ShawneeDispatch.com

Sixty-eight thousand, seven hundred and eighty-two pounds of aluminum. 171,953 pounds of steel. 240,737 pounds of plastic. A whopping 6,396,714 pounds of paper.

The numbers represent the total amount of materials recycled in 2007 from Shawnee at the Deffenbaugh Industries recycling facility in Kansas City, Kan., and while they seem impressive at first, the total amount of materials recycled last year is actually 22.3 percent less than the city's total in 2005 and 17.4 percent less than 2006.

"Our volumes have gone up, so I don't know how to explain the drop in Shawnee," said Tom Coffman, spokesman for Deffenbaugh. ": It waxes and wanes, and when it does, you pay a little more attention to it. And you have to give some credit to Shawnee; they're doing a good job of that."

Shawnee has been pushing to become a more sustainable or "green" city, a movement reflected in this month's Shawnee Shine Up campaign. The city has asked residents to take part in events like the E-Waste Recycling, Beauty and the Best and Tidy Town events last weekend, and the city also will supply gloves, bags and other materials to those who want to clean up their neighborhoods.

The city also recognizes the need to keep recyclables out of the Johnson County Landfill in Shawnee, also operated by Deffenbaugh, and started a recycling program in city parks. But to understand the importance of recycling, perhaps it's important to see where materials go after they're placed in the green boxes and put out at the curb.

Trucks are weighed as they enter the recycling facility to help the company keep track of how many pounds of materials move through the facility each day, an average of 500 to 700 tons.

Trucks bringing in residential collections dump recycling into one large, covered area, and Bobcats push the materials onto an in-floor conveyor belt, which takes it up to a sorting area. A team of sorters picks out the trash, debris and other items that don't belong. The rest is sent on through Deffenbaugh's Bollegraaf machine for further sorting.

Deffenbaugh created its recycling division in 1989 and used to sort at the curb, but Coffman said that caused several problems. Trucks were separated into sections for the different materials, but the trucks quickly ran out of room once one section was filled.

Switching to "single-stream" recycling in 2003, allowing all materials to be collected in an undivided truck, meant the purchase of the state-of-the-art Bollegraaf sorting machine from the Netherlands. The machine can detect the different kinds of plastic, and steel is pulled out with a magnet.

About 90 percent of the materials the facility handles are fiber products: paper, cardboard and newsprint. Of the materials that move through the facility, about 75 percent is collected from commercial customers. This is beneficial in that the materials are usually clean and don't involve much sorting.

"So we probably have 65 percent of our costs for 12 to 16 percent of our material," Coffman said, referring to the 20 percent that is collected from residential customers and 5 percent collected from venues like the Abitibi paper recycling program.

Deffenbaugh also eliminated glass from its regular collection, because broken glass presented such a hazard to workers and created a mess. If glass shards made it into loads of other materials, those loads could be considered "contaminated" and turned away.

There is a small market for glass, Coffman said, which is another reason why Deffenbaugh now only takes glass at its recycling facility at the entrance to the Johnson County Landfill.

"Glass has a negative value," Coffman said. "Every other material we have, people pay us to come in, load it up and haul it off."

The glass that is taken at the landfill is hauled to an Oklahoma facility for recycling, at a loss for Deffenbaugh, Coffman said.

Another big hassle: plastic bags. Deffenbaugh doesn't take plastic bags because there isn't a market for the grade of plastic used in the bags.

Sorters must remove them from other recycling materials, empty them of cans or paper that customers have filled them with to throw away, and they're easily caught by the wind, causing a hard-to-contain mess at both the landfill and recycling facility.

"Have I mentioned they're a menace?" Coffman jokes.

After they are sorted, materials are packed into large bundles. All of the materials are shipped by truck or train out of the facility, and Coffman said much of it is sent to companies in Mexico or China for recycling.

Recycling is soon to be an economic effort as well as a green one. Because the Johnson County Landfill is filling so quickly, the county's recently-approved Solid Waste Management plan calls for efforts to increase recycling.

Among these efforts is the goal to work toward a volume-based waste collection rate structure, or a "pay-as-you-throw" system, by 2013-17.

One such system is in place in Kansas City, Mo., where residents may throw away only a certain number of bags of trash each week. Additional bags must be marked with special stickers that cost about $1.50 each, otherwise they won't be taken.

"That drives recycling rates tremendously, because people all the sudden have an economic incentive to pull recyclables out of their solid waste streams," Coffman said.