Recycler senses opportunity in green technology sector.

Stroll into Green Circle Environmental's recycling plant and there's nary a whiff of refuse lingering in the air.

Every month, between 300 and 400 tonnes of plastic pop bottles, plastic bleach containers and newspapers from 24,000 Sault households are deposited in neat piles at the Sackville Road site for sorting, bailing and shipping to recyclable manufacturers in southern Ontario.

To company president John Martella, 37, teaching Sault residents to recycle the right way, and extend the life of the city's landfill beyond 10 years, has been an ongoing educational process.

After landing the city contract for recycling pickup two years ago, Martella remembers taking a whole truckload of grief from irate homeowners whenever the recycling truck would skip those sloppy blue box owners who dared to "contaminate" their curbside offerings by mixing Styrofoam with paper.

The green slips left behind by collectors advised them that new standards were in place and next time--do it right.

To Martella, landfills are a vital cog of municipal infrastructure, as important as roads and sewers; and a great deal more expensive to replace, considering the provincial licensing requirements.

His interest in waste management stemmed from years at Brandes Aggregate, a local gravel pit operation, working his way up from equipment operator into management.

A profound thought always nagged at him.

"Nobody's developed any technology to solve the waste issue and no one's educated the public to try and recycle."

By 1995, he accepted an offer from Sault Ste. Marie Disposal, a local garbage hauler, and made the jump into waste management.

Four years later, the two principal shareholders had sold their interests in the company to the then-29-year-old Martella, along with a struggling start-up recycling firm called Green Circle Environmental.

When his company was awarded the city's recycling contract for residential curbside collection in October 2002, the municipality backed up its commitment to reduce garbage with a graduated year-by-year bag limit reduction program, there-by forcing residents to recycle.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

It was a "massive" step for the company to prove recycling could be done properly.

"My ass was on the line," admits Martella, of his decision to finance and build a 30,000-square-foot facility containing state-of-the-art processing and bailing machinery, which began operations last fall. "I had to prove to myself that it could be done."

Today, his modest 14-employee operation contains a Bollegraph system, technology imported from The Netherlands, which Martella calls "the Gucci" of recycling plants. It is "top of the line," he says.

The resulting 300- to 400-tonne monthly averages--up from 140 tonnes two years ago--speak for them-selves.

And he senses people's attitudes have changed too.

His next target is extending recycling to multi-family apartment buildings, a pickup schedule that just started at the beginning of August. Eventually, he plans to extend the program to the commercial and industrial sectors.

Martella's big upcoming project is to establish himself as a distributor of green technology.

He is close to signing a contract with an Italian company to establish a Sault plant to recycle refrigerators.

The undisclosed Italian firm has developed a leading-edge automated system that strips old refrigerators into reusable products, removing the aluminum, steel, plastic and wiring, and reducing the appliance into powder.

The company, which operates 40 plants across Europe, has offered Martella the North American distribution rights.

The technology runs from $4 million to $10 million, depending upon the plant size.

The Italian company is negotiating with the Canadian Standards Association (CSA) and the Ministry of Environment to use the equipment in North America.

Europeans, he discovered on his trips to Italy, are "hard-core recyclers," with steep fines for non-compliance, while the Province of Ontario only became serious about recycling when Toronto's Vaughan landfill site was closed and the city began shipping garbage to Michigan.

Despite the community's buy-in, the business isn't without its challenges.

"Shipping costs are a killer," says Martella.

The Sault's northern location hurts the company in transporting recyclable material to manufacturers in Toronto and the U.S.

The distances in shipping such a low-priced commodity severely limits what he can ship and prevents him from expanding the pickup program to include all known recyclable items.

Prices have dropped, too, with an abundance of paper flooding the market. Cardboard six years ago was $300 per tonne. Today, it vacillates between $60 and $120 per tonne.

By IAN ROSS 

Northern Ontario Business