Photo by Craig FritzCraig Fritz/Tribune

Craig Fritz/Tribune

A bulldozer pushes through trash at the landfill west of Albuquerque. The city is working on ways to expand recycling so that landfills like these don't fill up so quickly.

Photo by Craig FritzCraig Fritz/Tribune

Craig Fritz/Tribune

Joseph Torres sorts through newsprint at the city's intermediate processing facility before the paper is bundled and sent out for sale. Newsprint is a widely recycled product. As the city considers strategies for expanding recycling, even more newsprint could end up being sold. One proposal under consideration: Installing recycling bins at apartment buildings.

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Can the city of Albuquerque interest anybody in a huge pile of broken glass?

They're trying, and so far, the answer is a cautious yes.

Every piece of glass recycled in the city ends up pulverized into little bits and dumped in an outdoor storage area at Cerro Colorado Landfill.

"I've been here since 1993. I've never cut myself," said Frank Gonzales, a supervisor at the city's recycling processing facility, as he reached into the pile one day last week, scooping up a generous helping of glass and rubbing it in between his bare hands.

A pile of user-friendly glass - in pebble and powder form - is almost an inspiring sight, especially when it shimmers in the sun. But what can be done with it?

"Right now, there's not much of a market for this stuff," Gonzales said.

In a sense, the pile of glass - about 20 dump trucks worth at the moment - represents the hopes and dreams of Albuquerque's recycling program.

Both for environmental reasons and to conserve landfill space, the city wants to find alternative uses for literally everything people throw away, according to Leonard Garcia, the director of the solid waste department.

While he concedes that a few things will always end up at the dump, the inspiration is still there.

"It's a goal that we're going to strive for," he said.

That means finding some sort of use for all kinds of categories of solid waste, including that big pile of glass.

The range of strategies has two parts.

On the consumer end, the city is trying to encourage people to recycle more yard waste, tin, paper and cardboard.

And on the receiving end, the city, with recent encouraging words from two city councilors, is looking at turning vast chunks of the trash stream into compost or electricity.

There's even hope for the shimmering pile of glass, according to Garcia: Landscapers are interested, and have bought up some of the supply. Another potential market: contractors, who might be able to use the glass in their concrete, might be interested, he said.

Closing the loop

A few paces from the pile of glass sits the building where all the newspaper, plastic and tin recycled in Albuquerque ends up.

There, a team of eight sorters from the Saint Martin's Hospitality Center homeless shelter work in a maze of conveyer belts, separating different recyclables into large bins.

The conveyer belts lead to large machines that smash the material into "bales" of about five by three by two feet. Workers load those bales onto trucks sent by companies that want to buy the raw material.

Here solid waste meets the commodities market. Different materials sell for different prices, and those prices are always fluctuating.

Old copies of The Tribune, the Journal and the Alibi fetch $85 per ton these days, Gonzales said. Plastic milk jugs are a more lucrative deal at 32 cents a pound, making a semi-truck load worth about $13,000, he said.

The center as a whole brings in about $700,000 per year off processing a little over 2.5 percent of the waste stream and spends just over $1 million to do it, said Superintendent Stan Morris.

There's plenty of room to grow, if only more people in Albuquerque would recycle.

The plant operates a daily 10-hour shift but is idle the rest of the time.

That could change under a bill proposed by Mayor Martin Chavez. The legislation, under consideration in a committee of the City Council at the moment, would install recycling bins at apartment buildings. Such a plan would cost about $400,000 to start, and about $240,000 to keep going annually. According to city projections, the program would increase recycling by 20 percent.

The convenience factor, Garcia says, should encourage people to recycle more.

"We can see quite a bit more of the waste being recycled instead of being buried," he said.

A quick trip to the landfill will confirm that.

Every day, a steady stream of trucks lines up, dumping contents into huge holes. Cardboard, paper and plastic make up a noticeable portion of the trash.

"I get sick when I see that," Gonzales said.

Composting

Take several tons of yard waste, chip it and add some horse manure. Drop it in a pile and let it cure for a few months, watering occasionally.

The city has repeated this process enough to create between 20,000 and 30,000 tons of compost, which it hopes to sell or give to the Parks and Recreation Department for use there.

That takes another bite out of what would otherwise go into the landfill, in this case, about 6 percent of the annual stream.

The program started late last year, using discarded Christmas trees and the waste collected on special free disposal days.

Garcia hopes it will continue to catch on.

"I'm hopeful that we're going to see more and more of the green waste being diverted to our facility," he said.

Burn, baby, burn

Recycling and composting depend on residents doing much of the sorting, and while city officials say the efforts are worthwhile, they don't make the sort of huge bite that will cut the waste stream down to near zero.

Changes on that front could be on the horizon.

Earlier this month, two city councilors - Martin Heinrich and Isaac Benton - called on the city to start using garbage to generate electricity.

Even before that, Garcia's Solid Waste Department was researching the possibilities and taking international field trips to see how other cities are dealing with the problem.

One facility in Vancouver, Canada, for instance, incinerates 250,000 tons of garbage each year - about half of what Albuquerque throws away - generating power for about 16,000 homes, according to government Web sites.

Garcia visited the site, and a plant in Edmonton that uses a unique composting process to break down regular garbage, selling the end result to farmers.

Such big ticket projects would involve millions of dollars and large construction projects, but they do seem to have political support.

"I would love to see any and all reuse of our waste stream," Benton said.

Heinrich, meanwhile, speculated that such projects would be on about a five-year horizon.

Mayor Martin Chavez said the city should be in a position to select a specific technology in the next 12 to 18 months, but he wants to proceed with caution.

"No city in America has done away with their landfills yet," he said.

And while he would be happy for Albuquerque to be first, "I don't want to see Denver succeed because they learned from all our mistakes."