 Michelle Morris, we're so glad to be with you today here at the Murph. Can you tell us a little bit about what we are making happen here? Absolutely, I'm delighted to have you here. This is the CSWD Materials Recovery Facility and it's where all of the recyclable materials from within Chittenden County and about half of Vermont come to be processed, sorted, bailed and ready to ship to market. So one of the reasons we're here is to find out what kind of a job consumers do in putting in their blue boxes and how much sorting you have to do. So tell us about the big innovation of the Murph. The innovation of the Murph. Well Murph's have been around for a long time. This one was built in 1993, so it's a 20th century Murph. But the innovation is that it meant that people didn't have to sort every single different kind of material at their home or at their business at the curb and they could put it all in one bin, bring it or send it to this facility and we would do all the sorting for them. And what are we going to see that would surprise us? So many things. I think what people are frequently surprised by is the volume, the sheer amount of material that's handled here and we're a pretty small Murph really because we're a small state. But there's a lot of material and also how much handling happens here, how many people are involved. What we'll see when we come in here is there is so much manual labor and it's not super efficient in terms of what could be done today. And so our plans for the future, the Murph of the 21st century, is that it will be more mechanized and will have some exciting technology that we can talk about later if you like. But there will still be plenty of people working at that Murph, but they'll be in charge of quality control and quality assurance instead of the really hard labor that's done here of sorting things every day, hour after hour. So one of, as I said, the things we're interested in is to send a message to consumers about how they could do a better job. And because this is such a manual process, what are the most common items that end up in recycling that really don't belong there? Right. Well, because people do work here, we want folks to remember it's a safety thing and it's a quality job quality, right? So if you put the wrong things in your recycling bin, you're making people's jobs harder. You're making the whole system less effective and more costly. And in some cases, you're endangering workers. And that comes when people put things like scrap metal, random metal items. And we see things like knives, scissors, license plates, pots and pans, you know, that scrap metal that you can take to a drop off center, but please don't put it in your blue bin. Other things like plastic bags or any kind of filmy plastic that wraps around the equipment gears. And they have to shut down the entire operation to climb into there and cut these bags off after they've wrapped around the equipment. Clothing is another thing. Anything that's likely to wrap around something. We really just want clean paper, cardboard and containers like bottles and cans and jars. And what about the plastic lined containers? Cans, coffee cups. How do you feel about those? How do I feel about them? Well, do they belong in the recycling? Well, you mentioned a couple of different types of materials there, right? So when it comes to paper, we really just want paper. So if a paper product or packaging has been in contact directly with food in the fridge or the freezer, that means it also has a lining or a coating of plastic to keep that food or liquid from oozing out. Right? So think about juice cartons, milk cartons, ice cream cartons. Those don't belong here. They go in the trash. When we comes to things like metal cans, though, that's not a problem because that metal is going to get smelted down at very high temperatures and that liner will disappear. Okay. Well, that's good to know. All right. So we're going to go into the Murph and it's a little loud. So you're going to be talking close to the mic and we'll look forward first to the work, walk through the picture of what works and then we'll go see the real thing. Great. I'm excited. Thanks, Michelle. So we're going to give an overview of how the system works, where the Murph fits into the system and why you should care about it. So the CSWD materials recovery facility is owned by the Chittenden Solid Waste District and it is operated under contract by Casella Waste and where this fits is it's one of several facilities that CSWD owns and operates in Chittenden County to manage and process all of the general waste and materials that our community creates. The place that a Murph fits in is in the cycle of consumption for what people do every day. So products are manufactured. People like you and me buy them. We use them. We discard them in our recycling bin. It's either picked up by a hauling company or you take it to a drop-off center and then it comes here if you're in Chittenden County or in the northern half of Vermont. And I'll walk through in a second what we do here. Once we're done, the material gets sold to markets, often global, and then that gets sent back to manufacturers and ideally if you're buying products made with recycled content, you're closing that loop. So let's talk about what happens at this facility. When the haulers bring their material to the CSWD Murph, they literally dump it out onto what's called the tip floor. They pay a fee to bring it, which is going to be $65 a ton starting July 1st. Once they pay that they dump it on the tip floor and then the sorting begins. So the first step is it goes through a room called the pre-sort room. And there are two people whose job is to just look at everything that's going by them at a pace of about 23 tons an hour or one and a half blue bins of material every second. They're pulling off anything that doesn't belong here. That's why we have a tennis shoe here. Hardcover books, hazardous materials, all of those things that I spoke about earlier, things that don't belong here have to be pulled out and we want to get as many of them early on as we can so they don't hit the machinery. After pre-sort, the material goes down a conveyor and it hits two machines right