Recycler gives new life to garbage

By Mark Lineberger—Larson Newspapers

It's noisy. It's dirty. But it's responsible for keeping thousands of tons of garbage out of our landfills.
Mattera Enterprises Recycling may look like one of several nondescript metal buildings in a Dewey industrial park, but on the inside, it's a different story.

The company is in the business of recycling and it serves as sort of a middleman. On the floor of the roomy structure, tons of yesterday's household items are stacked toward the ceiling. Old newspapers, plastic juice jugs, metal piping and cardboard boxes  -- the ever-growing collection is where a lot of Yavapai County's recycled materials end up long after the original owners threw them out of site and out of mind.It's a matter of convenience for most people, said Joe Mattera, company owner.

While huge bins for separating recyclable materials are great, Mattera said, most people don't want to have to be bothered with separating their recyclable trash. They want to throw jugs, cans and papers into their curbside recycling bin and forget about it.That's where Mattera's company comes in. Trash haulers deliver their comingled goods to Mattera's building where his employees go though the
process of separating them for processing. The trucks bring in anywhere from 20 to 25 tons of recyclables a day, Mattera said. It works for Mattera's company and it works for the waste haulers, Mattera said, who used to carry a lot of their recyclables to the Phoenix area.Mattera Enterprises has been processing these materials for nearly a decade. Mattera got his start in the waste business in California, but decided to strike out on his own in Yavapai County, where he went to high
school.Back then, Mattera said that Prescott had only started a "quasi recycling program," and that his business was the "only game in town" when it came to processing these types of materials.

While business has declined lately because of the far-reaching effects of the current economic downturn, Mattera said he's learned to keep his business afloat through diversification.You can't just depend on one type of material to process, Mattera said, because you never know who's going to want to buy what -- depending on the economic climate. Last Thursday afternoon, it was the aluminum cans' turn.
Men operated heavy machinery to knock over dumpsters, spilling beer cans, soda cans and any other aluminum cans onto the floor. Hard-hatted workers use large rakes to drag the cans onto a conveyer belt, where more workers look through the piles for anything that doesn't belong.Around 97 percent of the materials that come in are suitable for recycling, Mattera said, with small allowances made for items that have been contaminated with non-recyclable garbage."Because no matter how much you tell people, the recycling can sometimes acts as an overflow for their trash bin," Mattera said. "We know it and we deal with it."Once the separation is complete, the next stage of the journey begins. The cans travel up the belt into a large processing machine that compacts and bales the cans into cubes for easy transport.That day, there was an 18-wheeler waiting at the loading dock to take the baled recyclables to California, where Mattera sells a lot of his materials. Other shipments are bound for overseas.
"They can go anywhere, really," Mattera said. "It just depends on where I can sell it."

The company also operates two buyback centers for people that do take the time to separate their materials. Mattera pays people for their paper, metals and plastics.The company employs nine people, and Mattera said he plans to continue to diversify as much as he can.Case in point, Mattera said he's recently started taking in leftover oil from area restaurants to start expanding into bio-fuels."Everybody wants to be green these days," Mattera said. "But the trick is keeping things green while being able to stay in business."And as long as Mattera and others like him are taking in recyclables, the world is all a little "greener" for it.