New Facility Archives - BusinessWest

New Recycling Facility Redefines ‘State of the Art’

By George O'Brien August 17, 2023

What Goes Around…

Frank Antonacci, left, and Jonathan Murray have been leading many different constituencies on tours of the MRF in Berlin, Conn.

Frank Antonacci says he’s lost track of how many tours he’s led of the All American Material Recovery Facility (MRF) in Berlin, Conn., which handles material from across the Nutmeg State and Western Mass.

“Suffice it to say, it’s a big number,” said Antonacci, a principal with Murphy Road Recycling, an operator of several recycling facilities, which, in partnership with Van Dyk Recycling Solutions, suppliers of the system’s equipment, opened the state-of-the-art facility in early 2022.

Since then, in addition to overseeing this intriguing operation, which processes more than 50 tons of recyclable material an hour, Antonacci and Jonathan Murray, director of Operations for Murphy Road Recycling, have been leading individuals and groups through the massive facility to show them what goes on there and why this operation is among the most advanced of its kind in the country — and the world, for that matter.

And there have been many different constituencies donning the bright orange vests, hardhats, and audio systems needed to hear and be heard over the din of countless conveyer belts and sorting machinery. These include elected officials, business leaders, public-works crews, press members (including BusinessWest), and, perhaps most importantly, representatives of the companies that buy the recyclables — and many of them have made the trip to Berlin.

What they take in is a facility that was built with three primary goals in mind: to increase the quantity, quality, and purity of recyclables; to provide an innovative and safe working environment; and to have the flexibility to adapt to ever-evolving consumer habits (more on that later) and recycling market conditions.

And more than a year after it opened to considerable fanfare, this MRF is accomplishing all three, especially with regard to the purity of recyclables, said both Antonacci and Murray, noting that this is something that communities, states, and those buying the recovered products are demanding.

“Today’s curbside material isn’t what it was 10 or 15 years ago. Then, it was heavy on newspaper and relatively clean. Today, everyone reads news online and orders everything from the internet. Today’s stream is full of small cardboard boxes and shipping envelopes and requires that we, as recyclers, innovate and change our thinking around the sorting of recyclables.”

The fully integrated system, replete with artificial intelligence and high-tech scanners, is dedicated to the maximum recovery of all recyclable material, with several second-chance mechanisms in place to make sure valuable material doesn’t slip through the cracks, said Murray, adding that the design includes state-of-the-art equipment to target paper, cardboard, boxboard, glass, and five types of plastic.

Elaborating, he said the system first separates paper from aluminum and other metals and plastic and then digs deeper to identify and sort different types of plastic, such as the PET (polyethylene terephthalate) used to make water and soda bottles, and HDPE (high-density polyethylene) used to make food and beverage containers, shampoo bottles, cleaning-product bottles, and similar products.

“The optical scanners are trained; they’re learning all the time to know what the makeup of a PET bottle is,” Murray explained. “If a scanner’s job is to pick PET bottles, it knows it by reading the makeup of the bottle. Everything else travels on to the next optical scanner, which may be looking for HDPE or milk jugs or laundry detergent bottles; it scans for those and shoots those out.

Frank Antonacci says Murray Road Recycling’s MRF has “moved the industry forward a generation” with its design.
Staff Photo

“The scanners are actually looking for the makeup of what’s in that material,” he went on. “It shoots a blast of air to kick it out or leave it in, and they’re trained at the factory and adjusted, so if we’re seeing a higher level of PET in the mix than HDPE, we can make adjustments so it will recognize that quicker and make sure we’re getting it all out.”

For this issue, BusinessWest toured the massive facility in Berlin and talked with Antonacci and Murphy about this operation, the evolving recycling market, and how the Berlin MRF redefines what would be considered state-of-the-art in this industry.

Leaving Little to Waste

Murray calls it the “Amazon effect.”

That’s a term he and others in this industry use to describe the influence of that giant corporation on life in general — and especially the world, and business, of recycling.

“Today’s curbside material isn’t what it was 10 or 15 years ago,” he noted. “Then, it was heavy on newspaper and relatively clean. Today, everyone reads news online and orders everything from the internet. Today’s stream is full of small cardboard boxes and shipping envelopes and requires that we, as recyclers, innovate and change our thinking around the sorting of recyclables.”

And these sentiments effectively and concisely explain what the All American Material Recovery Facility is all about — innovation and changing how people think about recycling and waste-disposal diversion.

