Investigation into Birmingham-area recycling raises more questions

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Do you know where your recycling’s going? It seems many residents don’t – and they want to find out. Al.com conducted an investigation to find out where recycling from several over-the-mountain-suburbs was going. But the results left them with more questions. WBHM’s Kelsey Shelton spoke with reporter Margaret Kates about her findings.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

There are a lot of moving parts in the story. There are a lot of different people involved. But what I wanted to ask you was if you could just break down the recycling process, like what do city officials say is supposed to be happening? 

If you live in one of these Birmingham suburbs that is part of the Cahaba Solid Waste Disposal Authority and uses AmWaste, you’ve got one collection a week that’s trash, and you’ve one collection per week that’s trash and recycling. You don’t have to think about sorting between trash and recycling. You put it all in the same bin, put it out and then the truck picks it up. The whole collection goes to RePower South, which is able to sort trash from recycling and divert more trash from the landfill. When RePower South is closed, what AmWaste says happens is that it goes to Big Sky Environmental, which is northwest of Birmingham. And they say that Big Sky is able to sort the trash from recycling as well. The key sort of end thing is that RePower South, they are supposed to create this fuel source from hard to recycle paper and plastics. So that’s sort of how it’s supposed to work. Obviously, there’s a lot of skepticism from people that it’s working as it should. 

Now, let’s get into this investigation. Tell me what you were setting out to do. I know Apple AirTags were involved.

I was making all these calls and I couldn’t ever really get a definitive answer. And so I was sort of stuck for a while. I think it was in January that someone just said, “what if we just put air tags in the recycling and saw what happened?” It’s just sort of a mad idea. It’s just fun. But I think it felt like the only way that we could try and get something definitive. 

The air tags were sort of semi-successful. Only one of them really worked because air tags are Bluetooth activated, so they need to be near an Apple device at all times. When they’re on the truck, they stop giving a signal and then, if you remember those days of following the garbage truck, those trucks compress. They crush the trash to make more room. They would get crushed and so we only had one tracker ultimately make it to Big Sky Environmental. And that’s when we decided to go for the more sophisticated trackers, which worked a little better. We still lost a couple in the truck. 

Something that stuck out to me in your report, as you’ve already mentioned, was a lack of clarity. And so I wanted to ask, why do you think officials at these trash/recycling companies are hesitant to kind of just say, here’s what’s happening, here’s why it’s happening? 

I really don’t know. It was sort of a fluid situation throughout the whole time I was reporting, right? Because RePower South would be closed and then it was open and then was closed. So things were changing. And I think from the city’s perspective, AmWaste is their garbage provider. They sort of rely on AmWaste to kind of take care of it for them. AmWaste relies on RePower South to tell them they’re open. So it’s really, it’s sort of a whole chain of entities relying on other entities to kind of give them the information.

So after completing this investigation, what did you find out specifically and what’s still kind of unclear? 

Does this mixed stream, this commingled stream, garbage and recycling together, is that effective? That’s a question that I didn’t really address in the story, but I think there are some studies out there that show that it’s hard to prevent contamination of the recyclables. That’s the bigger question that I just personally would like to answer. 

I think we found out that it’s just really hard to get answers, honestly, to the point that we had to resort to putting air tags and trackers into people’s recycling. And it’s really hard to say; we can’t just travel up to Big Sky to see what they’re doing. It’s private property. It’s hard to say definitively if there is or isn’t recycling. It’s very much a mystery. My boss called the story a Scooby-Doo mystery, and I think that’s a good way of putting it.

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