“We get a lot of boxes as you can imagine,” said Gibbons, “the wrapping paper, the plastic, all of those things. We see a huge increase in all of that.”

Gibbons is a manager with Rocky Mountain Recycling in Salt Lake City.

This time of year, Gibbons says he sees about a 20-percent increase in the amount of paper that comes through his facility.

As soon as a truck dumps off whatever people put into their recycling bins, it goes through a conveyer belt system to be sorted.

Workers sift through material to remove plastic, metal, or anything else that isn’t paper.

These workers pick through roughly four items a second.

“They’re amazing,” said Gibbons. “They do a great job. If there is any contamination, they spot it and they will pull it out so we’re sure we’re sending out the best product we can.”

These workers have a 98-percent accuracy rate to keep the paper as pure as possible.

From there, the paper goes into another chute where it’s tied together. Then it comes out in 1-ton bails, ready to be shipped to the paper mills instead of a landfill.

“It’ll be shipped to a paper mill, where yesterday’s wrapping paper will be turned back into newspaper or even next year’s wrapping paper,” said Gibbons. “It lets us know we’re taking care of today, so we’ll have a have a beautiful environment tomorrow.”

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is a leading-edge recycling company providing a range of innovative services to commercial and industrial companies throughout the United States. Based in Salt Lake City, Utah, RMR sells, services and finances equipment for customers who are ready to take advantage of today’s recycling advances.

• Intermountain West largest paper recycler.
• Operation in 11 states.
• Over 200 Employees.
• Recycling tens of thousands of tons per month.
• Media spotlight: New York Times, CNN Money, Waste News, Wal-Mart, internal news and more.

All that is thanks to the new recycling program instituted just this year by the city of Kaysville.

Many cities throughout Davis County have adapted recycling programs over the past few years, and Hiatt and members of the Kaysville staff visited Rocky Mountain Recycling in Salt Lake City this month to see what happens to the city’s recyclable refuse.

“There’s not a better program out there,” said Larry Gibbons, business development manager at Rocky Mountain Recycling. “You recycle it seven or eight, nine or 10 times,” he said, then, in the case of Kaysville city, it’s tossed out and sent to the burn plant where it generates energy. Recycling first is valuable because, he said, “if it’s burned, it’s gone.”

Of cities like Centerville, that have adapted a green waste recycling program as well, he added, “That’s the meanest, leanest, greenest program around.”

Gibbons said Kaysville city staff had done a good job educating their citizens about what can and cannot be recycled. Yes to plastic milk jugs and their lids, no to wire hangers and greasy pizza boxes. About 11 percent of the recyclables that have come in so far from the city are unusable, a rate that he said is good when starting a new program.

Contamination, such as a glass bottle, which would be crushed by the garbage trucks’ 5,000 pounds per square inch crusher, will make the other recyclable materials unusable.

While touring the center, Gibbons walked the group through an area where employees pull plastics from paper, another where metals are drawn up by magnets, and another where a machine can sense and sort the type of plastic by the light it reflects.

“These machines are so amazing, they help push the recycling to make it more practical now than ever,” he said, by allowing citizens to place everything in one bin rather than having multiple bins.

Gibbons said their location, at 3300 S. and 900 W., cuts down on transportation costs for the agencies that use them.

Other savings come to the city, in that they now have to pay less in landfill costs.

“Where we can keep it out of a landfill, it makes a huge difference,” said Gibbons. He said they will soon be providing more detailed information to the city on the environmental impact of their recycling, including numbers of trees saved and the amount of product diverted from the landfill.

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Rocky Mountain Recycling processes more than 45,000 tons of recyclable materials each month. All kinds of paper, cardboard, plastics, aluminum and other metals.

The brand new, $7 million single-stream sort system takes all of the recyclables from one big pile, and sends them into the bins where they belong.

John Sasine, president of Rocky Mountain Recycling, says the upgrade was critical to keep up with the expanding recycling market.

“This technology is 10 or 15 years better than the old system that we had,” Sasine said.

Three-foot wide conveyor belts carry the pop bottles, beer cans, cardboard boxes and newspaper through a series of screens and sorters. Screens first pull the cardboard away; the conveyor separates different kinds of papers: shredded, newsprint and magazine.

Farther along the process, milk jugs are spotted by an optical lens, and blasted into a bin. Later, a magnet plucks metal cans from the stream.

It’s efficient and effective for such a high volume of recyclables, but the company still needs people to sort the items the machine misses.

“They make sure there are no containers in with the paper and no paper in with the containers,” Sasine said.

If the materials mix, Rocky Mountain Recycling cannot sell the finished bales on the market. “Contaminated” bales end up in the landfill because the paper producers and metal smelters can’t use them.

“They have some really strict guidelines for what they can accept, because they have to turn it into a product that can be introduced back into manufacturing. If it’s contaminated, it’s unusable to them. That’s why a machine like this is critical,” Sasine said.

The owner says this expansion almost fell through before it even started. An out-of-state bank pulled the plug on the business loan last October, but First Utah Bank came through with the loan at a critical time.

In this economy, Sasine is very grateful that his local lender came through with the loan.

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“Our target customers are the largest retailers in the country,” said John Sasine, president. “Enthusiasm for the program has been so high that companies asked us to start immediately after a presentation.” Based in Salt Lake City, RMR operates throughout the Western US running recycling programs for municipal, industrial, and commercial customers. It is best known for the Super Sandwich Bale, created several years ago when Wal-Mart was looking to collect and recycle hangers and shrink wrap accumulating in their back rooms.

The Super Sandwich Bale™ is a simple solution no one previously thought of. Once plastic waste is collected and staged to 25 to 30 cubic yards, it is added to a baler used to recycle cardboard in an entirely inedible recipe. First, add a bottom layer of cardboard, then add the filler layer of shrink wrap and hangers, plastic bottles and cans, and office paper and crush it into a two- to three-foot high midsection. Top it off with cardboard and serve to a material recovery facility (MRF).

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Wal-Mart uses millions of them a year – uses them just once and then has to figure out what to do with them, along with the mountains of plastic film, shrink-wrap, shipping pallets, cardboard boxes, trailer tags and other behind-the-scenes detritus of the American shopping experience. Not too long ago, Wal-Mart employees just threw most of that stuff away.

Rocky Mountain Recycling came up with an idea for Wal-Mart to recycle the filmy plastic wrap off each piece of clothing that comes into the store rather than throw it away. This idea is called the “Super Sandwich Bale™,” a seemingly obvious innovation whose patent paperwork is a foot thick.

For nearly two years now, Wal-Marts everywhere in America have been using the Super Sandwich Bale™ – which means they now recycle more than 25 percent of what once was tossed into the trash compactor. Plastic clothes hangers currently account for a third of this volume.

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