Completing a comprehensive development plan that has been a culmination of the past 30 years, the Solid Waste Authority of Palm Beach County is concentrating on increasing efficiency, continuing to educate the public and provide environmentally responsible, reliable, long-term disposal capacity for the residents and businesses in Palm Beach County.

The Solid Waste Authority of Palm Beach County (SWA) is a Dependent Special District formed in 1975 by a special act of the Florida State legislature with the sole responsibility of managing the solid waste generated within Palm Beach County. The Governing Board of the Solid Waste Authority consists of the seven members of the Palm Beach County Board of County Commissioners. With near 100 percent public ownership of its Integrated Solid Waste Management System, the SWA’s award-winning system includes:

  • Seven Home Chemical and Recycling Centers:
  • Recycles or properly disposes of more than 3.3 million tons of home hazards each year
  • Six transfer stations
  • Two waste-to-energy facilities:
    • One using refuse derived fuel (RDF) with a 2,000 ton per day capacity
    • One using mass burn technology with a 3,000 ton per day capacity
  • Currently there is excess capacity of almost 175,000 tons per year to account for population and waste generation growth
  • Energy generated by the two waste-to-energy facilities:
    • Renewable Energy Facility 1 (REF 1) – 65 mW
    • Renewable Energy Facility 2 (REF 2) – 95 mW
    • Energy from REF 1 and 2, net of house load, is sold to Florida Power and Light, the regional utility
  • Energy consumption on Palm Beach Renewable Energy Park is provided by this waste-to-energy generation
  • One dual-stream Recovered Materials Processing Facility:
  • Processes almost 100,000 tons of recyclables each year
  • One Biosolids Processing Facility:
  • Processes more than 130,000 tons per year of waste water treatment plant residuals
  • End product is sold as fertilizer additive
  • One landfill:
  • Landfill gas-to-energy powers the Biosolids Processing Facility

Solid Waste AuthorityThe Home Chemical and Recycling Centers, landfill and transfer stations are operated by SWA employees, while the two waste-to-energy facilities, the Recovered Materials Processing Facility, and the Biosolids Processing Facility are operated under operating and maintenance agreements. This means that the SWA hires private contractors that are specially-qualified to run the day-to-day operations and assume the costs associated with maintenance. REF 1 and REF 2 are operated by the Palm Beach Resource Recovery Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Babcock & Wilcox Company. Babcock & Wilcox was part of the team that constructed the facilities, supplying the waste feed, boiler, grate equipment and air emissions control systems. Says Marc Bruner, Chief Administrative Officer, “Having the operator on a team as part of the design-build is critical because it not only brings their expertise, but it also gives the perspective needed to design a facility that is going to last for a long time and operate efficiently.”

Serving 39 municipalities and unincorporated territory with a population of 1.4 million, the SWA maintains more than 300 public recycling drop-offs, has roughly 385 employees and operates about 65 tractor-trailers to haul garbage from six transfer stations, strategically located throughout the county, to one of the two waste-to-energy facilities and recyclables to the recycling processing facility. These high-capacity transfer stations greatly reduce traffic and, correspondingly, reduce the carbon footprint associated with collecting and transporting solid waste and recovered materials. The tractor-trailers travel almost 4 million miles per year. The SWA contracts for the collection of garbage, recyclables, yard waste and bulk waste in the unincorporated areas. Each municipality is responsible for their own collection of these wastes.

Solid Waste Generation and Assessment

“Solid waste generation within Palm Beach County has steadily increased since the recession,” says Mark Hammond, Executive Director. “Solid waste for the present period is up 5 percent over the same period last year.” Last year, the SWA annual budget was $292,000,000, coming from annual disposal service assessments (which funds roughly 70 percent of the SWA budget), tip fees (approximately 12 percent), and the sale of recovered materials and electricity (approximately 18 percent). Part of the SWA’s success stems from the innovative programs that they have put into place over the last 30 years, including focusing on waste-to-energy facilities, household hazardous waste, and the efficient processing of waste.

