If you toss something into a blue bin in Hampton Roads, there’s a good chance it ends up at TFC Recycling’s sorting plant in Chesapeake.
The company services half a million households in Virginia including Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Suffolk and parts of the Peninsula.
At the facility in South Norfolk, trucks dump material collected from those cities in giant piles. The items then get shuffled along conveyor belts where workers manually remove non-recyclables such as pizza boxes smeared with food waste.
The remaining material goes through several more rounds of mechanical screening, including a new optical sorting unit that uses artificial intelligence, said TFC president Mike Benedetto. He pointed out the machine on a tour of the facility this week.
“As that camera sees a piece of paper coming, what it will do is it will fire a jet as it gets to the end of the conveyor, and all those noises you hear are removing the paper from the bottles and cans,” he said. “That does the final set of screening and separation.”
Paper, bottles and cans get compacted into bales and shipped to customers including the O-I glass plant in Toano, which produces bottles for Anheuser-Busch.
TFC has operated in Chesapeake for half a century. It’s drawn more attention in recent years as the industry faced significant challenges that have driven up costs for the company that are passed onto local governments.
Chesapeake ended its curbside recycling program in 2022 due to those rising costs, opting to redirect funding for a public safety pay plan. Chesapeake residents recently voted on a ballot referendum asking whether they would support bringing back curbside service with a new monthly fee. A majority said no.
But in other Hampton Roads cities, residents said they would pay more to keep the blue bins.
Norfolk and Virginia Beach recently renewed their contracts with TFC Recycling after polling citizens about their interest in the programs. Virginia Beach doubled its monthly recycling fee to do so, given a cost increase of more than $4 million.
Norfolk public works director Richard Broad told City Council this week that 86% of survey respondents said an increase in fees would be appropriate to continue curbside recycling.
That will likely happen. Broad said the city had “sticker shock” from its new contract with TFC, which increased the yearly cost by nearly 60% to $5.6 million.
Broad said the city’s been using TFC “since anyone can remember. They’re pretty much the only game in town.”
Suffolk’s current contract with TFC is set to expire next summer, with the option to renew for another five years.
Benedetto said TFC saw a 25% increase in costs in recent years, due to increases in material during the pandemic, and an industry-wide market fallout that began in 2018 when China stopped accepting much of the world’s recycling material.
Contamination of the waste stream is another major challenge for all recycling plants.
Only paper, bottles and cans are recyclable in Hampton Roads. But people throw in a lot of other things, especially plastic bags, which can clog up machinery, Benedetto said.
“When people who are so zealous and wanting to recycle items put the wrong materials into the recycling cart, it drives up our costs.”
Supply chain and inflation issues have started to slow down, he said.
“We deal with the ups and downs of the market. We absorb that risk and we recycle the material. So once it comes back here, no matter what the commodity value is of those paper bottles and cans, we are separating it out and we are selling it to market.”
In the meantime, the Southeastern Public Service Authority, which handles most of the region’s trash, is considering how to move forward with its own long-term waste disposal plans.
Space is running out at the Regional Landfill in Suffolk. SPSA’s now weighing bids for a new contract aimed at reducing the amount of trash entering the landfill.
That could include a single-bin approach, where residents would not separate trash from recycling, and vendors would screen trash to remove materials with market value.
