WM opens $30M recycling facility in Fort Walton Beach, Florida

Late last week, WM officially opened its newest recycling facility, a 45,000-square-foot material recovery facility (MRF) in Fort Walton Beach Florida.

The Houston-based waste and recycling company hosted a ribbon-cutting ceremony Oct. 3 to mark the occasion, with attendees including Brandon Shaw, WM Gulf Coast area vice president; state Rep. Patt Maney of District 4; Paul Mixon, chair of the Okaloosa County Board of County Commissioners; and Fort Walton Beach Mayor Dick Rynearson.

“WM continues to execute on its investment plans in recycling infrastructure with the opening of our new WM Fort Walton Beach Recycling Facility,” Shaw says. “For decades, we’ve played an integral role in helping to keep Northwest Florida clean and safe. This new facility enables us to further our commitment to bringing sustainability-related solutions to the region by expanding access to recycling services to more communities across the Gulf Coast.”

The WM Fort Walton Beach Recycling Facility features what the company says is “state-of-the-art” technology that is expected to allow the site to process up to 76,000 tons of recyclable materials per year.

The Fort Walton Beach project is part of WM’s companywide plan to invest more than $1.4 billion in new and upgraded MRFs across North America from 2022 to 2026. WM Vice President of Recycling Brent Bell told Recycling Today earlier this year that the company plans to upgrade or open 13 facilities this year and 13 in 2025.

In mid-April, WM completed a nearly $39 million upgrade to automate the WM Germantown Recycling Facility in Wisconsin.

The company’s planned investments in its recycling infrastructure are intended to:

• increase access to recycling while increasing overall recycling capacity;
• collect more types of plastics;
• utilize intelligent sorting technologies, where conveyors and optical sorters communicate with each other and with technicians to improve material quality; and
• include an additional optical sorting line that serves as a final quality control measure for any recyclables not initially captured.

The company says the with the demand for recycled-content products expected to rise, its planned investments seek to enable it to increase its ability to manage more recycled materials and potentially enhance access to recycling for its customers.

With the Fort Walton Beach site, Bell told Recycling Today in April that WM is excited to bring single-stream recycling to the area and aims to educate residents and vacationers that recycling will be available and how to do so properly.