How Balcones Makes “Pure-Play” Recycling Work

Balcones has a busy year ahead, with plans to launch a San Antonio recycling plant and its second plant in Phoenix in 2024. These newest deals will bring the number of facilities the company has built, owns, and or operates to eight. They span its hometown of Texas, and since becoming a part of Circular Services, a Closed Loop Partners operation, the 30-year-old family-run business has moved into Brooklyn, Jersey City, Arkansas, and parts of Florida.

Branding itself as a “pure play” recycler, Balcones doesn’t and has never worked in the disposal space.

“We do not own landfills or haul garbage. It’s been important to the DNA of our company to stay laser focused on recycling,” says Joaquin Mariel, Balcones chief commercial officer.

Reaching decent recovery rates has demanded heavy investments in sortation as single stream has become the standard, bringing with it technical complexities and a need to work harder to earn the trust of consumers. They expect all the materials they toss together in the bin to be recycled.

Balcones is the first company to provide commercial single stream in Texas, though much of its bread and butter is residential curbside.

Speaking of the now long-instituted approach that simplified collections but made processing harder, Mariel says: “The recycling system in our country became highly invested in single-stream collection with the proposition that it was a way to recycle more material than when the public had to presort or use drop off infrastructure.

“Because of this wave we decided to ride, we needed facilities with technical capability and expertise to do the sortation [to produce bales that meet manufacturers’ specs].”

Both the technology and operational know-how have been key to staying on top of the reality that, with single stream, feedstock is infinitely variable. It can be different every day, he says.

The San Antonio facility, to launch in Q2 2024, is a $62M capital investment that the city will own, and Balcones will operate. It will be sited on 17 acres and house a 50-ton-an-hour system that will leverage automation and optical sortation to target high recovery rates.

The San Antonio “recycling campus” will also include a 120,000-square-foot warehouse as well as attached two-story building with office space and an educational facility available to the city. The new materials recovery facility (MRF) itself, like many of Balcones’ existing plants, will be a teaching resource.

“We consider our facilities to be classrooms. There’s no better way to convince skeptical recyclers of the efficacy of the recycling process than by bringing them in to one of our facilities so they can see how the material they put in their bin every week is handled … so they have confidence it’s going to a place where people sorting it care about what they are doing,” Mariel says.

The educational center will feature hands-on digital displays to teach the public about the recycling process. Visitors will be able to see into the MRF in real time to observe the production process.  A separate convening space will be open to any community members interested in recycling and for a general meeting spot.

San Antonio’s new recycling contract follows a prior, long-term agreement with Republic.

“At the most fundamental level, the new MRF will need to process our tonnage efficiently with the scalable ability for increased tonnage as San Antonio continues to grow rapidly,” says Josephine Valencia, deputy director San Antonio Solid Waste Management.

Given the economic climate, pricing was a priority as were innovation and technology when reviewing RFPs.

The fact that Balcones’ business model is recycling only and the commitment to build a new state-of-the-art MRF weighed in big in the city’s procurement choice. But the partnership on community education and outreach—long-standing city investments—was at least as important.

“One of the most exciting improvements to our education and outreach program will be the observation deck that the new facility will feature. The community, student population, and media will all now finally be able to see the process, which brings great ownership to the way people approach and commit to recycling. Balcones will take our outreach efforts to a new level,” Valencia says.

Balcones sorts and trades cardboard, newspaper, mixed paper, glass, aluminum, ferrous metal and, on the plastics side, polyethylene terephthalate (PET), high-density PE (HDPE), and polypropylene (PP).

Some commodities, particularly many plastics, have endured market downturns over the years. So how does a company that does nothing but recycle ride the tide? 

“We have lived through every major change and fluctuation in market trends. We understand markets go up and down, and we model our business based on long-term trends; not on making fast money,” Mariel says.

Prioritizing agreements with city leaders who are clearly behind recycling and vested in public education helps, as does building long-term supplier relationships to keep bales moving, even during slow times. That applies to all the commodities, according to Mariel.

Whether fiber, glass, or metal; it really is the same story.  There are end markets for all of them, he contends.

With single-use packaging, known as a pain point, ESG and packaging companies’ goals to use recycled resin have helped to keep what generators who feed its MRFs moving.

“It all goes back to that the public wants recycling to work. They want to know that what they buy from companies is recyclable and gets back into the supply chain,” Mariel says.

Looking ahead, Balcones’ strategy is to grow its footprint in its existing markets while expanding outward, targeting the Southwestern and Southeastern U.S. in order to build on recent acquisitions, and to stay close to strong end markets.

“More than anything we look to expand with partners – both public and private ones,” Mariel says.