The City of Powell’s new cardboard baler should make the city’s recycling efforts more efficient, but it still won’t be a money-maker.

The city offers optional cardboard recycling bins to commercial businesses for an additional monthly fee. For those that sign up, sanitation workers collect the material, load it in a compactor, then sell and ship the bales to mills in places like Washington, Oklahoma and Utah.

The semi truck loads of cardboard “generally” fetch enough money to cover the cost of shipping, Sanitation Superintendent Allen Griffin said. If you factor in how much the city would pay to dump the material in the landfill, “you can make the numbers look better,” Griffin told the city council at its Nov. 18 meeting. “But it is stopping stuff from going in the landfill, which is sort of the goal of recycling.”

The sanitation department’s current baler is about 13 years old and is designed for something like a grocery store rather than a city, Griffin said. “It’s not really meant to do the volumes that we’re doing.”

The city collected and shipped out roughly 256 tons in the last fiscal year, he told the Tribune, and the total modestly increases every year.

At Monday’s meeting, council members voted unanimously to buy a $120,616.80 replacement from Pro Baler Services of Salt Lake City. The incoming HE-60 “Big Mouth” model, produced by Cram-A-Lot, can be fed cardboard much more quickly. It also creates denser bales, fitting roughly 1,400 pounds of
material into each bundle versus the current 900 pounds. All told, Griffin said it should make the whole operation more cost-efficient.

Earlier in the meeting, Councilman Zane Logan also offered some good recycling news, reporting that the price of cardboard is on the rebound.

Logan serves as the council’s liaison to Powell Valley Recycling, a private nonprofit that receives city support. While the city handles some businesses’ cardboard — and offers a couple bins at the corner of Clark and Second streets for city residents’ use — residential customers generally bring their recyclables to Powell Valley Recycling.

Thanks to the recent upturn in prices, Powell Valley Recycling “actually made a little bit of money” selling the cardboard it had on hand at the time, Logan said.

The recycling organization has its own baler and sometimes stockpiles cardboard until the price goes up. At the city, however, “when we get a load, we try to get it out of here,” Griffin said.

The city sought bids for its new baler, and Reaction Distributing of Ajax, Ontario, Canada, offered a different model for substantially less. However, that $96,668 machine didn’t meet the city’s specifications, including by not having enough compacting force.

And while more expensive, Pro Baler Services’ bid still came in almost $10,000 below what the city had budgeted. The company is set to deliver the baler in five or six months.

Meanwhile, Powell Valley Recycling is also closing in on a new piece of equipment that will enable it to begin accepting glass. The organization is purchasing a crusher to turn bottles and other glass objects into sand that can be used for landscaping and other projects. A community fundraising effort is underway, with the organization now only about $10,000 shy of its $120,000 goal, Logan said.

For more information or to donate, visit givebutter.com/ko1QkG.