RECYCLING TIPS
What you can recycle:
- Office paper, junk mail, folders
- Magazines, catalogs, telephone books
- Newspapers, including inserts
- Flattened cardboard
- Paperboard (food boxes)
- Clean pizza boxes
- Plastic bottles and jugs
- Drink cartons (such as orange juice containers) with caps and straws removed
- Aluminum cans, steel and tin cans
- Glass bottles and jars
What you can’t recycle:
- Plastic bags
- Styrofoam
- Medical sharps or syringes
- Drinking glasses
- Coat hangers or scrap metal
Other advice:
- Trash and recyclables need placed in separate containers. "If you're not putting it in a separate bin at your apartment, then it's going to the landfill," said Jeff Rumpke, regional vice president of Rumpke Consolidated Companies Inc. overseeing the Cincinnati market
- Stick to the lists. If things go to the recycling plant that shouldn't, it adds transport costs and goes to landfill anyway. "Scrutinize their waste stream at their house and compare it to this list," Brad Dunn, division manager of Rumpke Recycling in Cincinnati, advises.
- Recyclable containers don't have to be scrubbed clean, but need rinsed out
- Labels don't' have to be removed
- Re-attach caps to plastic bottles, because loose lids are too small to be sorted by the machines
- However, remove cap and straws from drink cartons
RUMPKE CONSOLIDATED COMPANIES INC.
What: Waste management and recycling company with 11 landfills and 11 recycling centers in Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio; also services parts of West Virginia
Founded: 1932
Headquarters: Colerain Twp., Hamilton County
President and CEO: Bill Rumpke Sr.
Regional Vice President overseeing Cincinnati: Jeff Rumpke
Website: www.rumpke.com
Revenues 2012: $488 million
Employees: more than 2,600
MORE ONLINE
See our video inside Rumpke’s new recycling plant in St. Bernard
RUMPKE CONSOLIDATED COMPANIES INC.
What: Waste management and recycling company with 11 landfills and 11 recycling centers in Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio; also services parts of West Virginia
Founded: 1932
Headquarters: Colerain Twp., Hamilton County
President and CEO: Bill Rumpke Sr.
Regional Vice President overseeing Cincinnati: Jeff Rumpke
Website: www.rumpke.com
Revenues 2012: $488 million
Employees: more than 2,600
MORE ONLINE
See our video inside Rumpke’s new recycling plant in St. Bernard
RUMPKE CONSOLIDATED COMPANIES INC.
What: Waste management and recycling company with 11 landfills and 11 recycling centers in Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio; also services parts of West Virginia
Founded: 1932
Headquarters: Colerain Twp., Hamilton County
President and CEO: Bill Rumpke Sr.
Regional Vice President overseeing Cincinnati: Jeff Rumpke
Website: www.rumpke.com
Revenues 2012: $488 million
Employees: more than 2,600
MORE ONLINE
See our video inside Rumpke’s new recycling plant in St. Bernard
Bulk waste material handler Rumpke Recycling processes more than 1 million pounds of product a day from the curbsides of businesses and homes in Cincinnati, Dayton, Hamilton, Louisville, Middletown and surrounding areas. Rumpke can recycle aluminum, glass, paper, cardboard, paperboard, and drink cartons.
“This is the stuff that’s generated every day,” and there’s a lot of it this time of year from gift packages, newspapers thick with advertising and holiday parties, said Brad Dunn, division manager of Rumpke Recycling in Cincinnati.
However, Christmas lights — even though they contain plastic and glass parts — can’t be recycled. Nor can Styrofoam packing peanuts, plastic grocery bags or videocassette tapes be recycled at Rumpke’s plant.
Plastic bags can be recycled by returning them to the store where customers got them, Dunn said.
Bowling balls, deer carcasses and wood burning stoves aren’t recyclable either at Rumpke’s new recycling facility (people have tried), but parts of the stove could be scrapped by a company that processes metal scrap materials.
Electronic materials, including computers, must go to special facilities that can recover the parts that can be reused.
Rumpke, best known for hauling trash, wants more people to recycle, but it’s just as important to recycle things the right way, company officials say. Otherwise, plastic grocery bags and videocassette tapes people put in the recycling bin and that end up in Rumpke’s recycling plant will be transported to the company’s landfill, adding costs in the process.
“One thing that helps us to keep costs down is when people stick to these lists,” Dunn said.
“Whenever they send items in here that are not acceptable or not recyclable we’re just adding costs to the process. We then have to sort that material out. We then have to transport to landfill,” he said.
In April 2012, Rumpke’s Cincinnati-area recycling plant on Vine Street was destroyed by a fire.
The family-owned waste business rebuilt the recycling plant and upgraded the material sorting technologies. The new $32 million recycling plant in St. Bernard opened last month. Its series of conveyor belts, magnets and optical scanners process about 1.2 million pounds of paper, glass and plastic — with workers sorting out the non-recyclables — a day.
The recycling plant is capable of handling twice that amount, said Jeff Rumpke, regional vice president of Rumpke Consolidated Companies Inc., overseeing the Cincinnati market.
“We took that opportunity to upgrade and prepare our company for the future growth of recycling and where we see the industry going,” Rumpke said. “We’re looking to grow recycling in the greater Cincinnati service area.”
Rumpke’s customers include area businesses, municipalities and residential subscription customers.
Customers have two bins on the street, one for trash and one for recycling. Two truck routes run every week. Once loaded, the trash truck heads for the landfill and the other heads to the St. Bernard recycling plant.
Estimates are that more than half of what ends up in a landfill could have been recycled, composted or scrapped, Rumpke officials said.
Greater Cincinnati’s trash goes to Rumpke’s Colerain Twp. landfill, which has about 13 years of space left at current incoming volumes. More recycling could save space longer, Rumpke said.
At the recycling plant, once the material is sorted by type and compacted into large bales, it is sold to manufacturers that can re-use the recycled content to make a new product. The glass travels back to Rumpke’s glass recovery facility in Montgomery County that separates it by color to make fiber glass insulation or new glass bottles. After further processing, the glass is also sold to manufacturers.
“We want the material to go to its most efficient, best end use,” Rumpke said.
Colerain Twp.-based Rumpke Consolidated operates in Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio and services parts of West Virginia. Annual 2012 revenues of $488 million made it the 26th largest privately-held company in the Tristate, according to the Deloitte Cincinnati USA 100 list. The whole company employs about 2,600 people.
Companywide, Rumpke has 11 landfills and 11 recycling centers.
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