Buyer found for Baldwin Trash

Published by the Mobile Press Register

Buyer found for trash from beach

Cans, chairs, umbrellas will be sold along with appliances culled in residential pickups

Thursday, August 02, 2007

By RYAN DEZEMBERStaff Reporter

ORANGE BEACH -- From beer cans to umbrella stands, beach chair frames to abandoned tent poles, city officials have found a buyer for the heaps of scrap metal left behind surfside by tourists each summer.
As such, the City Council is slated to approve an agreement with Pensacola-based Southern Scrap Co. that Public Works Director Tim Tucker said will likely net the city a profit, or at least help defray the cost of keeping Orange Beach's sandy vistas spiffy.
"I'm sure there will be a check coming back to City Hall each month," Tucker said Tuesday. "It's a win-win because it keeps this stuff out of a landfill."

In 2½ months city employees have filled about seven trash bins with junk -- some 210 cubic yards of material, metallic or otherwise -- that they've hauled off the beach, Tucker said. Should the council approve the deal with Southern Scrap at its meeting Tuesday, Tucker said his department will immediately begin separating the metal objects, stripping them of non-metallic components -- primarily the webbing in chairs and such.

The scrap company will also, as part of the agreement, buy old appliances that the Public Works Department collects from residents as part of its bulk waste pickups as long as the city first removes pollutants, such as the chlorofluorocarbons and hydrochlorofluorocarbons found in refrigerators.

"We used to have to pay somebody to come get this stuff, now they're paying us," said Councilwoman Tracy Holiday.

Keeping Orange Beach's shoreline clean has been a topic of public debate for the past two years.
As the crowds of vacationers grow in size, so do the piles of waste they leave behind. In a world of $20 tents and cheap, chintzy beach chairs, large items that may have once been packed into the minivan and taken home are increasingly treated as disposable items.

Last April, City Hall invested about $50,000 in a beach-cleaning machine that is run along public stretches of the beach, churning the sand to remove cigarette butts, beer bottles, food wrappers and rocks. Last summer the council flirted with the idea of banning the large tents that tend to get left behind and become a burden for employees to remove.

Tucker said the notion of trying to sell the material collected from the beach came from City Administrator Jeff Moon when he saw the pile that had accumulated. From there, Tucker said, it was a matter of finding a scrap dealer in the phone book.

When Bill McVay, marketing manager for Southern Scrap, came to Orange Beach he not only said he'd buy the beach material, which is mostly aluminum, but that his company would also be interested in the steel-laden appliances the Public Works Department picks up from households.
While the Pensacola company will charge no rental fee for a 30-cubic-yard container, as is common in other waste deals, the city will be required to pay $225 to have its scrap hauled away. That amount is less than Orange Beach usually pays its regular hauler, Allied Waste, to take away a trash bin full of waste, Moon said.

Plus, Orange Beach has the opportunity to more than make up for the hauling fee through the metal sales, Tucker said. Going by current market rates, Southern Scrap will pay Orange Beach 40 cents for each pound of aluminum it collects and $3 for every 100 pounds of steel, according to the agreement.

About 563 pounds of aluminum would cover the $225 collection fee, so would 7,500 pounds of steel.

McVay said that once the metal reaches the company's Pensacola facility, it will be processed into sizes ready for reuse, bundled up and sent to its mill customers. The aluminum will simply be compacted and bailed before being sent to separate users, McVay said.

"Hopefully it's something that will work out for both of us," McVay said Tuesday. "We really, at this point, don't know what we're looking at."