Residential Garbage Collection, Yard Waste and Curbside Recycling

With a responsibility to dispose of all of the waste generated in the county, the SWA serves a population split approximately 50/50 between municipalities and unincorporated areas. Each city is responsible for collecting the waste, while in the unincorporated area, the SWA is responsible for collection. The SWA divided the unincorporated area into districts and issued franchises to private haulers to collect that waste. There is twice a week MSW pickup, once per week vegetation, twice per week bulk, and once per week recycling. Recycling is a two-bin system with glass/aluminum/plastic/steel containers in one bin and paper in the other.

Household Hazardous Waste (HHW)

The HHW program began in the late 1980s with once per year weekend collection events. By the early 1990s, the SWA set up two permanent, staffed locations. Over time, unstaffed drop off centers were set up at all of their transfer stations. “We now have six transfer stations throughout the county and a central facility that are open six days a week for residents to come drop off their material,” says Bruner. “We’ve got it set up so there are disposal bins or cans for their electronics, pool chemicals, batteries, florescent tubes, used oil, paint, etc.” The drop-off locations at the transfer stations are monitored by video cameras and the facility’s staff in order to manage the traffic. Every day, the HHW staff collects the material that has been dropped off. Last year, the SWA collected more than 3,000,000 pounds of HHW and either recycled it or had it sent offsite for safe disposal rather than having it go into the landfill.

Customer Convenience Drop-off Center 


While relatively new, the customer drop-off center at the SWA’s main complex is open six days per week during regular business hours and is designed to handle a variety of waste, including regular MSW, construction and demolition debris, and vegetation. Its primary purpose is to accommodate the public that may show up in small vehicles, providing a safer and easier alternative to directing them to a facility tipping floor. Customers can come to the facility, back into a spot and empty their load into a container or, if it is vegetation, they can push it onto the ground and the staff will take of it from there. “Since its opening six months ago, it has been very well-received,” says Bruner. “In fact, we are contemplating an addition that would create a bigger area for vegetation.”

Transfer System

Because Palm Beach County is very large—between RI and DE in size—the transfer station system is very important to the SWA and private haulers. Having a centralized disposal facility is a fundamental element in the SWA’s overall integrated solid waste management concept. Without these transfer stations, every vehicle in the county would have to come to one spot, resulting in a sizeable traffic burden and maintenance cost. According to Bruner, “The transfer station system is a tremendous benefit to the collection fleet. Instead of driving 30 miles or more up and back, they are only driving 10 to 12 miles, so they can get back on the routes a lot quicker. It took us a while to put the whole system in place, but it really works very well for us in terms of fuel saving and mile savings and convenience.” Located strategically throughout the county, the first one was built in 1989 and the last one was built in 2011. Most of the county’s population resides within a band that is about 10 to 11 miles from the Atlantic coast to the east, while one group of communities is roughly 40 miles to the west near Lake Okeechobee. Five transfer stations run from the southern part of the county to the northern part of the county along the coast and close to a major thoroughfare, while one transfer station is located in the western part of the county, serving the three municipalities in the Lake Okeechobee area plus the unincorporated area residents.

Biosolids Processing Facility

Opened in 2009, the biosolids facility is a joint venture between the SWA and the major wastewater utilities in the county. In Palm Beach County, the wastewater utilities treat the wastewater and end up with two products, a liquid that they dispose of and a solid product that typically gets either landfilled or land applied as a soil amendment around the state. Direct land application of biosolids can result in nutrient spikes in local waterways, which may cause algae blooms. The SWA’s solution is to use landfill gas to dry and sanitize the material, which, in turn, makes a pellet type of product that can be used as a nitrogen amendment in fertilizers. The pellets are a slow-release fertilizer that poses a lower risk of having their nutrients washed into waterways. Pelletization also provides major volume reduction—for every semi-truck load full of material that comes in, a pickup truck-sized load of pellets is created.

