Progress — 2014
Page 5
Eagle Waste & Recycling expands
with new facility serving North Woods
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BY GARY RIDDERBUSCH
NEWS-REVIEW EDITOR
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In less than 10 years, Eagle Waste &
Recycling Inc. has grown from a small
mom-and-pop trash and recycling collection company to a larger family-run
trash and recycling collection company
with a state-of-the-art, single-stream
sorting facility that offers the latest efficiencies and technology in recycling.
Alan Albee and his wife, Marti, purchased Eagle Waste July 1, 2005, from
Vaira Ozols. At that time, Eagle Waste
had seven employees and approximately
500 residential and commercial customers. The Albees soon purchased the
property across the street from the original site and utilized the space for an expanded recycling center.
With a vision for expansion, Albee
went on to purchase the former Surgipath Medical Industries building at 701
W. Surgipath Road near the airport. In
addition to the existing 25,000-squarefoot building on this site, he added another 12,000-square-foot building and in
the fall of 2013 added equipment and attained Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources permits to operate both a
solid waste transfer station and a singlestream sorting facility known as a material recovery facility (MRF).
The recent expansion was justified
by gradual growth of their collection and
hauling business over the last nine
years. In 2005, Eagle Waste was servicing the greater Eagle River area — including the city of Eagle River curbside
collection contract and the towns of
Phelps, Plum Lake, Cloverland and Lincoln. In 2006, the service area was expanded to include Three Lakes, Minocqua, Woodruff and Arbor Vitae.
In 2007, Eagle Waste was awarded
the residential trash and recycling contract for the city of Tomahawk and 2009
Alan Albee has expanded
Waste’s business six-fold.
Eagle
Eagle Waste & Recycling Inc. in Eagle River utilizes state-ofthe-art equipment and 18 employees to separate recyclables in
saw Albee purchase the hauling route of
Straubel Disposal located in Presque
Isle. This opened up hauling opportunities in Boulder Junction, Manitowish
Waters, Winchester and Presque Isle. In
2010, Eagle Waste moved north and began servicing Land O’ Lakes, Conover
and Watersmeet, Mich.
It was in 2011 that Albee came up
with the idea to build an MRF.
“I knew we would need sustainability
and greater volumes of recyclables to
make this venture profitable, so we began focusing more on the collection of recyclables,” said Albee.
This focus resulted in the contract to
pick up recycling at all Forest County
drop-off sites, which was quickly followed by the award of the residential
trash and recycling contract for the city
of Crandon in 2012. During this time, Albee said Eagle Waste was fortunate to
add recycling collection services for
nearly all town drop-off sites in Vilas
County.
In January 2013, Florence County
was added to the growing list of customers and finally, in April 2013, Eagle
Waste & Recycling started servicing the
Ashland and Bayfield areas and obtained the city of Ashland contract starting Jan. 1, 2014.
With the MRF in operation in Eagle
River, Albee opened a second transfer
station in Ashland to not only give the
residents of the Ashland and Bayfield
areas an option for service, but also to
feed the Eagle River MRF.
More employees
With the expansion projects over the
its single-stream sorting facility known as a material recovery facility (MRF).
—NEWS-REVIEW PHOTOS
years, the increase of Eagle Waste’s business has been six-fold. The company now
has nearly 40 employees, including three
in Ashland, and several thousand residential and commercial customers. The
Eagle River facility brought 18 new jobs
to the area as well as the first MRF serving northern Wisconsin and the Upper
Peninsula of Michigan.
“This facility is only possible due to
the support of all of our customers. Without local businesses supporting our locally owned and operated business, our
expansion would not have been possible.
I appreciate and am thankful for our
customer loyalty,” said Albee.
Single-stream recycling allows customers to combine all recyclable materials — glass, plastic, tin, aluminum, scrap
metal, paper and cardboard — together
in one container. A series of conveyors,
high-tech equipment and employees
separate the material.
Because most companies choose to
set up their MRFs in major metropolitan
areas which produce large volumes of recyclable material, Albee said, “There
may be better places to have a material
recovery facility (from a business
sense),” but when it came down to it, Eagle River was his only choice for the facility.
“The Eagle River area is where we all
live and work and I see a great need for
more, better and full-time employment
in this area. It’s difficult to find work
that’s not seasonal and offers benefits,”
said Albee. “We live here, we work here,
we raise our families here and we think
this is a good addition to the community
and it provides jobs so that people can
stay here and enjoy the same things that
I do and my family does.”
Albee said the new MRF is being run
with 18 employees, about half of those
working greater than 40 hours per week
and the other half working slightly less
than that.
“This plant easily can employ those
18 people full time and if we ever got
enough recycling, we could run two
shifts on this line and we could employ
36 people. That would be a long-term
goal,” he said.
Albee went on to say that t