“We took a significant amount of risk and leveraged our expertise, as well as a very strong team, to develop what we have here.”

The facility, and the roughly $40 million invested in it, represent another entrepreneurial venture, and gambit, undertaken by the Antonacci family, which was recognized by BusinessWest as its Top Entrepreneurs in 2018 for their creation of an eclectic and highly successful stable of businesses, with ‘stable’ being one of the operative words.

Indeed, this large and impressive portfolio includes a horse farm, Lindy Farm in Somers, which has bred and trained a string of champion trotters; Sonny’s Place in Somers (named after the patriarch of the family, Frank’s grandfather, Guy ‘Sonny’ Antonacci), a huge and continually growing family-entertainment venue; GreatHorse, the high-end, horseracing-themed private golf club created on the site of the former Hampden Country Club; and Murphy Road Recycling.

All of these ventures represented considerable investments and risks, Antonacci said, adding that the MRF in Berlin is no different.

“You’ll see many of the same themes throughout this facility as you would at our other operations,” he explained. “We took a significant amount of risk and leveraged our expertise, as well as a very strong team, to develop what we have here.”

The company looked at a number of recycling facilities starting in 2018 and made the decision to buy the Berlin facility in 2020, at the height of COVID.

“It was a considerable risk and investment at that point,” he went on. “But we knew that there would be life after COVID, and we believed that the region really needed a reliable, scalable solution to handling the growing amount of single-stream material.”

One of the primary goals for the new MRF is to increase the quantity, quality, and purity of recyclables for sale to companies that will use them to make new products.

By single-stream, he noted that recyclables from businesses and consumers come with various materials mixed together, often with materials that shouldn’t be placed in recycling bins but are anyway — from batteries to electronic devices.

This venture represents the expansion and modernization of an existing recycling facility, Antonacci said, adding that everything about the facility is state-of-the-art, a phrase he used early and often in this conversation, because it’s certainly warranted.

“We integrated tried-and-true mechanical separation though screens with optical technology,” he noted as he talked about what is really the heart of this operation. “We have machines that are optically looking at the material to polish any contamination or any mixture of different grades of recycling, and that’s done through highly advanced camera systems with artificial intelligence.”

Reading Material

The facility handles recyclables from roughly 100 communities in Connecticut and Western Mass., Antonacci explained, noting that materials from many communities in the 413 are aggregated and then brought to Berlin for processing. Overall, it handles upwards of 1,000 tons of material per day, a huge jump from the 350 tons a day handled by the largest facilities in the area prior to the opening of the MRF in Berlin.

Beyond size and scope, this facility stands out for many other reasons.

Indeed, the operation employs a dozen optical scanners that can identify and separate materials based on their chemical composition, and utilizes robotics and AI to perform additional quality control.

“The quality of the material that we’re able to glean from the blue-bin mix is really remarkable,” Antonacci said. “Leveraging our expertise and that of Van Dyk Recycling Solutions, we’ve moved the industry forward a generation with the design of this plant, based not only on the scale, but on the quality of the materials coming out of here.”

As they were developing the Berlin facility, those at Murphy Road toured a number of recycling operations in this region and other parts of the country, Murray said, with an eye toward adopting best practices and technologies. But there are some things being done here that would be considered unique and groundbreaking, he went on.

This includes a dual-feed system set in parallel lines, Antonacci said, adding that this is a different approach to preparing materials for final processing. Other innovations include the picking stations, where employees handle quality control, which are enclosed in dust-controlled, climate-controlled boxes which place a premium on worker comfort and safety.

“We went through a painstaking effort of keeping people away from places that could harm them,” he told BusinessWest. “We invested heavily in automation to further increase the safety and productivity of the facility.”

Beyond these safety features, the facility was designed to effectively handle ongoing evolution in consumer habits and thus the recycling stream. As he talked about this and pointed to the streams of paper moving along conveyer belts, Murray noted that, despite declines in readership, a large amount of newsprint still winds up in recycling bins.

“We took a significant amount of risk and leveraged our expertise, as well as a very strong team, to develop what we have here.”

But these same bins are being increasingly dominated by both cardboard packaging — that aforementioned ‘Amazon effect’ — as well as myriad kinds of plastic, aluminum, and tin cans.

Overall, the bins are cleaner than they were years ago, he went on, adding that the overall quality of the end product — what is ultimately sold to companies to make new products — is a function of how effectively the different materials, especially the many types of plastics, are separated.

And this is where the All American MRF stands out from other facilities.

