Recycling is important to us both ecologically and economically.   A well designed and operated solution will:

  • Enable the maximum number of products to be recycled thus avoiding land fills;
  • Be easy for residents to participate in the program; and
  • Economically convert recycle streams into valuable materials.

The result being the town gets paid for recycling waste vs. paying to haul away waste. Van Dyk Recycling Solutions designed the facility that City Carting uses to process Darien’s single stream recycling. Van DyK Recycling Solutions, is a world leader in designing and supporting MRF (Material Recovery Facilities) with over 200 sites.  Besides residential recycling his company provided solution for composting, commercial waste, waste-to-energy, and more.  In his talk Pieter Van Dijk, CEO, will cover:

  1. the changing global market for recyclables – specifically China.
  2. the engineering challenges of handling the variety of materials, including single stream, in a recycling program and converting them into usable product.
  3. issues specific to Darien and surrounding towns that use the local facility –  including educating the public to be active and responsible participants in the process.

Pieter Eenkema van Dijk grew up in the Netherlands where he received a Masters degree in Economics at Groningen University in the Netherlands and an MBA from Insead Business School at Fontainebleau in France.

In 1984, he founded Van Dyk Baler Corp. in North America and is the company’s current president. Now Van Dyk Recycling Solutions, the company has distribution rights in the United States and Canada for the industry’s best manufacturers, including Bollegraaf Recycling Solutions, Lubo Systems, and TOMRA sorting solutions.

He is located at the Van Dyk headquarters in Norwalk, CT with regional offices in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston.

Here is his slide presentation:  DMA VAN DYK Presentation

Time lapse of building the facility at Santa Barbara:  Santa Barbara

Arranged by Alec Wiggin and Cliff Van Voorhees

Bryan Hooper’s notes from the talk:

There’s an old Yorkshire expression that says ‘where there’s muck there’s brass,’ which in essence means that you can make money out of other people’s garbage.  Our speaker last week, Pieter van Dijk, of Van Dyk Recycling Solutions illustrated the truth of that saying with a densely packed, detailed description of the history of the recycling industry and his company’s leading position within it. He described the origins of modern recycling processes which started back in the 80s for residential waste, and developed further from two-stream (one for paper, one for plastic, glass and metal containers) into the current more efficient one-stream process using big bins. He highlighted the problems caused by plastic bags which clog the processing machines and asked us to keep them out of our blue bins to avoid contaminating the good products. The growth of the business was driven by demand for paper products for pulping by China and the recycling of metal containers, both ferrous and aluminum. The recent cessation of purchases by China depressed demand so much that average prices received by recyclers for their material dropped from $110 per ton in 2005 to $21 today.  With costs increasing from $40 to $45, payments to cities  such as the $25 per ton to Stamford are no longer viable; margins have dropped from $45 to a negative $24, resulting in charges to cities to compensate. Van Dyk develops processes and systems at their facility in Norwalk, and supplies plants to recyclers in North America. We have been invited by Pieter van Dijk to view his plant once the virus allows, and we have posted his slide presentation with videos on the DMA website.