Charleston County to farm out recycling
CHARLESTON - In private hands, Charleston County's recycling operation should make $1 million more each year than it does now, said County Council officials who voted Tuesday night to privatize the facility.
Council approved a contract with American Recycling of South Carolina to run the facility in Charleston, and in another waste-related vote agreed to sell the site of the former garbage incinerator in North Charleston to Shipyard Creek Associates for an as-yet undisclosed price.
Council also considered opening negotiations with a local company promoting a garbage "gasification" system that critics said sounded a lot like a new incinerator.
All of the votes were connected to the county's effort to revamp the way it handles the roughly 300,000 tons of garbage that county residents throw away each year, and improve recycling.
The sale of the incinerator site supports North Charleston's still-disputed plan to reroute rail lines to serve the new port facility. Shipyard Creek Associates has been working with the city's leadership to develop an intermodal rail yard by 2014.
"It's part of the rail thing, and we weren't using the land," said Councilwoman Colleen Condon, who said the rail plan increased the property's value.
While most council members supported the privatization of the recycling center and the sale of the incinerator property -- Henry Darby opposed the sale, worried about the impact on nearby neighborhoods -- County Councilman Elliott Summey's proposal to begin negotiations over a garbage gasification plant was a surprise to most council members and to the county's waste management consultant.
The county had sought proposals on alternative waste management technologies last year and received 11 in December, but none have been presented to County Council by consultant Mitch Kessler or the county's attorney, Joe Dawson, who has been leading the waste management project with Kessler.
Dawson told council members there were probably four proposals out of the 11 worth learning more about. After some discussion, with several members opposed to Summey's request to get a proposal only from Energy City SC of Charleston, it was agreed that County Council will get a presentation from Dawson on the several alternative technologies at a meeting in September, probably in an executive session.
Summey said after the meeting that he was frustrated that it has taken so long to pursue alternative technologies, and he wanted to consider Energy City because it is a local company.
Councilman Paul Thurmond also expressed frustration about delays, and both he and Summey said the county has an opportunity to stop using landfills entirely.
Energy City's website describes a "gasification technology to convert municipal waste into electricity while salvaging all metal and glass for recycling income." The technology is described as "a non-incineration system" that uses a 1,112-degree process to turn garbage into gases.
"I am hesitant to do what, at first blush, looks like putting up another incinerator," Condon said.
Until the last year, most of the waste collected throughout the county was burned in the incinerator in North Charleston, but County Council declined to negotiate a new contract with the company operating the sometimes controversial 20-year-old facility.
Also until last year, the county was dumping more than half of the yard waste it collected at the Bees Ferry Landfill, rather than composting the material. Ending that practice has allowed the county to more than doubled its county-wide recycling rate, from 10 to 21 percent, and using some of the least-desirable yard waste as landfill cover has allowed the county to stop buying dirt for the same purpose.
Going forward, the county plans to launch a number of demonstration projects aimed at testing the viability of food composting, allowing residents to put all recycling in a single bin, and other initiatives.