Elaborating, Antonacci said this facility’s sorting capabilities extend to polypropylene, used to make everything from yogurt containers to margarine tubs; from Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cups to the packaging for to-go food products.

“This is something that has historically been hard to separate,” he explained. “But we have both the optical technology to look for polypropylene number 5, which those containers are made out of, and there’s also a laser on our optical machine that enables us to see those black plastics — the to-go containers — which most facilities can’t.”

Bottom Line

There are ever-larger amounts of polypropylene #5 winding up recycling bins, and the ability to separate it from everything else is becoming increasingly important, said Antonacci, adding that this is just one of the reasons why he and Murray are giving so many tours these days.

People want to see what separates this facility from most others — with the emphasis on separates. It not only represents state-of-the-art in this industry, it defines it.

Square One Moves Forward with New Facility in Springfield’s South End

By George O'Brien August 3, 2023

Nonprofit Management Special Coverage

Building on a Legacy

This aerial photo shows the former Square One property, at lower right, the day after the tornado ripped through Springfield’s South End in 2011.
Photo by John Suchocki The Republican

While early-education provider Square One has a presence in several Springfield neighborhoods and serves residents city-wide, it has always been associated with the South End.

That’s where it’s been headquartered since the beginning, in 1883, when it was founded as Springfield Day Nursery by Harriett Merriam, the daughter of Charles Merriam, of Merriam-Webster dictionary fame, to meet a critical need for childcare among the city’s working families, said Dawn DiStefano, the agency’s president and CEO.

“We’ve always been anchored in the South End,” she said. “And it doesn’t take too much effort to walk into the South End and see that it is in woeful need of some attention.”

The bond with the South End was — and is — so strong that, when the agency’s facilities at 947 Main St. were heavily damaged by the June 1, 2011 tornado that devastated a large swath of that neighborhood and eventually razed, then-President and CEO Joan Kagan quickly pledged that the agency, which soon started leasing space at 1095 Main St., would rebuild in that section of the city.

But fulfilling that pledge has proven to be an enormous challenge.

“We’ve always been anchored in the South End. And it doesn’t take too much effort to walk into the South End and see that it is in woeful need of some attention.”

Indeed, although other options were looked at early on, it quickly became clear that, if the agency was going to rebuild in the South End, it would have to be on the property it owned, DiStefano said. And this property is fraught with challenges because of its small size, odd dimensions, contamination in the wake of the tornado, and other factors.

But, in a measure of its commitment to the South End, the agency is taking on all those challenges and moving forward with plans for a 26,000-square-foot, $12 million, three-story facility that will be built on the east end of the property that fronts Main Street.

Dawn DiStefano stands at the site on Main Street where Square One had a facility — and will again.

Plans call for erecting a Butler-style building on the property, one that features a number of pre-fabricated elements, which serves to reduce the overall cost of designing and building a structure, DiStefano said.

“We’re savings millions of dollars because we’re not doing a traditional brick-and-mortar building,” she explained, adding that the agency is working with One Development & Construction LLC in Westfield, which specializes in Butler-style construction, on the project.

The current timetable calls for construction to begin late this year, probably November, with the new facility slated to open its doors in the fall of 2024.

The agency is in the early — also known as the ‘quiet’ — stage of a capital campaign for the new building, with nearly $3 million committed to date — $950,000 from the city in the form of ARPA money, and a $2 million commitment from the state.

DiStefano said early indications suggest a strong measure of support for Square One’s initiative, and she expects the nonprofit will be able to open its facility with little, if any, debt.

“It’s all achievable … but we’re not working with 10 acres here. We ultimately determined that we could do something with this site.”

“The most enjoyable, and most encouraging, part of this project has been how many people and institutions are compelled to give or have shown promise,” she explained, adding that the agency undertook a feasibility study on the campaign, one that surveyed 42 individuals and companies and revealed “100% intent to support the project.”

For this issue and its focus on the region’s nonprofit sector, BusinessWest takes an in-depth look at Square One’s building plans and how they reflect a nearly century-and-a-half-old commitment to a city and especially one of its proudest, and neediest, neighborhoods.

Building Momentum

As she talked about the many challenges with building a new home for Square One, DiStefano said it’s good to keep things in their proper perspective.

Indeed, while there has been nothing easy about this building project, and it has a long way to go, the overall degree of difficulty pales in comparison — in most respects, anyway — with coming back from the twin disasters of 2011 and 2012 — and coping with the pandemic of 2020, for that matter.

