Dive Brief:

• Republic Services recently announced an expansion of the Sonoma County Recycling Center in Petaluma, CA that increases capacity to 200 tons per day.
• The facility grew to 38,000-square-feet to accommodate a new processing system from the CP Group. This made room for multiple new material lines, a baler and a bale storage area to protect sorted material from the weather.
• A multi-year analysis from the county and multiple municipalities pointed to self-haul material, commercial dry waste and construction and demolition waste as three areas to focus on. As a result, the facility now has a new in-feed conveyor for commercial cardboard, mixed paper, containers, film and plastics and a hopper-fed C&D system with sorting stations.

Dive Insight:

Republic took over operation of Sonoma County's Central Landfill and five transfer stations in 2015 as part of a long-term contract that included plans to build this material recovery facility at the site. The company's announcement of this latest expansion was tied to Earth Day, along with news about new compressed natural gas fleets in California, Missouri and Washington.

This project is the latest in a series of recent activity by the CP Group, with Republic and other companies. They provided the technology for Republic's Southern Nevada Recycling Center — which is said to be the largest in the country — as well as facilities for Waste Pro, Resource Management Group, and others within the past year.

These facilities and many others are part of the ongoing trend that has made single-stream material recovery facilities predominant in the U.S. Recently announced advances in artificial intelligence indicate this shift could accelerate in coming years with a move toward greater efficiency and potentially less need for human labor.