Courtesy of Rocket Recycling
By Jill Nagy
Empty deposit bottles and cans are swiftly processed at a rate of 600 per minute through a high-speed six-lane chute by new counting machines at Rocket Recycling’s recently opened location, 112 Excelsior Avenue in the EBI Beverage Center—its third facility.
“We saw a need here for high volume processing,” said Tyler Russell, owner along with his wife, Julia Sanzen, of the company. He said that the company processes tens of thousands of bottles and cans each day at each of its three locations. Previously, empty containers were sorted by hand, a slow and expensive process. Russell estimates that the new sorting machine does the job 100 times faster than the reverse vending machines at the grocery store. The average customer brings in hundreds of recyclable containers at a time, Russell said, and in the summer they may bring in thousands. The new sorter allows them to “get their money and get out very quickly.”
Russell described their newest sorter at the Queensbury store as “very complicated and very expensive,” and noted that it was developed by another New York state company. The machine reads the bar codes on the containers and sorts them by size and distributor. Sixty days later, the scrap aluminum from a redeemed can is part of a new can. Glass containers are, for the most part, are ground into sand, he said.
Rocket Recycling also has redemption centers in Glens Falls at 255 Ridge Street and Queensbury at 330 Aviation Road. However, the Saratoga location quickly became the company’s busiest, according to Russell. “We get busier every week,” he noted.
Future plans depend, to a great extent, on the fate of proposed changes in the state bottle bill. Proposed changes include adding other types of containers, such as water and juice bottles, to the roster of redeemable containers; increasing the deposit from five cents per container to 10 cents; and increasing the processing fees paid to companies like Rocket Recycling. Any of those changes, in Russell’s opinion, would be extremely helpful. “We are planning for it and definitely hoping for it,” he said.
While Russell’s business is thriving, he said that the container redemption business as a whole is not doing well. In the past year, 150 centers closed in New York state, about 20 percent of the total number in the state, he noted.
For further information and a video of the new sorter in action see rocketrecycling.com.