away. So one is a cardboard sorting screen we call it because it screens out material we want and material we don't want. The cardboard floats up and over and it goes on to the floor and gets sent to the baler. Then the next thing is glass. It goes into what's called a bottle breaker. And that's very quickly spinning metal discs that are spaced about two inches apart on axles two inches apart. And that's why we have a two inch rule. So anything smaller than two inches in two directions should not go in your blue bin because it'll drop down and get mixed in with our glass. And that's a problem for us. So once the glass is broken, it drops down onto its own dedicated conveyor and it goes on its merry way to the very end where we'll talk about it again. So now we're left with everything except cardboard and glass. All these materials flow through until we get to the paper and container screen. So here we are at the paper and container sorting screen. So this is where the what we call fibers. So mixed paper of all kinds and containers cans, yogurt tubs, dairy tubs, those kinds of objects, what we call sort of three dimensional objects are separated. And that's done with another screen, which is just a bunch of very quickly spinning rubber discs. So the paper flows up and over onto a conveyor. And the containers bounce down into the sides onto their separate conveyor. So the paper goes on its way. And meanwhile, the containers go through a second screen to get more of the paper out because it's never perfect the first time or even the second time. The second screen is a marching floor that further sorts fibers or paper from the containers. Then once the containers go through that one, now they're going by human sorters. So we have like six or seven people whose job all day from six in the morning till three in the afternoon is to look at all the material coming by them on the conveyor and pull out specific materials or objects. These are all containers remember so we have one person who's just pulling out a certain kind of plastic item. It could be laundry detergent jugs or other types of that plastic. Another person is pulling out only natural colored milk jugs. We call that high density polyethylene or HDPE because it that material has a very high value on the market and we don't want to mix it with other lower value material. In the next Murph of the future, there will be optical sorters that can ping a fire infrared laser off of those and know what kind of plastic it is and then a puff of air will blow it into the right container. But until we get there, we have these great workers who do it as their job. So we'll go by that container line later and you can see what I'm talking about. The other object we have on that container line is a magnet. That's an electromagnet and it's pulling up anything that has ferrous material. So iron containing cans like tin cans, steel cans are all pulled up by this magnet. Meanwhile, the paper also goes by a bank of human sorters. And their job is to really pull off contamination. So anything that got through up to this point that shouldn't be there like plastic bags or other items that don't belong. Once all that sorting has been done, the material goes on the conveyor. Now it's all just single types of material going into the baler. It gets bailed into big giant cubes. We'll see those later as well and shipped off to markets. We're fortunate because we have markets from this Murph of almost all of our materials that are in North America. So Canada and the United States. The only thing we were shipping overseas was our mixed paper and that has been affected by China's shut down on global imports of mixed paper. So we are going to other Asian markets, but we're actively seeking closer to home markets. And the good news is there's been investment in local New England paper mills that will be reopening in the next couple years. So the last step is once it gets shipped to these markets, it gets made into new products. And that's the whole point of recycling. If you cannot sell it and it can't be made into a new product, it can't be recycled. It's not a magic formula. And some of the materials that these items get made into glass can be made into potentially other bottles, but usually not from any kind of Murph. And there are many reasons for that. But it typically gets made into aggregate mixed with stone. That's used for civil engineering projects like road beds, or it can be used for abrasives and things like that. Plastic can be made into new water bottles, carpet, fleece clothing like this vest I'm wearing, flower pots, drainage materials, that sort of thing. And then metal can be made into any number of things like car parts, new cans, construction materials and that sort of thing. Paper can be made into new paper items like cardboard tissue paper, toilet paper, cereal boxes and that sort of thing. Here we are at the scale. And what happens here is all trucks going in or out go over this scale. So that we know what their weight is empty, and then either full with an incoming load of recyclables, empty to come in and pick up materials to be marketed. And either way, we know the weight of the truck so we can subtract it from the weight of their incoming or outgoing load. Another reason we need a new facility here is because this is really quite a small yard. When you have 18 wheel or tractor trailers coming in more than one at a time, it's really hard to accommodate them all. We'll probably see that during the time we're here. So we are going to stop up ahead briefly by this large pile next to us. And then we'll continue. So another thing to note about this yard is when you did that look around, you could see that there are some plastic bales stored outside. And you really don't want that to happen because when they're exposed to light and snow and rain, it degrades the quality of the plastic. But the problem is we're out of space. We don't have enough room to store everything as long as we need to before it's marketed. So what I'm standing in front of here is a raw pile of glass, recycled glass. It's not recycled yet, obviously, it's just broken down. But you can see all of the bottle caps and materials that were put in there. In some cases, they