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Plans for massive recycling facility get $5M boost from feds

Posted By: Toledo Blade on October 2, 2024.  For more information, please click here to read the source article.

Local officials gathered inside One Government Center on Wednesday to celebrate the $5 million in federal grant money that has been secured to help pay for Lucas County’s first-ever materials recovery facility.

The future warehouse-like building in the heart of Toledo will be used to sort out recyclables and identify markets for reusing them.

“If this [project] was a Beatles song, it’d be ‘The Long and Winding Road’,” Lucas County Commission President Pete Gerken said at the outset of the event, explaining that the concept for such a facility emerged more than 20 years ago.

The most practical benefit of taking on such a huge project, estimated to cost some $27 million when it’s all said and done, is saving about $300,000 a year in fuel to frequently haul all of the locally collected recyclables to the closest sorting facility 90 miles away in Oberlin, Ohio. Officials said the Toledo area gets nothing out of that except a gas bill.

By building its own materials recovery facility, or “MRF (casually pronounced “Murph”), it can join other big cities in sorting recyclables locally, saving on gas, and reaping benefits from whatever money can be generated from items such as aluminum, steel, glass, cardboard, newsprint, and plastic as newer markets are identified.

Officials said there has been a particular interest among major corporations in more glass recently.

U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D., Toledo) said the $5 million in federal money is coming in the form of a $4 million U.S. Environmental Protection Agency grant and a $1 million U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development grant.

Those funds are in addition to $7 million in grant money awarded in 2022 by the Ohio Department of Development through the state’s brownfield remediation program.

The Lucas County Solid Waste Management District has been using that money to clean and cap off the former South and Western Landfill in South Toledo, reusing industrial land and eliminating an eyesore.

That landfill has sat dormant since it stopped accepting waste in the late 1950s.

Once built, Toledo’s MRF will be used to process some 35,000 tons of recyclables a year, a combination of what’s collected from curbside bins and drop-off recycling stations. It will be operated by Balcones Resources.

The MRF is to be a massive 60,000-square-foot building on 15 acres along Kuhlman Drive near South Avenue. Verdantas and Tetra Tech are designing and engineering it.

It is expected to cost $20 million to build.

Ms. Kaptur said the U.S. EPA’s interest in the project begins with reducing climate-altering carbon emissions regionally from all of those costly, gas-guzzling trips to and from Oberlin. But it also wants to see more done nationally with recyclables, especially plastics, she said.

“One of the concerns of the Environmental Protection Agency is microplastics,” Ms. Kaptur said of the tiny bits and pieces of plastic that have become a ubiquitous problem worldwide and break down into such tiny nanoparticles that they can travel throughout the atmosphere. “We know that plastic contaminates our fish, our shorelines and, ultimately, our own bodies.”

Toledo’s position as a port city might help it identify “other opportunities that flow from the recycling center” as markets for such materials become more developed, Ms. Kaptur said.

Lucas County Commissioner Lisa Sobecki and Toledo City Councilman Nick Komives said they expect the future MRF to become an important educational and outreach center once it’s operating and open for tours.

“This is not a cheap project, but it is a project we know that is critical for us to have,” Ms. Sobecki said.

Mr. Komives, who chairs Toledo City Council’s Committee on Mobility, Sustainability & Beautification, was the one who presented the $300,000 fuel figure at the event.

“We’re going to save that money by doing that sorting right here in Toledo, and we’re going to keep our recyclables here,” he said.

Lucas County Sanitary Engineer Jim Shaw, one of the officials most directly involved with organizing plans for the MRF, stood with the event speakers but did not talk during the news conference.

Afterward, he told The Blade that work on the brownfield site is proceeding on schedule. Under a best-case scenario, construction on the recycling center would begin in about a year or so, with completion still expected sometime during the 2026 calendar year.

“We’re going to control our own destiny with recyclables,” Mr. Gerken said. “I think that’s important.”