What makes Whatcom's trash and recycling system unusual? | Cascadia Daily News

Editor’s Note: Diverted: Tracing the path of recycling in Whatcom County is a multipart series that follows waste from curbside to commodity market.

South of Ferndale and just a few minutes from Interstate 5 is the bustling hub of waste management in Whatcom County.

With no open landfills in the county, the private transfer stations and scrap yards that dot the side of Slater Road serve as the central location where many small loads of trash and recycling are consolidated, loaded and transported elsewhere.

Whatcom is the only county in Washington with a fully privatized waste management ecosystem. Jennifer Hayden, the solid waste supervisor at the county health department, said that system has advantages and disadvantages.

“I have less control over operations, which in this specific case is fine because they do a really good job,” she said about the private companies that manage trash and recycling. “They’re invested in waste reduction methods, they’re invested in high quality of service to their customers, they’re invested in having highly trained staff.”

Two of the biggest operations, Recycling & Disposal Services (RDS) and Lautenbach Recycling, are family-run, locally owned businesses that sit just across the street from each other, but provide somewhat different services.

Trash is compacted at RDS, loaded into trailers, and trucked south to King County, where it is put on rails and taken to Columbia Ridge Landfill in Arlington, Oregon. Roosevelt Landfill in Klickitat County also receives a portion of Whatcom’s trash — typically from Republic Services, the third transfer station on Slater Road.

The lion’s share of Whatcom County’s trash is brought to RDS by Sanitary Service Company and Nooksack Valley Disposal trucks. In 2020, the station received 125,000 tons of household and commercial waste, of the approximately 180,000 total tons generated in the county.

At RDS, individuals are also allowed to dump trash and recycling. The transfer station has a wide, open yard that allows for the convenient separation of commodities, and RDS accepts the widest variety of recyclables and waste of any facility in the county — anything from tires and propane tanks to concrete, lithium batteries, porcelain toilets, yard clippings and even whole mobile homes.

William McCarter, a manager at the transfer station, said the strangest thing that passes over the scale at RDS may be the occasional dumpster full of body part molds from a local prosthetics company. His father Larry founded the business in 1996.

“My dad built this whole place on the premise of recycling,” McCarter said. “He’s really passionate about it.”

However, RDS does not receive recycling from the local curbside collectors. That all goes across the street to Lautenbach Recycling, which isn’t open to the public and only accepts commercial loads. It’s also where RDS sends its sorted household recycling.

“It’s very easy because they’re super easy to work with and they’re right across the street,” McCarter said of Lautenbach Recycling.

Troy Lautenbach, a lifelong resident of Whatcom County, started a drywall recycling company when he was 24. Since then, his brother Torrey has joined him as the operations manager and the company has expanded into a suite of Skagit- and Whatcom County-based businesses that include recycling, commercial composting and storage container rental, as well as transfer stations in Mount Vernon, on San Juan Island and in Ferndale. Lautenbach Recycling also has the state’s only depackaging machine, which takes industrial quantities of expired or spoiled food waste (picture a semi trailer full of curdled milk) and separates the organic material from the packaging to be processed separately.

Lautenbach Recycling most recently purchased Northwest Recycling in 2022. Northwest, a 100-year-old company owned by the Parberry family, began as a scrap yard, but when recycling collection started in the 1980s, Northwest became the leading recycler in Whatcom County, sorting and processing the county’s curbside recycling.

In 2021 when the City of Bellingham began the Old Town revitalization project, Northwest closed its Old Town sorting facility, and the Slater Road operation started taking all of Whatcom County’s curbside recycling in February 2021.

Hayden observed that private industry is often more nimble and can adapt more quickly to change than government entities.

One significant change that recyclers are reckoning with is the transition from the historic three-bin recycling system to single-stream recycling. The shift means that Lautenbach Recycling is processing both sorted and commingled loads brought in by haulers. When pre-sorted or “source separated” material comes in, it is baled at the Ferndale facility and sold to various buyers. For example, mixed paper and cardboard goes to paper mills in Washington and Oregon, where it is turned into paperboard and sent to a box-making factory.

(According to regional data tracked by the Department of Ecology, as of December 2023, corrugated cardboard commands around $60 per ton in the Pacific Northwest commodity market. Aluminum cans are worth $1,250 per ton, and uncolored HDPE plastic, what milk jugs are made out of, is worth 25 cents per pound.)