Recovered Materials Processing Facility (RMPF)

After residents sort their recycling into the yellow bin, which contains all of the fiber (paper, cardboard, etc.) and the blue bin, which is used to collect containers (plastic, metals and glass bottles and cans), these two groups of commodities are collected in the curbside recycling program and delivered to the RMPF. One section of the facility processes paper and cardboard while the other half sorts and separates the comingled containers, glass, plastic and metals. Approximately one hundred thousand tons of material goes through the facility per year and the SWA markets the end product to several outlets in the U.S. and overseas. However, as Bruner points out, there are a couple of factors that are currently affecting recycling, “Paper has changed over the last years, both in size and thickness, resulting in a reduction of tonnage. The same thing happens to plastic and aluminum. Over the past few years, water bottles have gotten much flimsier, using only the bare amount of material. The amount of items collected has not gone down, but the weight of it has. It is an interesting quandary because waste reduction is supposed to be the top of the waste management hierarchy, but waste reduction is being done at the production level. Recyclers are now getting 10 percent less material than we did before.”

Ray Schauer, Director of Engineering and Public Works, goes on to explain that it presents a challenge because, from a labor and cost perspective, each piece weighs less. “So, to get the same tonnage, you have to separate more containers. It has impacted the efficiency on a per pound basis of the SWA’s process and made it a little more expensive.” However, the SWA has offset those challenges in two major areas: first, outreach. The SWA has done a lot of training within their transfer stations to identify and control the contamination of the material that is coming in. They also have a significant public outreach program in place in order to educate residents about what is allowable in recycling containers. Secondly, they are planning modifications to the RMPF that would include additional optical sorting capability to increase efficiency.

Schauer continues, “Our facility represents the current state of the art. But it was built almost 10 years ago, and we are getting ready to upgrade some of that equipment for the next generation. One of the things that the dual stream system has allowed us to do is maintain a very high quality of outbound material, as the contamination is minimized. Our material pricing is fixed by published commodity pricing but we do get a premium because of our consistent high quality.”

Hammond points out that currently, those in the recovered materials business are witnessing a shift in the types and quantities of materials collected from both residential curbside and commercial programs. “Markets for recovered materials are also demanding higher quality. The challenge will be for those who collect and process recovered materials to be ready to meet the public’s demands for recycling programs and the demand of the market for high quality.”

Solid Waste AuthorityWaste-to-Energy

One of the main challenges faced by the SWA was ensuring adequate disposal capacity. In 2005, the existing waste-to-energy facility was operating at capacity and landfill space was projected to be depleted by 2025. The SWA Governing Board evaluated options of constructing a new landfill or increasing waste-to-energy capacity and determined that waste-to-energy was the better option. “Probably the single hardest decision that a local government official ever makes is where to put a landfill; they are the most unpopular land use out there. That was one of the issues that we faced when we looked into potentially developing another landfill location,” says Bruner. “The alternative to that was to add a second waste-to-energy facility because it would extend the life of our existing landfill by 30 to 40 years and provide a reliable source of clean, renewable energy. In terms of cost, we were candid and said waste-to-energy is probably going to have a larger upfront cost, but the elected officials thought it was worth it to avoid another landfill. Since this wasn’t our first waste-to-energy facility, they already understood the benefits of it.” The SWA’s original 1980s master plan envisioned two waste-to-energy facilities and two landfill complexes, one located in the northern part of the county and one in the southern part of the county. At the end of the day, by expanding the waste-to-energy capacity through the addition of a new facility, the volume of waste required to be land filled could be reduced by over 90 percent and building another landfill would not be necessary in the foreseeable future.