may have popped off a bottle, but in many cases, people put them in there loose because they didn't know that you're not supposed to recycle small items that are smaller than two inches in two directions. This is where they end up. What happens to this next is it's going to go through the extra machinery we added in 2015 that costs about another half a million dollars to further clean up and clean out all the contamination out of this pile so that we can then have the glass available. It's then called process glass aggregate after it's been broken into smaller pieces. And that PGA for short, in the winter, we send it to Canada to a company called 2M that further cleans it and processes it and markets it for abrasives and things like that. And then the summer we send it to FW Whitcombs Quarry where they mix it with quarry aggregate stone and then they can provide it for folks who want to use it for those civil engineering projects I mentioned. So this is what the glass looks like when it comes out of the mirf. And it's already been cleaned up quite a bit by the machinery we have inside. We'll talk about later. And as you can see, it's all mixed together all different colors. It has quite a bit of non glass material in it. So this pile will be scooped up. It'll be put in that red hopper. And it'll go through a vertical shaft machine that further breaks it down into smaller pieces. And then it goes through a shaker screen up above. And what you see are these smaller pieces that can then be marketed. Looks almost like sand. Can still see some of the colors in there. And that is after we've taken out all this stuff that didn't belong there. Some of its paper, we get a lot of corks. So please do not put the cork back in your wine bottle. The cork goes in the trash or your favorite hobby project. Alright, so now we're about to go on to the tip floor where the action is really happening. Alright, welcome to the tip floor. We get about 180 to 200 tons of material a day here. That translates into about 46,000 tons a year. What's happening is this gentleman is pushing it to the back of the tip floor. And then he's metering it out onto a conveyor. And it goes up into that little green room. And that's where the pre sort is happening. We'll talk more about that when we're upstairs on the observation platform. So right now we're going to walk over to see the bottom of the container sorting line. Okay, here we go. So the sorters are up above us sorting containers, the human sorters and each worker is picking off a specific type of container throwing throwing it against a little wall and it ends up in this bunker that we're talking about. And at the end of the shift, the bunker is opened on the other side and the material is pushed out onto the conveyor to be bailed. This one we're looking at is what we would call mixed colored plastics. HDPE high density polyethylene typically includes laundry bottles, that sort of thing. This next one is one is our one of our highest value plastics. It's what we call natural high density polyethylene or HDPE. And it's the most high value because it can be made into any color. It doesn't come pre colored, they don't have to remove color and it gives you lots of options. This little dumpster behind me contains material that should not have come here. So the workers are having to pull it off the line. They throw it on the floor and then it gets swept into here during the day. Things like random plastic objects. This is a mistake. This should not have come here. We only want containers made of plastic. No styrofoam please. We don't want styrofoam. No black plastic and especially plastic that has food contamination on it and it's all smushed together with paper in it. Come on, take a little time, separate it out, make the job easier for all the workers who are here. All right. Behind you here is the PET polyethylene terephthalate. That's your drink bottles, salad boxes, that sort of thing. Plastic. The next bunker here has the metal cans that the magnet is pulling off. So vegetable cans, tomato sauce cans, pet food cans, that sort of thing. This last one is what we call mixed plastics. It's a whole bunch of different kinds of plastic but it includes things like yogurt tubs and at the very end is the aluminum. Now we're going to go upstairs to the observation deck so we can get out of the way of the workers who have to do their job. This is just our observation deck. It gives you a better view of the tip floor. You can see the material coming in. You see the pre-sort room straight across with that little window and that roll off that big green container underneath is where all the pre-sort trash is going. They'll fill two of those a day mostly with what we call plastic film. So plastic bags, overwrap that went around big cases of food, things like the overwrap that goes over your toilet paper when you buy a big case of it. That is all going to the landfill. So if folks make the choice at home to put the right things in their bin, these workers don't have to sort it off and we don't have to have the added expense of sending it to the landfill. After there, the material goes through the screens that I talked about in on the mural where the paper and the containers get separated and you're seeing the mixed paper coming off the line over here. That material is all getting pushed onto the conveyor by this bobcat and it's going down to the conveyor. We'll see the blocks of bail paper coming out on the other side. Meanwhile, the containers come on their own conveyor up overhead and we're now going to walk by the container sorting line and you can see the work that those sorters are doing to separate out the right material and pull off the mistakes that folks make. Hazardous items like propane tanks, batteries, scrap metal and all that other stuff that should not go in the blue bin. So now we're going to go down the container line and I'm going to point out some important things to keep in mind. Bob's Center it does not belong in your blue bin. It can be stopped at any time by any worker if they need to. I don't know why it was stopped this time. It might not be here. It might could be anywhere in the facility that they needed to stop for a minute. So what