Complimentary approaches

As regulatory agencies and municipal governments identify the need to keep organics out of landfills to reduce methane generation, construction and demolition (C&D) recyclers have seen an opportunity to collect that material, process it and market the resulting products.

Organics recycling has a lot of commonalities with C&D recycling, says Troy Lautenbach, founder of Lautenbach Recycling in Mount Vernon, Washington, a C&D recycling facility that first got into organics in 1994.

Lautenbach Recycling’s first entry into the segment was working with industrial food manufacturing plants. The facility would accept byproducts, or residuals, from the food manufacturing process and repurpose them into animal feed.

Eventually, when the first dairy digester opened in Washington, the company began supplying organic material to the digester, a relationship that continues today. From there, Lautenbach began actively seeking industrial food processors to expand that part of his business.

Because of the company’s coastal location, Lautenbach Recycling also has found a niche processing for the fishing industry. Trident Seafoods, an Alaska-based fish-producing company, is one of the biggest companies it services.

A while after branching into organics, Lautenbach Recycling bought a stake in a neighboring business, Skagit Soils Inc., after a few of the Skagit partners retired. Lautenbach’s son Tevon is now the general manager of the fully permitted composting facility that processes organic materials collected by Lautenbach Recycling.

Across the country, C&D recyclers are embracing organics, particularly in regions with regulations requiring organics management or where the legislature is advancing recycling-related bills.

“Washington state is trying to be better than California,” Lautenbach says. “We have that tailwind that helps us, whereas in the Midwest you might not see that except for some small pockets.”

For instance, in Minnesota, Dem-Con Cos. has plans to build an anaerobic digestion facility that would process up to 75,000 tons of organic waste per year, including food scraps collected from the Twin Cities metropolitan area.

“Anaerobic digestion is an interesting thing [and] pretty exciting, but the capex is tremendous,” Lautenbach says. “You really have to have the marketplace, and in Minnesota, they’ve done a public-private partnership, which is an interesting idea that I think has a lot of merit.”

Operating out of Dallas, Champion Waste & Recycling Services started hauling organics in 2008 for some of the larger producers in the market. The aim was to help divert this highly recoverable material from the landfill, Champion Vice President Paul Kuhar says.

Over the years, more of Champion’s clients were looking for organics management solutions. In 2019, as Champion began to develop its third recycling facility, it designed a state-of-the-art depackaging and composting facility to allow for the diversion of a large amount of source-separated and commingled food waste.

Champion manages organics for commercial and residential high-rise buildings, and the company has developed into a one-stop shop for organics recycling, designing programs to provide education, collection and processing.

“We service high-volume producers down to commercial buildings with cafeterias looking to pull food waste out of the stream,” Kuhar says. “No client is too small as we design programs that fit their sustainability goals.”

While Lautenbach Recycling works primarily with commercial and industrial customers, the company also processes curbside organics collected by local municipalities and companies including WM, Houston. Additionally, the company accepts leaves, grass clippings and kitchen food scraps from homeowners at its composting facility.

“One other cool thing we do is we haul brewer’s grain bulk from a brewery to a dairy farmer,” Lautenbach says. “You’re always trying to keep your ear low to the ground for new markets, new problems that people are trying to find homes for.”

Equipment & end markets

In making the transition into organics processing, Lautenbach Recycling designed specialty equipment to address the odors that come with organics management, including sealed-door enclosed roll-off boxes to transport material.

In 2022, when the Washington Legislature passed House Bill 1799 to keep organics out of the landfill, Lautenbach Recycling purchased a depackaging machine. While Lautenbach Recycling does not operate an anaerobic digester, the company has developed close relationships with a few local anaerobic digester operators, delivering its organics to them.

In Texas, Kuhar employs a HS 90 unit from Italy-based Tiger Depak to process commingled organics. The unit separates organic from nonorganic materials, which are mostly packaging. After processing, Champion uses a variety of screens and windrow turners to produce nutrient-dense organic compost.

“We use our complete process to take material that was diverted from the client site, turn it into compost and then use it back at the site for landscape beds, which makes that complete circle,” Kuhar says.

Compost markets generally are seasonal, Kuhar says, with springtime being the largest volume output. However, Champion Waste provides materials for composting year-round.

Compost isn’t the only end market for organics. Methane digesters can create methane that can be captured and used to create electricity, Lautenbach says. Substrates from digesters can be used as cattle bedding, and liquids can be used to make fertilizers.

Organics recycling challenges

Contamination is the single biggest issue in any type of recycling program but especially organics, Kuhar says.

“Our goal with all of our recycling facilities was to design a system that can deal with contamination when it happens, which provides an opportunity to educate the client,” Kuhar says.

For organics, this education opportunity involves collection drivers taking pictures using a tablet-based system that provides direct feedback to the customer when loads are delivered.

One differentiator between C&D materials and organics is that organics have a short shelf life of just a few days.

“If you let it sit around too long, it’s going to start to attract vectors like rats, mice and flies, and [it] smells,” Lautenbach says. “[Y]ou can let a pile of C&D sit for a long time before you get to processing.”

While C&D materials can be stored indefinitely, Lautenbach Recycling tries to process organics as soon as they arrive to provide a buffer in case of any disruptions in the process.

“That way we have a little bit of time,” Lautenbach says. “We don’t have stuff already at 3-days-old or 5-days-old that is waiting to be processed, and then the machine goes down. That’s critical.”

Prospective recyclers

For C&D recyclers looking to branch into organics, market evaluation is key, Kuhar says. He encourages asking plenty of questions to evaluate each particular client’s needs, as well.

“Is the market saturated with haulers or processors as it pertains to organics?” Kuhar says. “The answer is usually not, or at least in our part of the country.”

To encourage a customer to expand a recycling program, the process needs to be easy, Kuhar explains. Ease of collection, including containers and trucks, program design and postcollection options will be the keys to success for any program, he adds.

For recyclers just getting started, Kuhar recommends partnering with a processor, allowing a C&D recycler to offer collection services but not necessarily the processing. However, he cautions, clear expectations and goals must be established on both sides to make an organics program successful.

“Composting is a cool microcosm of what recycling is—it’s getting material and processing it as effectively and efficiently as you can and then finding the best end market on the backside and managing people all the way through,” Lautenbach says. “From that standpoint, the opportunity for people in different regions is really something they should be looking at.”

The author is managing editor of Waste Today and can be reached at smann@gie.com.