Dive Brief:

• Interstate Waste Services has opened a new $30 million MRF meant to serve the New York City area as it prepares for the full rollout of the city’s commercial waste zone program.
• The North Arlington, New Jersey, MRF has a combination of optical sorters, glass sorting equipment and AI-enabled robots from Machinex meant to sort a unique blend of materials that will come from collecting commercial recycling in New York City, such as plastic bags.
• The MRF also allows IWS to internalize recycling capabilities for its service footprint in the region. The company had previously been sending recycled materials to other companies’ MRFs.

Dive Insight:

The MRF is a strategic move for IWS, which is one of the largest privately held waste companies in its area of New York and New Jersey. Last year, IWS won 15 zones in New York City’s new commercial waste zone system through its subsidiary Action Environmental Services, one of the largest awarded. 

IWS’ new MRF is located at a repurposed transfer station in northern New Jersey. In addition to the 45,000-square-foot facility, it also has a 17,000-square-foot bale storage building. The site employs about 25 people. 

The design is meant to help handle the higher volumes of materials the company expects to collect from the commercial waste zone rollout. “With the commercial stream, you’re getting a lot more aluminum, a lot more PET. You’re not getting as much HDPE and HDPE natural,” said CEO Mike DiBella said.

Material collected in New York City is set out on the curb in plastic bags, a hurdle that needed to be addressed in the MRF design process. The company ultimately decided that employees at the new MRF will manually open the bags, which DiBella says is faster than using bag ripping equipment and results in less contamination.  

Though manual sorting is an important part of the MRF operations process, DiBella said the rest of the facility uses state-of-the-art sorting equipment from Machinex. That includes seven optical sorters, an AI-powered robot, a series of ballistic separators and screens for OCC and fines, according to a release from Machinex. 

Glass breakers and size-separation equipment in the new MRF also gives IWS an opportunity to better process and sell its glass to buyers in nearby Pennsylvania and elsewhere.

“We never had a great solution for glass, but the new system makes a product that’s marketable,” DiBella said. “Now it’s more of a recycled commodity we can move, day in and day out, instead of struggling to find markets for the kind of glass we were collecting from the streets of New York City or New Jersey.”

Along with serving New York’s commercial waste zones, IWS also serves thousands of residential homes in New Jersey. “Before this, we weren't self-sufficient for residential, single-stream and dual-stream recycling. We were giving this material to other businesses,” DiBella said.  

The new MRF has been open for about two weeks, “but we're already transloading a lot of our material from the other sites and bringing it to this site,” due to the facility’s more advanced equipment and ability to capture higher volumes of material that wasn’t getting sorted at its other nearby MRFs, he said. “This is the anchor for the business now.”

IWS sees acquisitions as a key part of its business model, and DiBella said the MRF is expected to help accommodate more material as IWS aims to double its business in New York’s five boroughs in coming years. The company is backed by Littlejohn & Co. and Ares Management Corp. Recent acquisitions include Oak Ridge Waste & Recycling and Marangi Disposal.

The company is also in the process of acquiring smaller hauling companies to capitalize on New York City's commercial waste zoning changes, he said. These smaller companies may not have been competitive in the commercial waste zone system, but “they have a customer base, equipment, and good people. Finding good people to work specifically in New York City is very challenging. So that gives us a little benefit as we tuck them in,” he said.

This story first appeared in the Waste Dive: Recycling newsletter. Sign up for the weekly emails here.