Newspaper Star

[Red Arrow]

Recycle Michael is a star, including picture, on the front page of today's Business section in the TW.

Nice article too.

[nathanm]

Recycle Michael is a star, including picture, on the front page of today's Business section in the TW.

Nice article too.

It almost makes me want to buy a copy of the World. Almost.

[RecycleMichael]

aw shucks

[Red Arrow]

aw shucks

And I just saw Ann on Ch 6 news with her new book.

[RecycleMichael]

I am thankful the Tulsa World ran the story.

http://www.tulsaworld.com/business/article.aspx?subjectid=46&articleid=20120226_15_E1_CUTLIN329241

Recycling puts money back into Oklahoma economy

By PHIL MULKINS World Action Line Editor
Published: 2/26/2012 

With 1,100 workers, the Georgia-Pacific plant in Muskogee is the city's largest employer - mostly in the name of recycling. The plant buys recycled newsprint by the truckload and turns it into pulp for making many products, including fine writing and printing paper, coffee filters and tea bags, disposable wipes, diapers, etc. Yesterday's newspapers - a raw material for paper manufacturing - can become tomorrow's paper towels, instead of filling a landfill somewhere.

But the ultimate by-product? Jobs for local people. "It's not just a planet-saving project anymore," said Michael Patton, director of the Metropolitan Environmental Trust. "Recycling is now a big business that creates jobs and puts money back into the Oklahoma economy, not the landfill. Those Muskogee jobs are good examples of why residents should recycle. Someone else can make a living with them." The Tulsa-based MET is a big part of recycling's success. The organization collects, sorts and resales recyclable items to companies like Georgia-Pacific. Four area glass manufacturing plants buy the recycled bottle glass from the MET and the Tulsa city recycling program: Owens-Illinois Glass in Muskogee, Dlubak Glass in Okmulgee, Anchor Glass in Henryetta and the Verallia Glass Plant in Sapulpa. They employ about 1,200 people.

Orchid Paper Products Company, a fiberboard company in Pryor, has 300 jobs for people who use recycled paper and cardboard to make wallboard for the construction industry. Figures from National Economic Research Associates show 12 jobs are created per ton of material recycled vs. discarded. He said Oklahoma State University did a research project five years ago on manufacturing jobs of workers using recycled materials to make new goods. It revealed 6,000 Oklahoma recycling jobs with a $300 million annual payroll. The MET itself employs 120 people with disabilities to run their 13 recycling centers and sort items. The agency, which dates back to 1987, is a governmental trust authority that receives funding from governments to operate residential recycling drop-off locations.

Last year, Tulsa city residents put 137,000 tons of material into the trash, 60 percent of which is recyclable. But only 7,000 tons of material was recycled (8.5 percent). In the steel recycling arena, the figure runs at 20 percent to 30 percent for automobiles, he said. And, Patton says, there's room for more. "Oklahoma does a bad job of extracting recyclables from its trash," he said. "But a lot of that stuff coming into Oklahoma still makes jobs here. On Feb. 16, the MET unveiled its new baling center where the agency is using seven new employees to bale plastic bottles and aluminum cans to sell to Tulsa recycling companies."

The bottles, he said, are worth three times crushed what their value is loose in trailers, and the bottles' added value supports the seven new jobs. The $30,000 baling machine was bought by a George Kaiser Family Foundation grant. There are other people collecting recyclables for resale: janitors and waste companies like American Waste Control that just started a new factory here with a new line of 16 jobs per shift to separate recyclables out of mixed trash, Patton said. They even run a TV ad about their plant.

The reason recycling has taken longer to catch on here is trash is expensive to throw away in most parts of the world but not in Oklahoma, Patton said. Disposal rates here are $11 to $12 per ton but $100 per ton on the East Coast. "We've not been compelled to do anything but landfill it or burn it cheaply at the trash-to-energy plant, but recycling is such a bother," he said. "Ninety percent of Oklahomans think, 'Why should I recycle?' The reason is it has become a lot more valuable. It's a commodity now that creates jobs and makes lots of money.

