New Hanover recycling center hampered by shopping bags

NEW HANOVER COUNTY -- Joe Suleyman has a plea for the county's residents -- please stop putting plastic shopping bags in your household recycling.

Standing next to several massive cubes of waste that can't be processed by the county's recycling center, New Hanover County's environmental management director said 70 percent of the huge bales are plastic film -- most of it shopping bags and garbage bags.

Suleyman is told that the bales look like several weeks' worth of mostly plastic bags.

"It's about two days' worth," he said.

Suleyman said county residents with "good intentions" are hampering recycling operations by putting shopping bags and other plastic film into their household recycling bins.

"This stuff is recyclable, just not in your residential recycling stream," he said. Instead, residents should take bags back to their origin.

"Right outside of every Food Lion store, every Harris Teeter, just about every store, they have receptacles for plastic bag material," Suleyman said. "Please take them there. When it comes here, it becomes a problem here."

That includes regular plastic garbage bags as well, he said.

The bags tend to gum up the huge machine's works. Material runs along conveyor belts, where about seven to eight employees at different stations try to remove major contaminants like food, diapers, yard waste and pet waste.

"That belt moves 60 feet per minute," Suleyman said. "They don't have time" to remove each plastic bag.

So the bags, which are light and flimsy, can often end up in the gears of the machine. When that happens, all of that work stops as crews shut down the machine so crews can open it up to access that machinery.

"They have to literally cut away all that stuff," Suleyman said. "So there's eight people that do nothing but pull out plastic bags and other contamination."

He said the equipment is shut down "at least once per shift" and often as much as three times per shift. Unscheduled downtime averages about eight to 10 hours per month -- the equivalent of $40,000 in labor costs each year, he said.

"It's wasted labor time and maintenance costs increase," Suleyman said. "It makes recycling harder to do, economically."

And the problem has a ripple effect, as those bales are deposited into the county landfill -- taking up precious space.

Shopping bags and plastic film, such as the wrapping around cases of bottled water, can be recycled. The most common reuses are as new bags or film or even plastic pellets that can be used to make other products, like composite lumber.

But, Suleyman said, it just takes a little more time and effort to be "green" with those products.

"Please don't bag your recycling," he said. "Just don't bag it."

Reporter Tim Buckland can be reached at 910-343-2217 or Tim.Buckland@StarNewsOnline.com.