Recycling is big business in Washington state. Its success defies the misguided notion that profitability and improving the environment are incompatible goals.

Consider the numbers.
According to Brad Lovaas, executive director of the Washington Refuse and Recycling Association, 14,000 people were employed in Washington’s recycling industry, as of 2005. This number includes workers in areas like municipal solid waste operations that collect recyclable items from homes, businesses, and industrial sites; hazardous waste cleanup; aggregate; concrete; material recovery facilities; and transport. During fiscal 2008, the garbage and recycling part of the industry did $2.6 billion worth of business.

“We’re a huge industry,” said Lovaas. “Just last year we paid $33 million in solid waste tax, which goes into the public works trust fund.”

While the trucks that collect cans, bottles, papers and anything else that can be recycled for municipal solid waste recyclers are, by far, the best known part of the industry, they are only part of the picture. Indeed, the types of recycling and the uses for recycled material are as varied as they are often surprising.

For example, when you drive your car, you may well be traveling on recycled asphalt pavement or on concrete with an ash additive from the TransAlta coal-fired plant near Centralia.

“In many cases, the roadways we dig up can be recycled right there on the spot,” said Lovaas.
Although the recycling business provides a great public service by collecting material that would otherwise go to landfills and giving it a second life, recycling is very much a business, not a charity.

“We’ll collect your materials,” said Lovaas. “We’ll process them, but we’ve got to make our money back.”

Mountains of Metal
One of Washington’s most fascinating recycling operations is the General Metals of Tacoma scrap yard, located on the far eastern end of that city’s waterfront, along the shallow Hylebos Waterway. In operation for more than 100 years, it employs 125 people.

You can’t miss the property along Marine View Drive. Mountains of scrap metal dominate the landscape. Crushed automobiles, refrigerators, washing machines, dryers and metal that is not immediately identifiable stacked one upon the other are visible long before you enter the site, becoming ever more overwhelming the closer you get.

Schnitzer Steel, a large Portland-based company, purchased General Metals of Tacoma in the 1990s. Prior to that transfer of ownership, the operation was an old family business. The site’s recycling mission, however, remains unchanged.

“We deal almost entirely with ferrous scrap metal, which is probably in the range of one- fifth of all the recycled material in Washington in terms of total tonnage,” said Matt Parker, the site’s general manager. “Specifically, we take in unprepared scrap metal and transform it into a format that steel mills can easily melt.”

Those mountains of scrap autos and appliances will go through an extremely involved mechanical process before they are ready for melting.

Surrounded by the piles of scrap is a large plant with a 10,000 horsepower motor – the largest single consumer of electricity on the Tacoma grid. The plant shreds, cuts and cleans the material in addition to putting it through processes that separate non-metal components, like steering wheels, which are not usable by steel mills.

“Some material is metal, but has components other than steel, like copper,” said Parker. “This material needs to go through additional processes while some of the other material has to be cut into smaller bits with a torch before it is ready to go to the mill.”

The majority of the material processed at the yard comes in by the truckload. Approximately, one-third of the incoming metal arrives by rail while another large segment comes on bay barge from the British Columbia coast.

Most of the scrap metal is from Washington state, but a significant portion comes overland from parts of inland Canada, like Alberta, in addition to other U.S. sources, including Idaho and Montana.

While much of the scrap that arrives at the site travels a long distance to get there, a much longer journey via bulk ship awaits the processed material.

“Our customer base is almost entirely in Asia,” said Parker. “The country of destination is constantly changing, depending on market conditions. Right now, it’s primarily China, but just a year ago our main customers were in Korea and Taiwan.”

Once the one to two shiploads per month of processed material from the site arrive in China, mills re-melt it into steel that is usually used for construction.

In addition to benefitting the environment by recycling otherwise unwanted material, Schnitzer’s Tacoma operation operates under strict environmental controls.

“The site is a capped property,” said Parker. “All rainwater that falls on our property is collected and goes through our tank system where it is chemically cleaned before it’s discharged off the site.”

Green Industry
Recycling is one of the greenest kinds of businesses – a fact recognized by Washington state policymakers, and the Climate Action Team, an advisory group convened at the direction of Gov. Chris Gregoire and the Legislature by the Department of Ecology and the Department of Community, Trade and Economic Development. “Recycling was the first recommendation the Climate Action Team,” said Lovaas. “What it called for was more collection of recyclable materials.”

Lovaas believes the state’s existing collection system for recyclable materials can be more effective by collecting materials from more customers on existing routes.

 “What we’ve really got to figure out is how to incentivize those people who still aren’t part of any recycling system to become involved.”

Parker paints a stark portrait of why the recycling industry is essential, and the dire financial and environmental consequences of not recycling ferrous scrap metal, in particular.

“Ferrous scrap metal recycling is incredibly important because the alternative is so unbelievably energy consumptive,” said Parker. “The alternative is to take large pieces of equipment, strip or tunnel mine on an enormous scale to get huge quantities of iron ore.”

From there, the ore would have to be processed to the point where it could be melted in energy-intensive blast furnaces.

“It is approximately 72 percent more efficient to take ferrous scrap metal and recycle it than it is to use virgin material,” said Parker.

Recycling in the Recession
While there will always be a need for recycling, the industry has not escaped the effects of the recession.

“There’s always been this line that recycling is recession proof,” said Lovaas. “Well, if that was true before, it’s not true this time.”

The fact that the Washington’s Asian trading partners are also feeling the downturn is affecting Washington’s recyclers.

“Being the most trade-dependent state is probably not the best thing when foreign trade heads south,” said Lovaas.

Transportation costs, in some cases, outweigh the value of bringing materials to recyclers. In addition, recyclers are dealing with negative changes in the value of the materials they recycle as the commodity rates drop with the economy.

“We are really struggling, in some cases, to keep our little recycling programs going because the value of cardboard has decreased,” said Lovaas. “A year-and–a-half ago, it was like gold.

Now, in many cases, certain materials, like cardboard, which we used to be able to collect and give value to someone, have declined so much in value that if you want to recycle it, you have to pay.”

Despite the economy’s current challenges, Parker remains optimistic. “We’re navigating through this downturn as best we can,” said Parker. “We’ve been here over 100 years. We will be here through the dark days.” It would, indeed, be foolish for anyone to count out this industry.

Recycling, after all, has a history of profitability and a basic function that is more appreciated than ever before in an age of environmental consciousness.

“You can drive a truck with aluminum cans from here to Patagonia, and it makes sense from a greenhouse gas standpoint because that recyclable content will forgo all the processes it takes to create the virgin products,” said Lovaas. “We feel real good that we’ve got some things to offer Washington state going forward. The problem is finding the good economics to get that truck of aluminum cans to Patagonia, and that’s another question.”