Chattanooga’s troubled roadside recycling program will soon be promoted by a company that grinds glass into sand, and another that makes it easy to compost food waste, and strives to better educate city residents on what can and cannot be recycled Recycle.

The pilot project demonstrated during the city’s annual Entrepreneurship Week on Tuesday has been approved and received between $3,500 and $5,000 in funding to test their ideas.

"This is the best crowdsourcing," Mayor Tim Kelly said after a speech at the Waterhouse Pavilion.

Roadside recycling accounts for about 80% of the city’s recycled materials, but the roadside recycling program was suspended in July due to a shortage of truck drivers. However, even while the program was running, most of the materials collected by the city—especially some plastics—cannot be recycled and eventually become waste, Kelly said.

"Those things have been sent to landfills, and talking about this is politically inconvenient," Kelly said.

Kelly added that the suspension of the roadside shuttle program, which will resume after raising employee salaries in the city on November 1st to attract more drivers, is an important opportunity to re-examine the program that needs improvement.

"I think this is a real time worth teaching for all of us. Let's review what went well and what didn't go well, and how we solved it," he said. "We have a great opportunity here."

Four proposals have been cut to test ideas to help residents recycle more efficiently and reduce the amount of waste processed by the city.

"These ideas are being implemented, the results will be measured, and the city will know how progress is made," said Christine DiPitro, the project director of the non-profit small business booster company laboratory.

— Norm Lavoie and Michael Ryan, NewTerra: Provide simple and easy-to-use compost for 100 households, and conduct a pilot garbage collection every other week.

— Brian Wright, Green Charity: Let the city participate in existing projects, collect items that are difficult to recycle, and donate aluminum rebates to the Habitat for Humanity project.

— Mackenzie Tapley and Jimmy Urciuoli with Green Steps: Update educational materials about recyclable and non-recyclable.

— Chris Greenwood, olivine glass crushing: crushing recyclable glass into sand for reuse.

She said that one of the biggest challenges facing effective recycling programs is insufficient demand for waste plastics that were once ideal commodities.

"The demand for these previously used materials is not what it used to be," DiPietro said. "We think that many things that are recycled will end up in landfills. But people like to put things in recycling bins."

Jimmy Urciuoli of Green Steps said that China stopped accepting most plastic waste from the United States in 2018.

"Plastics 3 to 7 are usually not recyclable, which is something I didn't know for a long time," Urciuoli said. "When China stopped accepting our plastic recycling in 2018, all this really changed. When this happened, these plastics were basically out of date in the market."

As the recyclables market changes, signs and other educational materials about what recyclables and non-recyclables are becoming inaccurate. Updating this information is part of a pilot program initiated by Urciuoli and Mackenzie Tapley.

"As the recycling market changes, workers have been making signs with cardboard and markers, and we can do better," Tapley said. "We will update the logo to make it accurate."

Co-founder Chris Greenwood said that the city’s roadside projects do not accept glass and limit the type of glass it accepts in garbage collection centers, but Olivine Glass Crushing can turn waste glass into popular sand.

"Through this pilot project and a large hammer mill, Olivine will turn glass breaking into Chattanooga's primary method of glass recycling," Greenwood said. “The demand for sand from buildings exceeds the supply so fast that even in the Middle East, the birthplace of the Arabian Desert, they are importing sand from places as far away as Australia and Canada.”

In order to divert food waste from landfills, where landfills account for 24% of waste materials, NewTerra is looking for 100 households to participate in a program to simplify composting and change waste collection to once every other week .

Kelly said that ultimately, the city’s website should have a transparent understanding of what is recyclable, what is not, and what happens to the materials that residents try to recycle.

He said that reducing consumption and reusing items is as important as recycling waste, and these ideas will complement the city’s efforts to improve recycling.

"The concept of public entrepreneurship may sound like a contradiction, but believe it or not, it's the same thing," he said.

Contact Mary Fortune at mfortune@timesfreepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @maryfortune.

See the full schedule at colab.co/startupweekcha.

Job Fair: Noon to 4pm at Waterhouse Pavilion

Maker's Marketplace: 5-7pm at Waterhouse Pavilion

Entrepreneurial Society and Entrepreneurship Award: 6-9 pm at Finley Stadium

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