Deborah Johnson Wood
The next school
environmental class to tour the new $11.5 million
Kent
County Recycling and Education Center will learn about the county's
upcoming new single-stream recycling method from a bird's-eye view of
the action – a catwalk that extends over the sorting equipment.
The new center at 977 Wealthy St. SW is nearly
complete, and work crews are training on the new sorting equipment, says
Dennis Kmiecik, Kent County's solid waste division director.
"The schools are emphasizing recycling in their
curriculum," he says. "We got overwhelmed with tours in our old facility
(322 Bartlett SW). So in the new facility we invested in a classroom
that can seat 80 people and has all the new technology."
Interior windows allow students to observe workers and
equipment from the classroom. What they'll see will be state-of-the-art
sorting equipment that can handle a much higher capacity of recycled
waste than the current equipment, all sorting from a single stream that
contains plastic, glass, metal and paper waste products.
With single-stream, Kent County residents and businesses will
no longer need to sort recyclables into separate bins, but can place
them all in one cart they can wheel to the curb.
Kmiecik expects the city of Grand Rapids to offer 30-, 68- and
90-gallon carts, free. Individual haulers outside the city will
determine what carts to offer customers and the cost, if any.
The change will take place mid-July, with how-to
information available within the next week or so, Kmiecik says.
The new process should reduce the recycle center's
operating expenses, but Kmiecik isn't making predictions on how much.
"We were running 13 hours a day, six days a week,
with 90 to 100 community service workers each day," he says. "Now it
will be eight hours a day, five days a week with a minimum of 20
people."
Kmiecik hopes the new process will
mean more people will recycle. He says Grand Rapids has a 45 percent
residential recycling rate; countywide the number is only 20 percent.
Source: Dennis Kmiecik, Kent County Recycling and
Education Center
Deborah Johnson Wood is development news editor for Rapid
Growth Media. She can be contacted at deborah@rapidgrowthmedia.com.
Development News tips can be sent to info@rapidgrowthmedia.com.