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Everything Old Can Be New Again

Rumpke operates one of the nation’s largest recycling facilities, making St. Bernard a hub for the economy and the environment.

by John Fox

The Rumpke Recycling Facility in St. Bernard accepts residential waste from across the Cincinnati region as well as from Dayton and the Miami Valley area, Louisville, south central Indiana, and eastern Ohio. It’s the fourth largest facility in North America, processing about 700 tons of paper, metal, glass, and plastic per day. Two shifts per day process about 55 tons of waste an hour, while the third shift focuses on cleaning and equipment maintenance.

Rumpke built the St. Bernard facility from scratch in 2013, replacing the previous building that was destroyed in a fire. The initial investment was $32 million, and the company has spent several million dollars more in recent upgrades to add AI robotic technology to assist with sorting plastics, as well as other improvements.

The facility’s key job is separating waste into specific categories of recyclable material, and the process starts with staff manually pulling out items that can’t be recycled by Rumpke, from lumber to license plates to rubber duckies. Equipment then uses magnets, air puffs, robotic arms, and good old-fashioned gravity to divide cardboard from cans and clear plastic from color plastics.

Rumpke’s new Hefty ReNew program allows curbside recycling of previously hard-to-recycle plastics in orange bags put out with normal recycling. This material is shipped to end users that can convert it into plastic pellets, plastic lumber, and other construction materials.

Once the recyclable material is separated, it’s baled and shipped via truck or rail to end users who do the actual recycling. Nearly 95 percent goes to manufacturers within a 250-mile radius of Cincinnati with around 80 percent staying in Ohio. It takes about 60 days for an aluminum can to return to a store shelf after it’s been tossed in the recycling cart.

Photographs by Catherine Viox

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