"The value of the commodity is much more than trash. Why would you throw away something that's valuable? Why would you throw away something that has a chance to be something else? There are lots of things that have always been recycled - things we don't talk about very much." You can even recycle cars, Patton noted. Yaffe Metals and Borg Compressed Steel have always bought and crushed cars and sold them to the steel industry to make more cars. "Tulsa has a long history of recycling steel, producing hundreds of steel recycling jobs," he said. "We never drive our old cars to the landfill and throw them away. These are things people never think of throwing away. Yet people keep throwing away bottles, aluminum cans and paper."

The Oklahoma Recycling Association is the organized voice for Oklahoma recyclers and recycling businesses representing them to Oklahoma's political leaders. It is a center point for networking and resource sharing and is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization working to support communities, governments and individuals in recycling. "Recycling means many things to Oklahomans," according to the OKRA website. "Beyond resource conservation and managing solid waste, recycling creates Oklahoma jobs. Recent studies show there are more than 6,000 jobs in Oklahoma created by recycling related processes. These jobs represent $300 million in payroll each year - payroll spent at Oklahoma businesses."

Big Recyclers
CITY OF TULSA: Tulsa curbside recycling, 918-596-9777 tulsaworld.com/TulsaCurbsideRecycle Services households in the City of Tulsa. No apartments or businesses. Accepts newspaper, office paper, magazines, glass bottles, No. 1 and No. 2 plastic bottles, aluminum cans.

MET RECYCLING CENTERS: The Metropolitan Environmental Trust operates 13 recycling drop-off centers throughout Tulsa County. Some MET communities operate their own recycling centers, called affiliates. See a list of its recycling centers at tulsaworld.com/METCenters

The MET's website has a directory of all the companies that are open in Tulsa as recycling entities - the "Tulsa Metro Recycling Directory" at tulsaworld.com/METRecyclerDirectory. They all will accept Nos. 1 and 2 plastic bottles, glass bottles, newspaper, office paper, magazines, aluminum cans, motor oil (5-gallon limit), antifreeze (5-gallon limit), batteries (household and auto), cooking oil, eyeglasses, steel cans and phone books.

The MET has 13 recycling centers in Tulsa (north, east, central, south and west), Bixby, Broken Arrow, Claremore, Collinsville, Coweta, Jenks, Sand Springs and Owasso.

[AquaMan]

Thanks for not posting some of the comments after the story. Tulsan's always look for some way to tarnish good stories.

[jacobi]

Thanks for not posting some of the comments after the story. Tulsan's always look for some way to tarnish good stories.

If one wants to loose faith in Tulsa, the best place to do it are the comments sections on local news affliates.  A few months back, a cyclist was run off the road and into the back of my car, severing his carotid artery.  The story was on the local news sites.  he young guy, was someone I was vaguely aquainted with through working at whole foods.  He was on his way to work for the early shift.  In the initial footage of the kids blood all over the road, they camera caught both his box cutter and his square produce knife.  With this people were talking about how he was a gang banger and that his throught had been cut in a drug deal.  Not only was this basely false (john is a rock climbing and taking care of his body), it was comepletly devoid of any compasion.  I directed the people on the page to look up his facebook page.  I'm sure that when they were confronted with the image of a mid 20's middle class white kid they suddenly changed their minds.  The anonymity of the internet emboldens the otherwise cowardly.

That said, I realize that I am saying all of this on the internet. 

[Nik]

Do any suburbs have curbside recycling? I'd love to get that here in Sand Springs and I've thought about writing my councilor, and figured this would be good information to have.

[RecycleMichael]

Sand Springs has been in on all the discussions about what is happenng in Tulsa. I don't have any news to report, but if the Tulsa program is the success I think it is going to be, of course it will happen.

The M.e.t. center in Sand Springs is one of my favorites. It draws customers from points west and a lot of lake people bring us their recyclables late on Sunday nights. It is open 24 hours a day and easy to find on Morrow street. It will be moving whenever the BrewPub renovations need our lot. I am going to move it east a half mile and across the street from the Kum and Go.   

[Conan71]

You don't find 2 liter soda bottles disappearing from your collection sites do you?

[RecycleMichael]

Those are pretty easy to find without going to our centers.

It is hard to tell on that one because the PET bottle composition changes so much. We are seeing record tonnage of PET bottles each month, but it is mostly new water bottles. PET now makes up twice as much tonnage as Milk and Soap (HDPE) bottles combined.