Recycling center to open with restrictions

Posted 5/12/20

The Powell Valley Recycling Center is opening up again this week, but its operations will be limited for some time. For the safety of employees, customers will need to take extra steps to use the …

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Recycling center to open with restrictions

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The Powell Valley Recycling Center is opening up again this week, but its operations will be limited for some time. For the safety of employees, customers will need to take extra steps to use the center.

“It’s not going to be business as usual,” warns Marynell Oechsner, president of the Powell Valley Recycling Board.

She explained that seven of the center’s nine employees are seniors in the high-risk group that’s most likely to have serious complications from a coronavirus infection.

The new coronavirus, Oechsner said, can live on cardboard for 24 hours and up to 72 hours on plastic and steel. It’s believed that the virus is transmitted primarily from person to person through coughing and sneezing, but there are a lot of unknowns. And with most of their staff well inside the vulnerable group, the board thought it best to close the facility.

“We didn’t want to take any risks,” Oechsner explained.

 

Extra steps

Beginning Thursday, the center will open, but staffers will only accept materials on Thursdays and Fridays, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. The drop-off bins will still not be available.

The goal is that all the materials collected can sit for at least 72 hours before any employees touch them.

All the materials brought to the center must be pre-sorted so employees won’t have to touch them.

The center is only accepting aluminum cans, aluminum foil, tin cans, water and pop bottles, milk jugs, newspaper, white paper and corrugated cardboard.

Water bottles, pop bottles, and milk jugs must have the lids removed. While there are other forms of plastics they might be able to recycle, Oeschner said they wanted to keep it simple to minimize the need for employees to handle material.

Newspapers can contain no magazines, and white paper cannot be mixed with colored paper. All cardboard needs to be broken down, with no pasteboard or cereal boxes mixed in. Mills pay less when items such as cereal boxes are mixed in with the corrugated cardboard; the fibers are shorter, so it’s more difficult to recycle them.

The center will also accept aluminum and copper scrap metal.

When dropping materials off, only two customers at a time will be allowed in the building.

Any material that doesn’t follow the guidelines will be rejected.

Oechsner said she knows it’s not the most ideal scenario, but said the center was under pressure to open. This way, there’s at least a recycling option in Powell.

“I’m sure there’ll be some unhappy people,” she said.

Employees are going to be maintaining social distancing. They will be wearing Tyvek suits, with latex gloves under their work gloves, and masks. All the personal protective equipment will be left in the building when the workers go home, so they don’t bring any infections home with them.

“We’ve been scrounging to find enough safety equipment,” Oeschner said.

 

Now the good news

While the pandemic has greatly limited the facility’s ability to operate, it’s also improved markets for cardboard. Before all this, the bales of cardboard at the Powell Valley Recycling Center were stacked 20 feet high in rows that were growing by the month. Processing facilities weren’t paying for the material; in fact, recycling centers had to pay about $15 per ton to get the processing facilities to take it.

“So, of course, we weren’t shipping any cardboard,” Oechsner said.

Now, the mills are paying $45 per ton for the material, and the bundles behind Powell Valley Recycling are starting to diminish — while the center watches revenues grow.

According to a newsletter from Interwest Paper, Inc., a regional recycler, there are a number of factors at play. China closed its recycling markets to American suppliers last year, which has created a demand for domestic processing facilities. As a result, new mill systems are coming online. Add to that the COVID-19 pandemic shutting down businesses, and scrap material is becoming more scarce.

Oechsner points out, too, that with so much online ordering, boxes are in high demand.

“That’s good news for us,” she said.

While there are some extra hoops to jump through in order to recycle in Powell, Oechsner said they appreciate people’s business. She hopes people understand that they have to put their employees’ safety first.

“We’re going to err on the side of caution,” she said.

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