Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall and other leaders got a tour of the new, state-of-the-art Waste Management facility’s inner workings and viewed countless large cubes of smashed-together paper, plastic and other materials awaiting shipment. Waste Management, a private company that contracts with the city, invested $17 million into building the facility.
Mark Snedecor, director of recycling operations at Waste Management, said the new facility uses automation and runs about three times faster than the prior Salt Lake plant. It also “produces a quality of product that’s probably 80% better than the prior ones,” Snedecor said.
“It’s an incredible amount of waste that otherwise would be buried in our earth, and to hear that the vast majority of it gets sent to post-consumer manufacturers to be turned into things like carpet and new milk jugs, it’s inspiring,” Mendenhall told KSL.com after the tour.
“Those small decisions that we make at our homes and in our offices about where that piece of trash, that cardboard box, that lid to our yogurt, it all ends up actually being sorted and taken care of. It’s really inspiring to see,” she said.
The Salt Lake location is one of just two of its kind built by Waste Management so far. “We took elements that we’ve used from other manufacturers, combined it all in a system the way we wanted it set up, noting that it’s the second of its kind in the country the company has,” Snedecor said.