Kristen Hancock, the materials manager at Lautenbach Recycling, estimates that between 1% and 2% of material from separated loads need to be disposed of due to contamination, a number that is backed up by an Ecology materials recovery study from 2016.

“The source-separated material in Whatcom County is so clean. I get told constantly by the mills that the product is just superior,” Hancock said. “People are just educated in Whatcom County with that three-bin system.”

In the recycling world, contaminants can be either physical items that don’t belong in a recycling load, like garden hoses or plastic bags, or byproducts that affect recyclable materials, like food, liquid and shards of broken glass. Paper is especially susceptible to being contaminated by such byproducts. Ecology found the contamination rate to be much higher for single-stream recycling, between 16%–30%, mostly because of glass shards (separating glass led to a 2%–6% contamination rate).

“We’re very connected to the environmental community, so right away they started asking us how we felt about the single-stream switch,” Troy Lautenbach said. “The problem is that single-stream does contaminate the recyclables at a higher rate. The upside is that from a collection standpoint it’s much easier and more efficient, and it’s easier for the consumer because everything goes into one bin.”

That’s why Lautenbach encourages customers to wash and dry their containers before recycling them, especially when it’s all going into the same bin. And wish-cycling, or trying to recycle something just because you hope it’s recyclable, is frowned upon at transfer stations. Whatcom County has a searchable, frequently-updated online database called Waste Wise that helps users identify what materials are recyclable and how to dispose of them.

“The carbon footprint of wish-cycling is much higher because you’re transporting it to the recycling facility, the recycling facility is transporting it to the processor, and then that processor has to pull it out as a contaminant,” Hancock said. “It goes to the landfill either way. If you’re unsure, it should probably go in the garbage.”

Most of the household “PTAG,” the mix of plastic, tin, aluminum and glass from recycling bins, is compacted, loaded into shipping containers, and sent to large corporate material recovery facilities, or MRFs, in Snohomish and King counties. All recycling from the new single bin system — including mixed paper and cardboard — is loaded and sent directly to the MRFs.

At Lautenbach Recycling, commingled loads and PTAG are treated similarly, but there is a higher cost associated with commingled loads, because adding cardboard and paper to the mix means another layer of market pricing, sorting and processing at the MRF.

With the change in recycling collection, Lautenbach is seriously considering establishing a material recovery facility in Whatcom County, which would mean more local control over materials (and more local revenue).

“We’re in this transition where we now have two different means of collection happening in the community,” he said. “We’re in the process of exploring ideas and having conversations about what it would take to put a MRF in.”

Cost estimates are between $5 and $10 million, and equipment manufacturers aren’t accustomed to working with companies that process the low volume that Whatcom County generates — Lautenbach said that the biggest MRFs are processing 50 tons an hour, whereas a local one would process closer to 10 tons an hour.

There’s a healthy amount of doubt and cynicism around recycling, and Hancock hears it often. She acknowledged that it’s hard not to feel that, in the relentless churn of consumerism, we’re all guilty of creating too much waste.

Along with that, major changes to China’s waste importation policies, often called the “national sword” or “green sword,” banned the importation of some types of waste and set strict contamination limits on recyclable materials in 2017. This left recyclers scrambling to find domestic markets for all the materials they once sent overseas.

“We’re kind of coming out of this really dark time in the recycling industry,” said county solid waste supervisor Jennifer Hayden. “A lot of programs did have to shut down recycling across the country and stop accepting things. We never did in our area, and that’s partially due to the fact that it’s easier for us to find international markets like Canada, but it’s also ingrained in our value system. Once people understand a little bit more, it doesn’t seem quite so bleak.”

Hancock emphasized that successful recycling is all about supply and demand.

“This was a learning curve for all of us, when we opened this facility,” Hancock said. “I learned very quickly that you can’t send all of your product to one place, you have to keep your doors open. It’s all about supply and demand. Mills have shut-downs all the time, but materials never stop, so we have to keep it flowing out our doors.”

And while that may be the case, Hancock said that whenever she gives tours of the Lautenbach Recycling transfer station, people come away feeling a little more optimistic about recycling.

Or, as Hayden phrased it, “If you look at the stuff that you’re putting in your bin, it’s actually recyclable material and it’s getting recycled.”

Future installments of Diverted will explore plastics, C&D (construction and demolition recycling), regional material recovery facilities and commercial composting.

Julia Tellman writes about civic issues and anything else that happens to cross her desk; contact her at [email protected].