Continual evolution

Waste is a constantly evolving business, which means waste collection containers need to continually evolve too.

With a focus on product development and testing that’s threaded through every aspect of the business, Cascade Engineering, based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, is uniquely positioned to stay at the cutting edge of container trends and technology.

Thanks in part to a longtime preferred supplier relationship with Houston-based WM, the nation’s largest waste management company, Cascade prides itself on innovation. It was the first U.S. waste container producer to be 1SO 9001-registered. Through its container buy-back program, Cascade recovers any brand of HDPE injection-molded containers and recycles them into new collection carts.

Its signature Eco Cart, the world’s first cart made from recycled residential curbside plastic and bulky rigid plastic, won the 2021 Design for Recycling Award from the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (now the Recycled Materials Association). Cascade partners with KW Plastics (KWP), a Troy, Alabama-based plastics recycler and supplier of high-density polyethylene (HDPE) and polypropylene (PP) recycled resins, to manufacture the carts.

Waste Today spoke with Scott Downer, national sales director at the Cart Solutions division of Cascade Engineering, to learn more about the company’s approach to container design and what’s on the horizon.

Waste Today (WT): Cascade makes its containers with HDPE. Why is that considered the industry-standard material for waste containers?

Scott Downer (SD): As a material, it gives you the right amount of rigidity and the right amount of flexibility in a cart. One of the things that happens is you have automated containers and automated trucks that use a grabber. [The cart materials have] to be rigid enough not to “hourglass,” so that when I dump it, I don’t leave three bags in the bottom of that cart. Then from a semiautomated tipper perspective, it’s also got to be rigid enough to hold that three seconds up, three seconds down.

WT: How many Cascade customers have switched to the recycled plastic Eco Carts?

SD: Upwards of 75 percent of our customer base uses the Eco Cart.

Ten percent of the total cart weight is [supplied by] KWP, and then we use up to 40 percent more [recycled plastic from our buy-back program]. After carts are on the street for 10, 15 [or] 20 years, they end their useful life. What we do is we bring the carts back, get them reground, pelletized and put back into the carts that go back out there. We know what that material was; it’s our own material. You can have a 50 percent recycled cart, and that’s a big thing for [these companies] in their sustainability reports. They enjoy that.

One of the things that does dictate this is colors. With light colors, you can’t really use the KWP if aesthetics is a big thing. If you do a black or a dark gray or blue, those colors mask that recycled material. Some places really like the idea of being able to see the [recycled content] in a cart, it makes a swirl-type design. The city of Grand Rapids uses a swirl cart because it shows that they are using recycled material. But the darker the color, the better for aesthetic purposes.

WT: Beyond material, how important is container design when it comes to various end uses?

SD: Design makes a big difference—the material and the design for automated collection are key. We have this major testing area out back. A cart gets picked up once a week, 52 weeks in a year. It’s got a 10-year warranty, so that’s 520 cycles that part needs to go through, theoretically, under a 10-year warranty. What we do is we take our grabber, and we will run to 1,560 times, so three life cycles. We set those grabbers to the worst conditions out back, and we squeeze [the container] to the point where it’s mashed—and it can’t break.

WT: What kinds of advancements are in research and development at Cascade when it comes to recycled materials for carts?

SD: Cascade’s a triple bottom line company—people, planet, profit—and we’re always looking at that planet piece, looking for ways to get these hard-to-recycle plastics into a usable product that the consumer can use, or companies can use down the road and make into something else.

We’re looking at UBQ, [a thermoplastic from Israel-based UBQ Materials that] actually uses all the stuff you can’t recycle in your trash, organics and things like that. And they’re pelletizing and sending it to us. We’re working with UBQ, and it’s almost pushing it to carbon neutral.

We’re looking at … tires, all the tires that get used in this industry. Is there a way we can get that rubber into the carts?

WT: Is there anything else in terms of innovation and container design that you see coming down the road?

SD: You’re always trying to improve the widget, no matter what, right? So, you’re always looking for things. The one thing that I will say is, as organics collection starts to become more and more of a thing, what types of systems [will we need]?

It goes back to the anaerobic digestion you’re using in that area. Is it one that takes your yard waste and kitchen waste, or one that just takes kitchen waste? Is there something that we’re going to have to do from an organics collection perspective? Do we have to make the carts lockable?

There are always things that are coming up, but I think that’s the next frontier. So as these states continue to say, “Hey, we want ‘X’ amount diverted from landfill.” You can only get so much diverted through the recycling process. We’ve got it … as far as we’re going to get now. Then it becomes … food waste, even pizza boxes and that type of thing—for most recycling programs, you can’t throw a pizza box in the recycling; it contaminates it. But it could go into an organics container.

Those are the types of things that I think are on the forefront that are still probably a couple [or] three years out, and we’re just starting to scratch the surface. And maybe there is something new out there. Maybe there’s a better container that will work for that type of collection.

Scott Downer is national sales director for Cascade Cart Solutions, a division of Cascade Engineering, based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Find out more at www.cascadeng.com.