Schauer explains that the new waste-to-energy facility is the last facility included in the SWA’s $1.4 billion program that has been implemented over the past 10 years. “The SWA was created in 1975. In 1983, the original 20 year comprehensive plan was developed that called for six transfer stations, a recycling processing center, two waste-to-energy facilities and two landfills, and it took about 30 years to reach that point. In 2003, the SWA initiated an update to the original master plan to ensure that the future disposal needs of the county were met considering the projected growth of the county and the estimated waste generation. The second phase was put into motion, which included rebuilding two of the transfer stations, building a new transfer station, relocating and expanding the recycling facility, and a retrofit to the first waste-to-energy facility in 2009. Right on the heels of that, we expanded our waste-to-energy capacity with the new facility. REF 2 is the only waste-to-energy facility in the country right now that uses selective catalytic reduction technology and we’ve got the lowest amount of emissions that exist in the country.”

The SWA’s next challenge is to find a use for the ash that is generated by the waste-to-energy facilities. “If we find commercial uses for that ash, we could be looking at adding another 15 to 20 years on our landfill capacity at our existing facility,” says Schauer. “It could be potentially used as road base and aggregate in concrete. However, it is subject to some environmental regulations, so we are working with the University of Florida to do extensive testing to determine if there is a viable option to use it commercially.”

Training and Outreach

Internally, the SWA does a lot of training for their employees with regards to job operations and risk management. One of their biggest risks is the transfer system because they have 40 or 50 trucks or tractor-trailers with 20-ton loads of garbage on the streets every day. The rigorous program includes hiring the best-qualified drivers with clean records. The safety officer rides along with them at the beginning and at every quarter to ensure that they are following the proper procedures and guidelines. The SWA also holds regular safety meetings at all of their facilities and they reach out to all of their operations staff at least quarterly.

A significant amount of SWANA training is required for landfill spotters and operators and RMPF operators. Since they all must have SWANA certification for their jobs, employees must participate in ongoing training in order to re-certify every three years. Even people in areas like engineering that aren’t required to maintain a certification are encouraged to participate in ongoing training.

The SWA also reaches out to the public with information on recycling and proper disposal. Becky Robinson, Public Affairs Coordinator, points out, “We have a really strong and active education team. We lead tours throughout the year, sometimes twice per day. We provide field trips for schools that meet education standards. We have a LEED Platinum certified Education Center with a touch table where visitors can play informative recycling games. We reach thousands of people every year through field trips, presentations, promotional materials and tours.” The SWA also offers safety and environmental outreach on household hazardous waste. For example, they promote safe disposal of boating wastes to help those who have expired flares or mercury float switches and do not know how to properly dispose of them.

Goals and Future Plans

Because of the SWA’s current integrated waste management system—the landfill, transfer stations, waste-to-energy facilities, etc.—they are not looking at any new significant capital projects. “We are really trying to get the most out of our system in terms of efficiency, “says Bruner. “That leads us to more work with the community on recycling programs and reducing contamination. Operationally, we’re looking at increasing efficiencies. Some can seem trivial, but they add up. Take for example the weight of our trucks and trailers. When we spec those vehicles, we need to make them as light as possible while still ensuring they are sturdy and safe because every ton of weight we reduce in the tractor-trailer combination is a ton of waste that we can haul. Over the course of the year, increasing our hauling capacity by 1 million tons could save a lot of money. It’s those kinds of incremental efficiencies that are going to be the focus of our attention.”

Bruner believes that the SWA’s most outstanding achievement so far has been providing environmentally responsible, reliable, long-term disposal capacity for the residents and businesses in Palm Beach County. “Over the past couple of years, one of our initiatives that has really taken hold is expanding our public education and outreach program—educating all of the grammar and middle school children in Palm Beach County about the positive impact environmentally-conscious disposal of solid waste has on our environment. Willie Puz, our Director of Public Affairs and Recycling, was really instrumental in making some of these changes over the last few years. We have started to take that next step and we have gotten a lot of positive response.”

For more information, contact Willie Puz, Public Affairs and Recycling,  at (561) 640-8914 (o), (561) 379-2405 (c) or via e-mail at [email protected].

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