting to the city or someplace else that they have an area of bin source that way they can bring those types of materials if you had a large enough material a batch of that material you can justify taking it over to Plymouth and then having it recycle yeah and i know good side grocery our local food co-op offered that around the holidays they had a bin to collect it so it's nice to see some of the businesses our local community people are you know taking the initiative to pull that together and so you you mentioned um what can't be so what are some other programs that not only just the city but the county the should one county offer but we do we do have the clean sweep programs there was just one this past weekend i believe and there was one a month prior to that and that's to allow residents to clean up their garages and basins materials and then get rid of the hazardous materials and or and to deal with the other materials that may not be hazardous but to give them the impetus to understand it's a good time to do their cleanup and latex paints can be dried out if done so properly in various things but it's it's the best thing that you're getting rid of the hazardous materials that otherwise would very likely end up uh getting overused by over applying on somebody's somebody's garden or something like that or get sent to the landfill and neither of those are good options um so the the clean sweep program is very good uh the there's also the electronic recycling programs that are going on throughout uh there are these pharmaceutical waste recycling program that the police department just had uh all of those uh are available on you can tell when and where or you can see when they're uh when the next ones are listed and they're on the on the city website and we'll post those later in the day here on the program right so i guess the next question is who should people contact if they have more questions about recycling in the city of shaboy again well the city of shaboy and department of public works employ several members of its staff that are trained in proper disposal methods related to the city ordinance uh contact can be made by calling 459-3440 or you can call bruce matzdorf who's the sanitation lead man and his number is 459-0224 so that wraps up our discussion about recycling for today we'll have there's probably a lot more to talk about with respect to i guess i'll just ask you a couple of the questions just the simple ones that we discussed that people had or you had so when people are recycling a plastic bottle what should they do with the bottle caps the bottle caps can be recycled as well and it's probably preferable that you separate them from the bottles and part of the reason is that the bop the the it can be done both ways but eventually it may be that there are two types of types of plastics so eventually they'd have to be separate so if you just leave them separate in your recycling bag that would be appropriate if they are together the other thing that happens when they go into the compactor they they make an explosion and that can be disheartening on the part of the sanitation worker so it's it's preferable to leave the lids off literally anything that you have any of those plastics anything that has a recycling label on it can be recycled the the good news with the change to this mirf in germantown versus one that we were going to in chicago previously is that this facility can handle more and more of the recyclables so when i talk to my tune from the advanced disposal the the restrictions were less than they had been in the past so if you see a wide range yeah they can have a wider range of of materials that they can accept and they have an endpoint user for those a wider range of materials so do you think that as consumers if we look at labels more and increase the demand by purchasing items that have more recyclables that that will make a shift in it also well that's a wonderful idea you know certainly i think you know it's it's evident you see many more people using reusable grocery bags and things like that any of those types of things make sense over the long haul and being conscious of that is is certainly is certainly helpful if we think about how much garbage we generate just from our daily our daily use maybe going to a fast food place or whatever else there's there's there's other ways around that right so being conscious of that you and recycling whenever possible makes sense now one of the questions that come up to the to the community as well as why don't we have more recycling bins in the parks or direct departments and and things like that and this in the city is trying to do so they the city building the city park buildings that are available front they have recyclable and garbage containers at those locations the problem that that does come about is that people will misuse or abuse them right garbage in the full right they put the garbage in both containers and then it's becomes then it's a duplication of effort on the part of the city workers to clean all that stuff up again later now maybe that's worthwhile assuming that if the people aren't they're going to leave it on the ground if they don't play have a container to put it in but that is that's one of the reasons there's been reluctance to try to put multiple containers at these types of locations because it's not pleased well enough to make sure that you don't spoil the good load of recyclables right and then another question that came up or comment is what to do with the plastic grocery bags that we get so yeah what are their feelings on that you know i would myself i use the plastic grocery bags in my garbage or recycling containers in the home to be able to rather than buying plastic bags all the time and they go into the landfill the plastic bags go into the landfill the way we currently do things we bag our waste rather than putting them into carts when the problem with it going and the problem with it going to landfills though that the reuse using fewer and fewer but plastic bags is a good idea going to paper bags much more appropriate it's either it's either recyclable or it disintegrates more quickly plastic lasts a long time so it lasts a long time in the landfill so that's not a good thing and in the case of the recycling you send the those plastic the plastic materials to the recycling container or to the recycling facilities and they get caught in the conveyor belts of the system so you have these relatively sophisticated complicated recycling conveyor belts that separate the waste streams and they get jammed up all the time with plastic bags that get hung up in the equipment so that's why they they like to limit the amount of plastic bags that go there and the small garbage plastic bags with the handles are probably even worse than the one single large single stream right because they're small and thin right and i think we've run out of time so i just want to say thank you very much for being our first guest on this program talking about recycling very important topic and i just want to say to sheboygan stay tuned for our next programs we hope to talk about bikes and talk about local food and other great topics um and all the and highlight all the great things that are happening in sheboygan so thank you and until next time