But the facility isn’t just a Mickey Mouse operation. It’s a $10 million series of conveyor belts that gobbles up waste material from construction and sorts it out to be recycled.
The material recovery facility (MRF) will double the sorting capacity to 1.6 million pounds per day at the Davis Street Resource Recovery Complex, owned by Waste Management.
Of course, the machine only does so much. It’s the people working in it that do the good part of the sorting.
Several speakers first talked about the new material recovery facility, touting their foresight at putting Alameda County on the cutting edge of the recycling front.
The waste material travels by conveyor belts through a series of magnets, blowers, vibrators and optical scanners – each step sorting out specific material – so that all that construction debris can be recycled instead of dumped.
“When the original project was dreamed up in the early 1990s, we couldn’t get anybody to think the project was a good idea, let alone fund it,” said Jack Isola, senior district manager of the complex.
The facility will add 25 more jobs to the complex, in addition to the current 300 workers, Isola said.
Isola recalled Jerry Brown, then mayor of Oakland, coming to the opening of a smaller sorting facility years ago and saying it was too small.
http://wmlogistics.wm.com/index.jsp
With more facilities like this, Alameda County will never need another landfill, said Gary Wolff, executive director of StopWaste, the county’s waste management agency.
People from all over visit Northern California to see what it’s doing in recycling, said Dan Grieger, executive director of the Green Building Council (Northern California Chapter).
“People from around the country and the world come here to see what we’re doing,” Grieger said. “The things you see here are innovative. It’s really important.”
City Councilman Jim Prola said there were a lot of concerns a few years ago but he now believes what Waste Management is doing at the facility is good for the environment and good for the city.
“They’ve (Waste Management) absolutely convinced me and turned me around since 2006 on what a great corporate giant they are,” Prola said.
After the speeches, the officials hit the switch to turn on the sorting machine. It almost didn’t go according to plan, because the workers who man the facility had decided to work. But the labor dispute was apparently worked out, at least temporarily, as the workers took their stations and began sorting for the benefit of the ceremony.
A call on Wednesday to Teamsters Local 70 which represents the workers was not immediately returned.
Source:http://ebpublishing.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=7904:giant-sorting-machine-will-reduce-commercial-waste-material&catid=1:latest&Itemid=28
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