The Central Peninsula Landfill is once again recycling cardboard after the successful installation of a replacement baler. The return of service comes more than a year after a catastrophic equipment failure severed some recycling services at the Soldotna landfill.
The decades-old baler that broke compacts so-called “fluffy” recycling, like paper and cardboard. The borough still recycled glass and aluminum while the baler was out of commission.
One major change for borough recycling has to do with plastic – the landfill previously had multiple large containers for different types of plastic. But Borough Mayor Peter Micciche says that’s a service that will not be returning. Here he is speaking to local business leaders earlier this month.
“You use less energy to make plastics than you do to convert existing plastics into plastics,” Micciche said. “It just doesn't make sense. So especially when you're adding the greenhouse gasses that we're generating, collecting this stuff and shipping it down to the Lower 48, it just doesn't make sense.”
The borough positioned the equipment failure as an opportunity to take a bigger look at how the borough manages solid waste. About 10 cents of every dollar in the borough’s general fund goes to its solid waste department, which covers the Soldotna landfill and a handful of transfer sites around the borough.
Last year, the borough assembly signed off on spending $1.7 million in federal pandemic-era aid for landfill projects. Most of that went to replacing the machine that compacts trash in the landfill. The rest went to removing the broken baler and designing a new facility for the replacement equipment – a used baler from Valley Recycling.
Around the same time the assembly approved that money, the borough said it had met with an Anchorage-based company about ways to recycle high-quality plastic in-state. Alaska Plastic Recovery has previously collected plastic on the Kenai Peninsula to turn it into what it calls Grizzly Wood. That’s a lumber-like substance made from plastic.
And Micciche says they plan to stockpile plastic the company could use – plastics No. 1, 2 and 5.
“We're willing to collect it for him, if he'd like to come pick it up,” he said. “We're going to experiment with that this summer, and if it works out, then we'll collect for him, but we will not be spending borough dollars to recycle plastic.”
Now that the new baler is up and running, the borough says cardboard recycling is back in business. On social media, the borough said clean, dry and baled cardboard will be sent for recycling either in-state or in the Lower 48. Contaminated cardboard will go in the landfill.
The Central Peninsula Landfill is open daily from 8 a.m. to 5:45 p.m.
