Titus founder and CEO Mike Centers presented the regional secondary-MRF model at the Zero Waste Washington Waste Summit. The full presentation is below.
The argument in Mike's own words
Primary MRFs do an excellent job with 80 to 90 percent of the material they take in. Where they struggle is low-volume material, mixed plastics and cartons, plus the yield loss every machine creates. The secondary-MRF model consolidates those streams from a network of primary MRFs at one regional facility designed specifically to sort them.
"There's always been a discussion about recycling, the chicken and egg: what comes first, do you develop the end market or do you develop the supply? We already have the supply. We just have to regionalize it."
A single 4,000-ton-per-month MRF might capture under five tons of expanded polystyrene in a month, taking a quarter of a year or more to fill one truckload. Consolidated regionally, the same material becomes multiple truckloads per month, at quality levels end users can actually buy.
Findings from the Pacific Northwest pilot
- A regional secondary MRF serving Oregon and Washington would recover an estimated 50,000 tons per year of additional recyclables
- 3 to 6 percent additional diversion for each city a primary MRF serves
- An estimated 130,000 tons per year of greenhouse-gas reduction
- Roughly half of typical MRF residual is quality material that can still be recycled
The mission
"Our mission is to create a pathway for closing the loop for all material collected, for the benefit of all stakeholders."
This presentation preceded the Chicago Secondary Sort Demonstration, where the model was put to work at four Chicago-area MRFs and recovered 79% of residual material. Read the Chicago case study →