Under the right market conditions, approximately 75 percent of the commercial trash and municipal garbage thrown away in Kent County could be recycled or composted if the right facilities existed. That’s the conclusion of a waste characterization study by Gershman, Brickner & Bratton (GBB), a consulting firm which spent several weeks last year sifting through the county’s garbage to analyze how much could be diverted from landfills.
“There are materials in the waste stream that have value, so long that they can be successfully recovered from the waste stream and made available for reprocessing,” said Jennifer Porter, senior vice president with Virginia-based GBB. The study underpins Kent County’s plans to restructure its waste processing around a new $280 million sorting and recovery operation capable of handling 430,000 tons of waste per year at a business park adjacent to the South Kent Landfill in Byron Township.