Berkeley County, S.C. Facility Takes in All Waste, Sorts and Diverts Recyclables

Berkeley County, South Carolina has an interesting approach to waste and recycling collection, for the area, all materials are picked up at once.

After collection, trucks head to the RePower South facility which helps reduce how much waste is going to the landfill. The facility in Moncks Corner, S.C. takes in all kinds of waste, from paper and plastic to shoes and diapers.

“We accept all of the MSW, garbage basically from Berkeley County,” said Brian Gilhuly, CEO of RePower South. “We process it to pull out recycled commodities, and then we also extract non-recyclable paper and plastics and make an engineered fuel that’s used to replace coal in local industry, primarily in the cement mills in the Holly Hill area.”

The pre-sort area of the facility is where items such as chains, ropes, and textiles are separated from the rest of the waste. After that, what’s left over goes through multiple steps involving magnets, infrared light, and robots to sort everything out.

“The system is extremely automated...almost all of it occurs without human intervention,” said Gilhuly. “We have people on the front end basically feeding the system, and we have got people on the back end effectively pulling products off the back end.”

Commonly recycled items like water bottles, cans, and cardboard are collected and transported from the facility to be recycled. The hope is the facility will be able to do the same with film plastic and organics in the near future.

“Single-use plastics and film plastics, we can take that material and melt that down to a naphtha oil in a reactor to sell that to petrochemical companies to make new plastics from recycled material,” said Gilhuly.

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