World Market Center saves big with recycling program

Recycling center may save buildings $450K by end of year

Heath E. Combs -- Furniture Today -- Kids Today, 5/14/2008 12:01:00 PM

LAS VEGAS – Prior to the first Las Vegas market in July 2005, Gerry Sawyer watched from World Market Center’s dock as 28 refuse containers were being filled with waste faster than they could be pulled to the city’s landfill.

“We ended up doing 748 refuse pulls to the landfill. Republic had to come haul away all the plastic, cut up carpet and cardboard,” said the WMC CEO, who added that during that market garbage removal ended up costing about $180,000.

At the time, Sawyer, formerly an Air Force colonel who served as Base Commander for Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada – where “everything” was recycled, he said – took a step back.

He thought to himself that there had to be a better way.

“Republic had a hard time keeping up,” Sawyer said. “There were six or seven trucks doing nothing but our project to stay up with the refuse.”

“It just didn’t make sense,” Sawyer said. “Fundamentally, why would you want to drive a dumpster load of packaging foam to a landfill? It just seemed insane. It didn’t make any sense from an environmental standpoint. It didn’t make any sense from good neighbor standpoint.”

For the winter 2006 show, the Center would bring in a single cardboard bailer with very limited capacity—using manual labor to sort the waste. It would help realize a 50% reduction in both the number of refuse pulls and cost.

“Then I sat down with the recycling company after the January 2006 show, and said we need to do this even better,” Sawyer said.

In 2006, the Center made an investment for the industry, Las Vegas and the environment by purchasing $346,000 worth of recycling equipment and built a Recycling Center on campus.

The World Market Center on-site recycling center was launched during the winter 2007 Market. More than 70% of all refuse was recycled.

World Market Center’s Recycling Center is comprised of a main bailer, a secondary bailer, two conveyors, one shredder and one polystyrene foam extruder. What wasn’t recycled was compacted to decrease volume at landfills.
 
The extruder re-constitutes packaging foam and nuggets by superheating and melting them into an ingot that reduces their volume by 98%. The ingots are loaded into bags, tied off and taken away by flatbed.

An independent company was hired for labor. And a recycling company pays for the shipping, transit and delivery of recyclables to a reconstitution location in exchange for the WMC’s cardboard, plastic and Styrofoam product.

WMC began noticing savings immediately. In the first year, even factoring in labor and the cost to pull non-recyclables to the landfill, on-site recycling would pay for all but about $7,000 of the initial purchase of the equipment.

In 2008, the cost savings will be over $450,000, Sawyer estimates.

For Building B, the cost to take the trash to the landfill without any recycling would have been $355,000 based on the number of trucks and the pull rate. The cost to pull in Building A would have been $227,000.

Since the January 2007 show, the Center has realized an 81% overall reduction of refuse and recycled 469 tons of cardboard, Styrofoam, and plastic.

“If you factor in what that means to the environment, it’s absolutely huge,” Sawyer said.

He envisions the potential for having two recycling yards on campus, one for the north and one for the south campus.

“The equipment I have can handle buildings A, B and C. As we add more phases we will have to add more equipment and personnel to the load,” Sawyer said.  “We have never seen the level of refuse we saw during our first market, despite receiving significantly more trucks in shorter periods of time since.”

Sawyer said that the WMC program is getting the attention of some state agencies, who may copy the model. The facility has also conducted numerous tours with convention center authorities to discuss replicating the program.

“We’re very young in our inception. Word starting to filter out that we have this capability,” Sawyer said. “Our goal is to be 100% recyclable and environmentally friendly. We now have a 98% solution in place and I’m trying to make us even greener as we go forward.”