OUTLET: The Virginian-Pilot
A couple of workers in hard hats stood along a conveyor at the TFC Recycling facility Monday and with darting eyes sorted through a nonstop barrage of scraps coming their way. Every few seconds, one of the men plucked a carton from the stream with his gloved hand and tossed it onto another fast-moving belt.
Not long ago, these milk, juice and soup cartons were a nuisance, among the items that TFC’s owner, Michael Benedetto, wished people would stop throwing in with their recyclables.
Effective Tuesday, though, Hampton Roads’ largest trash-recycling company began encouraging people to put the cartons into their blue bins. It’s the largest expansion in items that can be recycled locally in more than a decade.
Benedetto said the difference was a grant from a trade group called the Carton Council of North America. It helped his company install equipment to more efficiently sort out the cartons. Now, it’s more economical for TFC to sell them rather than trash them.
The change affects curbside recycling in every city in South Hampton Roads, as well as Hampton and Duck, N.C., all of which are either served directly or through a subcontract by TFC. Benedetto said that recycling drop-off centers in Accomack and Northampton counties on the Eastern Shore and Chowan, Gates and Perquimans counties in northeastern North Carolina, which also are served by TFC, will now accept the cartons as well.
The company quietly began sorting out and baling paper cartons at its Chesapeake facility last month. Enough people already were mistakenly throwing the items into their blue bins to allow TFC to work out any bugs in its new equipment.
Benedetto said more and more companies across the U.S. and as far as China are willing to buy bales of the recycled cartons. The Carton Council says the going price is about $85 per ton. The buyers reprocess the cartons into everything from food containers to building materials.
It’s estimated that paper cartons make up only about 1 percent of the total household waste stream, but recycling of them has grown. The Carton Council says nearly 60 percent of U.S. households now have the ability to do so, compared with about 18 percent in 2009.
The change has come as retailers, food processors and cartonmakers increased their commitments to greener practices.
Benedetto said the addition of the cartons will help TFC simplify its message that “paper, bottles and cans are what you can recycle.”
He said the Carton Council contributed more than $500,000 to help TFC install new equipment at its facilities in Chesapeake and the Richmond area. The biggest addition in Chesapeake was a conveyor system with optical sensors that recognize cartons and trigger their ejection onto a line with some other recyclable items.
Benedetto said TFC has no preference on whether consumers should remove the plastic caps from the cartons but asks that any container be emptied of its liquid contents before being put into a recycling bin.
TFC also announced Tuesday that it launched a program called Green Streets to honor neighborhoods with recycling rates of 80 percent or more.
Information is available at GreenStreetsVA.com.
