On Wednesday, New Hanover County and the city of Wilmington embarked on a new recycling plan that officials say will save the local governments money and reduce the carbon footprint associated with their solid waste disposal.
 
July 1 was the official start of a city-county agreement and contract with Sonoco Recycling LLC to handle all their recycled materials. Sonoco Recycling has now taken over the sorting, baling and sale of all materials brought to the county’s recycling site. For now, the company is baling the recyclables and trucking them to its material recovery facility (MRF) in Jacksonville. Over the next few months, however, the recycler will equip and operate a MRF at the New Hanover County site, on the foundation of the county’s former WASTEC incinerator.

According to Joe Suleyman, the county’s environmental management director, the city-county contract with Sonoco Recycling and the operation of the MRF will result in a combined savings of more than $650,000 annually and could divert up to 25,000 tons of recyclable materials from the landfall each year.

According to the interlocal agreement, New Hanover County will charge the city of Wilmington $10 a ton to handle recyclables, half of what the city was paying under its previous contract with Waste Management, which expired Tuesday.

The per-ton charge with Waste Management was likely to rise to $40 per ton if the city had renewed that contract, Richard King, Wilmington’s former public services director – now deputy city manager – said in a presentation April 6.

The new contract does not change anything about the way recycled materials are collected locally by private haulers. And there’s a benefit to individuals who use the county’s recycling drop-off sites.

Because Sonoco Recycling's materials-handling system is more sophisticated than the county’s, residents will not need to do as much sorting of items they drop off at county sites, Suleyman said Thursday. Click here to view a short video showing how a MRF sorts different types of recyclable items.

“We’re condensing down to three types of recycling containers: glass, cardboard and everything else,” Suleyman said, adding that the contract stipulates that transition to fewer sorting containers at drop-off sites must be done within 90 days, but will likely happen sooner than that.

Sonoco Recycling provides the collected cardboard, paper and some plastics to its parent company, Sonoco. A manufacturer of packaging materials, South Carolina-based Sonoco is one of the leading producers of recycled paperboard, using more than a million tons of recovered paper annually in its papermaking operations, according to company officials.

The recycling company sells everything its parent company cannot use, according to Jim Foster, Sonoco Recycling’s regional manager. Foster is supervising the start of operations in New Hanover County but will soon turn over management to Brian Shea, who will oversee the Wilmington site as well as Sonoco’s MRF in Jacksonville.

“Today we’re celebrating the first day with the city coming in,” Foster said Thursday. “The city has been awesome to work with: a true partner with the county and ourselves.”

Suleyman said that the recycling operation currently employs four people. Foster expects that number to rise to as many as 10.

Even during the first phase of the new program, during which Sonoco will haul recycled materials to its MRF in Jacksonville, the program’s carbon footprint will shrink, Foster continued.

“The city’s recycling has been transported to Raleigh, and sometimes bales of recycled materials come back to Wilmington for export. Right now there is a lot of fiber being exported,” he said, explaining that the new MRF will eliminate the need for all that trucking.

With the old WASTEC incinerator almost completely demolished, the remaining portion of the building (at right, ready for its new "skin") is ready for cleaning and renovation so it can house the new recycling operation. The difference in functionality and appearance, once the old building is upgraded, will be “night and day,” Suleyman said.