San Antonio’s recycled trash has a new home on the city’s far South Side.
Inside a large warehouse just off Loop 410 and Interstate 35, the City of San Antonio’s garbage trucks are dumping thousands of pounds of colorful recyclable trash into voluminous piles each day, 85% of which is collected curbside from residents’ homes.
It’s from here, at Balcones Recycling’s brand-new San Antonio-based “materials recovery facility,” that our daily discarded items will begin their journey of being separated by each material and then processed into bales.
Over the course of just minutes a labyrinth of machinery parcels apart the paper, aluminum, tin, and cardboard — helped along the way by a few human workers — to be stored in massive bins until they are compacted to be resold.
The new 145,000-square-foot recycling facility was built to handle the city’s trash and began operating on the South Side in August, representing a $68 million investment in the city’s recycling program.
Earlier this year, Balcones Recycling entered into a 15-year municipal recycling contract with the City of San Antonio, under which the Austin-based company will manage the processing of all recyclable materials collected by the city’s Solid Waste Department through 2039.
Plans for the city to transition to using Balcones Recycling first began in 2022, after city staff reviewed several proposals in its search for a new recycling contractor and found the company to be the most favorable option.
Previously, the City of San Antonio contracted with Republic Services, a major player in the North American waste industry based in Phoenix. In 2017, Republic Services acquired ReCommunity, the original contractor, and took over the agreement that had been in place since August 2014.
For years, the City of San Antonio has had “really ambitious sustainability and zero waste” goals, said Alexandra Gyarfas, director of marketing at Balcones Resources. She added there’s been good progress within the city — noting that in 2009 the residential recycling rate was 14.7% whereas in 2019 that rate was 35.8%, exceeding the nationwide average of 32%.
“While those numbers themselves are amazing and a reason to celebrate, they highlight the need for continued work,” Gyarfas said. “We have a lot of work to do to get those numbers to be better, and Balcones is so honored to be able to partner with the city of San Antonio to help with that effort.”
Here’s an inside look at what now happens to your recycled trash after you throw it into the blue bin.
The process
Balcones Recycling’s new plant can process up to 50 tons of trash per hour and runs five and a half days per week, using cutting-edge technology such as optical sorting systems and AI to make the process faster and safer.
After compacted trash is brought in by the city’s garbage trucks and dumped directly into the facility’s floor, two large yellow bulldozers work in unison to move the small loads onto a bigger mountain residing in the corner of the depot that towers almost to the ceiling.
Occasional loud pops are heard as the bulldozers drive over water bottles and soda bottles that had their caps put back on — though the company’s workers are unfazed by the sound. The air in the plant smells slightly sour, reeking of old milk cartons and crushed beer cans.
“You kind of get used to it,” said Brandon Cogburn, maintenance manager at Balcones Recycling with a shrug.
The bulldozers steadily take sizeable scoops of trash over to the mouth of a colossal machine system where processing begins. In here, the trash immediately starts being tossed and spun around within large corkscrew gears — called augers — before being deposited onto conveyor belts.
The augers are able to separate material by weight and size — which replaces the traditional pre-sort work found at other recycling plants that is performed by humans.
“What that means is that we got our machinery to protect our people instead of having our people protect our system,” Gyarfas said. Balcones’ system also helps remove glass early on in the process, helping keep workers safer, she added. That glass is processed at the plant, something Gyarfas was proud of as she noted most recycling facilities have to take glass separately.
Once roughly sorted onto the conveyor belts by material, the paper and plastic trash go through one of the plant’s 12 optical systems. These systems are machines that use either near-infrared technology or AI to scan the material as it’s going through the conveyor. The optical systems can identify different material types by different grades — for example, newspaper versus cardboard, helping sort materials further. The systems then use jets of air to separate the materials into different grades so items can be processed with their own type.
It’s here, at the ends of their lines, that humans help do sorting work. Two quality check stations are manned by roughly a dozen people who help both make sure that higher grade cardboard is not going in with the low-quality paper and to also assure there’s no metal in this part of the assembly.
Metal trash goes onto its own part of the massive system, where it will pass under an electrified magnet that can help separate aluminum from tin. These streams too will be scanned by optic systems and quality checked by human hands before being deposited for compacting.
From here, the materials are each smooshed down by a baler and cut into blocks of specific weights for resale and reuse.
A new future for San Antonio
The Balcones Recycling facility marks a new more sustainable start for the city of San Antonio, said the city’s Interim Solid Waste Management Director Josephine Valencia.
Valencia noted that while the city only handles residential recyclables, Balcones itself also can curate deals with commercial businesses interested in recycling in San Antonio.
“If you’re generating recycling, they’ll take it from you guys, and I think that’s really exciting for the city as a whole because our local government only touches a portion of what can be recycled,” Valencia said. “To have this facility that is able to provide services to the entire community … I think is a really good thing.”
