Allegheny County hires ‘Uber-like’ haulers to pick up its recycling
Allegheny County has contracted with a new recycling hauler — one that employs “Uber-like” technology.
Downtown-based RoadRunner Recycling uses a web-based application to communicate hauling routes to small-fleet truck drivers who have empty truck beds and downtime to make some extra money.
“We tap into an excess capacity of trucking assets that are already in a city,” said
RoadRunner CEO Graham Rihn. “We built software to say, ‘OK, this hotel produces 18 yards a month of cardboard. Let’s make sure those 18 yards of cardboard are routed and hauled to where it’s sold.’”
In addition to using trucks already on the road, another pillar of the company is that it keeps recyclables separate, bypassing the expense of singlestream processing and the tailspin in the international secondary materials market. Mr. Rihn and several recycling experts describe single-stream as a broken approach. Materials are never taken beyond a 50-mile radius outside a metro area to be sold, Mr. Rihn said.
“We’ve unlocked recycling. Recycling can work, and it can work profitably,” the 31-year-old entrepreneur said.
On July 1, RoadRunner began routing trucks to pick up recyclables from the county’s four Kane Regional Centers, the Shuman Juvenile Detention Center and nine county parks.
County manager William McKain said the $150,000 contract, which replaced its recycling contract with Republic Services, has potential to increase revenue and recycling.
And, since “going green” is a passion of county Executive Rich Fitzgerald, Mr. McKain said, the contract is an exciting prospect.
“We thought that with their revenue potential because they’re going to market, that it would ultimately reduce our cost,” Mr. McKain said. “And our goal was to increase our recycling.”
He said it’s too early to assess any cost savings the county has received so far.
He said cardboard and paper are the most ubiquitous recyclables produced by county properties — particularly at facilities like Shuman and the Kane centers where three meals a day are provided.
According to the county’s survey of its own recycling rates, county employees are putting 68 percent of their waste streams into recycling bins, compared with 21 percent in 2014.
Mr. McKain said diversion is a result of employee education and concrete measures, like banning personal trash cans at desks.
Allegheny County is not the only local client for RoadRunner, which focuses solely on commercial recycling. The company says GetGo and Heinz Field are among their 1,000 clients in the Pittsburgh metro area.
RoadRunner’s figures state that the company has 3,000 commercial clients in 10 U.S. cities, including Washington, D.C., where clients include the World Bank and George Washington University. RoadRunner claims that on average annually each client site increases its recycled volumes by 20 tons, compared to previous performance with other waste haulers.
Mr. Rihn, a Pittsburgh native who began the company in New York City in 2014, attributes the volume increase to company education, clearly marked bins that his company provides upfront and to close monitoring by subcontracted truck drivers, who submit photos of recycle bins to report contamination.
Mr. McKain said this was an appealing part of the way RoadRunner operates.
“We’re not going to sign a contract and walk away and come back three years later to find out if it’s working,” Mr. McKain said. “We’re monitoring it.”
In 2017, RoadRunner raised $25 million in investment, a significant portion of which came from Tulco, the firm owned by Thomas Tull, minority owner of the Steelers and former chairman and CEO of Legendary Pictures.