Dunn County solid waste director making positive changes

By Cara L. Dempski

MENOMONIE — Morgan Gerk might seem like an average resident of the upper Midwest to people who do not know him. He likes to spend time outdoors, enjoys fishing, and tries to spend as much time as he can outside all year.

But, when Gerk starts talking about his work, he lights up and his full passion for preserving our natural resources comes to the forefront.

Which makes it a good thing that Dunn County hired Gerk as its Director of Solid Waste and Recycling.
 Gerk was hired by Dunn County in August 2016 to head the department. He is a graduate of UW – Milwaukee, and has academic credentials for natural resources and biological conservation.

In the past 25 years, Gerk has worked for the Wisconsin DNR fisheries management unit, the UW – Milwaukee Great Lakes WATER Institute, worked as part of environmental response crews for Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and served as a senior environmental compliance specialist for the non-metallic mining industry in Wisconsin.

Gerk said he is in his current position because of values he holds dear to his heart.

“You have to have a passion for natural resources and recycling, sustainability and stewardship,” he stated.

His professional experience aside, it is the small changes in the solid waste and recycling sites and county transfer station that are drawing positive reviews from Gerk’s employees, solid waste board members, and the general public.

Generating revenue

One of Gerk’s employees, Bill Drinkman, seems very impressed with the changes Gerk has made in the short time he has been with Dunn County.

“He’s taking a lot of our waste and recyclable things and making money from them,” Drinkman explained. “He is doing such a great job.”

Gerk said that if you look hard enough, you can find someone to buy just about anything. He stated plastics are a very valuable commodity, and companies can save a great deal of energy, input, and capital by recycling materials instead of continually manufacturing new.

“We’ve diversified ourselves in a lot of ways with materials we were otherwise giving away or sending to the landfill,” Gerk said.

While Gerk’s predecessor took the department from being millions of dollars in the red to millions of dollars in the black over an 18-year tenure, Gerk feels he can build on the previous success.

Most people would not think of solid waste and recycling as a dynamic industry, but Gerk said there are new technologies introduced all the time to help streamline and diversify how materials can be reused.

One of Gerk’s points of pride is his ability to look at programs and see where refinements can be made to rescue as much material as possible while generating revenue for the department.

For instance, before Gerk started, all metal disposed of at Dunn County waste sites was put into one dumpster. One of the first things the new director did was separate non-ferrous (non-magnetic) metal from the scrap steel because the non-magnetic metals are worth more.

By training his staff and providing a little extra time, attendants at the sites and the transfer station began sorting the metals that came in. Instead of getting just $65 back per ton of brick scrap metal, the department is now receiving up to $1,200 for one ton of copper.

“We took something that we were just giving away,” Gerk said. “We pulled the material out, and now we’re making $1,200 for a ton.”

That adds up to an extra $144,000 yearly just for separating metals.

Gerk takes things a step further by separating clean materials from items that may have plastics or other items, which cannot be removed from the metal and can get from $350 to $800 per ton for those materials as well.

Dunn County has historically recycled only number one and number two plastics, but manufacturers classify plastics as one through seven. Gerk started asking what could be done to diversify plastic recycling in the county.

In the number two classification – plastics known as high-density polyethylene – there are natural plastics and colored plastics. Natural HDPEs are items made of plastic like that used in translucent milk jugs, while the colored plastics are all other colors on the spectrum.

Translucent plastics like milk jugs can fetch a premium of up to $500 per ton. The colored plastics bring in $460 per ton. Gerk estimates the transfer station makes approximately two bales of natural and two bales of colored number-two plastics weekly and said two bales weigh a little bit over 2,000 pounds.

Gerk said that the solid waste department continues to operate in the black, and the additional revenue sources picked up since he started his position have generated talk.

“People are always asking me, ‘why don’t we recycle this?’ or ‘why don’t we recycle that?’” Gerk stated. “I said there’s no reason why. As soon as I got in this chair, I said ‘we’re going to recycle all this stuff.’”

Environmental health

The biggest change Gerk has made to the department is finding a company to recycle the mixed, rigid plastics that show up at waste sites and the transfer station. These items include things like “kiddie” pools, truck bed liners, car bumpers, plastic toys, and large (one to five gallon) water bottles.

“If you think about the tonnage of this material that we used to receive, it’s immense,” Gerk said. “It all used to go to the landfill.”

Not only was the county paying for these materials to be in a landfill – something that is not healthy for the environment and took up a lot of landfill space – it was feeding into the mentality of a disposable society.

Gerk did some research and performed some outreach and found a variety of companies that were happy to pay a premium to take the material off his hands. So, instead of spending money to put the material in a landfill, the plastics are instead being baled and given to Universal Commodity Services, who then sends money back to the county for the materials.

There are other programs Gerk is planning to implement in the near future, one of which is an alkaline battery recycling program. While there will be a charge per battery based on the battery’s size, it will keep the batteries out of landfills and provide further revenue for the department.

Still, revenue is not the only thing Gerk is interested in.

“I’ll take this back to the beginning of our discussion,” he stated. “It’s not only about making revenue. It’s about stewardship and sustainability.”

Gerk said it is great when revenue and responsibility can go hand-in-hand, but in the end his desire is to do the right thing for the environment. He said the solid waste industry is ripe for the combination.

Many people throw an item in the garbage can and forget about, but Gerk believes it is critical to educate the public regarding what happens after the garbage bags and recyclable materials reach the waste site.

The man in the office

Gerk tries to get out to each of the county sites at least once weekly. At first, it was because there was a lot of training and oversight needed for the new diversion programs. Then, it was because he enjoyed the people working with him.

“There’s a huge benefit in coming from the same fabric your workers are,” Gerk said. “If I were to just stand up in this office and point, and say ‘do this’ or ‘do that,’ that has very little traction.”

Once he educated the people working for the department as to why he was creating the diversion programs currently, he could see the spark of inspiration for what else could be done to help refine the processes further.

It was clear during a visit to the county transfer station that Gerk’s ideas and status are respected. He also stopped to listen to ideas and thoughts on things proposed to him by those staffing the site at that time.

Gerk encouraged county residents who use the waste sites to get to know the attendants at each spot and share ideas.