The agency was completely displaced by the 2011 tornado; staff, teachers, and students were forced from the building and never allowed to return before engineers determined that it had to be demolished. In 2012, a natural-gas explosion downtown extensively damaged another Square One learning facility, to the point where it had to be abandoned. And early in the pandemic, Square One was forced to close its childcare facilities, as well as its operations on Main Street, before having to completely revamp operations after it was allowed to reopen to meet a huge need for childcare services.

An architect’s rendering of Square One’s facility to be built in Springfield’s South End.

The agency managed to push on and meet its broad mission — it provides early-learning services to more than 500 infants, toddlers, and school-aged children, and also offers an array of support services to more than 1,500 families each year — through all of that, DiStefano said, adding that the ability to do so offers strong testimony to the imagination and resiliency of its staff.

Those same qualities have been necessary for this building project, she went on, adding that, while rebuilding in the South End has always been the goal and the promise, it has proven to be a daunting challenge.

Indeed, the property that was ultimately destroyed by the tornado in 2011 was wedged into a narrow but deep lot, said DiStefano noted there was an administration building fronting Main Street and a two-story, L-shaped school building that extended eastward a few hundred feet. In a perfect world, or at least in a neighborhood with several alternatives when it comes to buildable lots and available property, Square One almost certainly wouldn’t rebuild on its former site, she added.

But this isn’t a perfect world. And Square One is building here only because there are few if any other options, she said, adding that she tried to purchase the brick property adjacent to former home of the agency, a move that would have provided considerably more frontage on Main Street, but was unsuccessful in that effort, just as her predecessor was unsuccessful in her efforts to secure other lots on which to build.

So the agency then focused its attention on building on its former home — an undertaking made challenging by the size and shape of the property as well as contamination from the demolition of the structures that once occupied the site.

“The bricks and all the materials from the homes that were razed obviously have asbestos and lead and other chemicals that have now seeped into the ground,” the explained, adding that the agency is currently working with a remediation company to determine just what is in the ground and what needs to be done to make the property ready for its intended use — as a home for programs for children.

Before even getting to that point, though, the agency had to conduct some due diligence to make sure it was feasible to build what it wanted to build on that parcel.

“This land is so awkward and small and weird that we didn’t want to buy it if we couldn’t build a building on it,” she explained, adding that Square One engaged in discussions with One Development to determine if its plan, its dream, was, in fact, doable.

Brad Miller, senior project manager with One Development, said that he and others ultimately determined that the answer to that question is ‘yes.’

“It is a challenging site because of its narrowness — it’s wedged between Hubbard and Williams streets,” he explained. “We only have so many options as far as the building footprint goes. The agency also needs a certain number of parking spaces, which we have to find a location for on that site, as well as a playground. It’s all achievable … but we’re not working with 10 acres here. We ultimately determined that we could do something with this site.”

The plans, still to be finalized, call for those parking spaces to be located on the Main Street end of the property, with the playground and building located toward the rear of the site, on a combination of the original site and a few smaller parcels acquired by the agency, DiStefano explained.

The planned structure will give the agency far more space than it has presently in the South End, she said, adding that the facility destroyed by the tornado had more classrooms than the currently facility.

Miller described what is planned for the site as a ‘Butler-hybrid’ building, a combination of conventional steel structure, with Butler components on the interior.

“This will a be steel-framed building with insulated metal panels on the outside, as well as some masonry on the first floor of the building,” he explained, adding that it will have a glass entranceway.

This pre-engineered building will ultimately save on design costs, he went on, adding that this is a design-build project, with One Development managing a large portion of the design as well as the construction.

While work continues on design aspects of the building project, Square One is proceeding with its capital campaign to raise funds to build the new facility.

As noted earlier, the agency has entered the quiet phase of the campaign, focusing on major grants from foundations and other donors, DiStefano said, adding that, by the start of 2024, she anticipates the process will enter the public phase.

Bottom Line

Returning to that feasibility study on the capital campaign and the resounding support it revealed, DiStefano said those results validate the agency’s determination to clear a long row of hurdles and ultimately build in the neighborhood where it was founded back when Chester A. Arthur was patrolling the White House.

“Those results make it enjoyable — that pushes you when you’re ready to say that this piece of land is too difficult to build on and it’s going to cost too much to do this,” she said, adding that this vote of confidence provides another dose of determination.

And even more commitment for Square One to build on a legacy that’s been 140 years in the making.

New Recycling Facility Redefines ‘State of the Art’