you're seeing now is material that couldn't be sorted on the first pass and we have to scoop that up and put it back into the system to go through again. That's one of the inefficiencies of this facility. With a new facility you wouldn't have to be running material through over and over again. It would be captured on the first pass. Through everything is sorted into the right container or bunker. It's then pushed onto the conveyor. We saw that paper being pushed onto the conveyor and here it is coming out of our brand new and Reset here is stacking up the bales to be taken into the bail room where they'll be stored until they're picked up and sent to market. Right now we've got mixed paper coming off out of the baler. So this dumpster this little container down below us is full of aerosol cans. We do accept aerosol cans that are empty that contained hazardous cleaning products. We don't want anything that's hazardous and we don't want anything that still has food or other material in it. This will be sent to a scrap metal dealer because we don't want to put aerosol cans through our baler. We are finishing up right where we started. First of all this is where the bales go to be stored until they're picked up and sent to market. So we've got the cardboard behind us. We've got steel cans and metal there. We've got aluminum cans on the very end. That's our most valuable material per pound. We have shredded office paper. Most of that comes from companies that keep it separate. We do accept shredded paper here but if you're sending it to us that's the only plastic bag we allow in this facility is with shredded paper in it a clear bag securely tied shut. That way it can be pulled off the line at pre-sort before it hits the machines. And then we've got mixed paper at the very end. But what I said is we're ending where we started because behind you is our glass cleanup equipment. We saw the version on the outside and this is all the indoor glass cleanup. So we have a vacuum that's pulling off shredded paper and scrap paper. We have a magnet that's pulling off metal like lids to cans and then in that big blue piece of machinery is a rotating trommel screen and the glass floats down it and different sized holes sort out the little pieces of glass from the big pieces of contamination or trash is what we call it and that ends up the trash ends up in that red dumpster at the end and we saw what's coming out of the facility on the outside. So that's the whole story of the Murph and it's a pretty small Murph but it's doing a lot of hard work and it's been doing a great job since 1993 and we think it's time to give it a break and build a new one. So those are very intense working conditions. Yeah they're working hard definitely and and we would we appreciate when people do everything they can to make those jobs easier. So just say one more time what's the timeline on the new Murph? We would love to see something happening within the next 24 months to five years at the outside. Right now markets are really challenging worldwide but the outlook is that within that timeframe 18 to 24 months things will start picking up and we want to be ready to take advantage of those renewed domestic markets for materials. And with buying a new Murph I imagine it's a multi-million dollar enterprise. Absolutely and we wouldn't be buying it we'd be building it and it would have to be on a new location because we don't have space here so we would be going to Bond and we'd be asking the community to support that. So this is something that would come up in a November or March vote eventually? We wouldn't have to time it with a November or March vote. There reasons why you would want to do it that way but there's other reasons why you wouldn't want to so we don't know exactly what the timing would be but we would certainly give people lots of notice and information about it beforehand so you'll know when it's coming we just presented our budget to the local member towns and this was something we talked about our executive director talked about it during her budget presentation. And one of the things we wanted to just point out is that even though Kisella subcontracts to manage this for the district it's all kinds of haulers are are bringing material. Absolutely yes because it's a municipally owned Murph the Chittenden solid waste district is a municipal district and all 18 towns in Chittenden County are members but we do accept material from outside of Chittenden County and any commercial hauler that's licensed is welcome to use this facility. And then just in closing a message to the public about how they can be prepared the materials in the best condition for this sorting to happen. Well I do want to give a shout out to our members and by members I mean everybody who's contributing material here because you hear a lot these days about the high levels of contamination or trash basically coming into Murphs and it can be as high as 25 or 30 percent. That's really appalling and we are very fortunate to have a committed educated public and by educated I mean they know how to recycle and they care about it and our contamination rate is under 10 percent and when we tell people that around the country they're just amazed at how well we're doing. So good job to everybody that doesn't mean we can't do better. So to answer your question you can send us only the things that we want you to send us right. Containers packaging and clean paper and cardboard. If you're not sure check out our website CSWD.net call our hotline 872-8111 or come to one of our presentations or tours and we'll be happy to talk to you more about what should and shouldn't go in the bin. And then just to put a period on the sentence what do we do with all our bottle tops. Put them back on the bottle or the can or the jar and then you can put them in the blue bin. Oh good and what about beer tops. Oh beer tops something like that that shouldn't go back on. You can put those in scrap metal actually at any of our drop-off centers. Oh well that's good to know. Yes all right. There's lots of ways to keep things out of the landfill but not necessarily here at the Murph. All right well Michelle thank you so much. Thank you it's my pleasure. Thanks for watching.