Following Fire, Recycling Center May Move
Menomonee Valley riverfront site could be repurposed for private development.
The Materials Recovery Facility, Milwaukee’s recycling center. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.
A significant fire on May 31 could send Milwaukee’s recycling center to the trash heap.
The growing number of fires at the Menomonee Valley facility and the potential of its riverfront location are causing city officials to consider a new site.
“For the past years and months, we have been looking at where we can move it,” said Department of Public Works Commissioner Jerrel Kruschke to the Public Works Committee Wednesday. “It’s not cheap.”
The upside could be high. Moving the facility would free up 8.8 acres of waterfront land for development and also improve the value of other neighboring properties, as one developer suggested in a letter to committee chair Alderman Robert Bauman.
The city jointly shares the decades-old facility with Waukesha County. Resource Recovery Systems runs the plant for the partners. It was renovated in 2015 as a modern, single-stream recycling operation, but that didn’t address its increasingly out-of-place location.
“It’s not an ideal location,” said Kruschke. “Why it was put there years ago is a great question.”
The surrounding Menomonee Valley has been revitalized in the past two decades, going from a decrepit railyard into a thriving industrial and entertainment center with an increasingly clean river running through it. But environmental advocates and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources have taken notice that the materials stacked outside of the facility, 1401 W. Mt. Vernon Ave., continue to be blown into the river.
The number of fires is also growing, driven in large part by improper disposal of propane tanks and lithium-ion batteries common in modern electronic devices. “We have had about 24 fires over the past couple years,” said Kruschke. “It’s a very common occurrence, unfortunately.” DPW said the cause of the May fire isn’t yet known.
Moving the operation, which consists of sorting and separating recycled materials, had been a conceptual idea. But the scale of the latest fire, which sent billowing smoke out of the facility for multiple hours, is presenting an opportunity.
“Right now we have significant damage. We don’t know how long we are going to be down,” said Kruschke. A structural engineer is evaluating the building this week, while the city is now trucking its recycling to a Madison center.
Residents should continue to recycle as they would. Milwaukee recycling trucks are now dropping off their loads at the city’s Lincoln Transfer Station, near S. 35th St. and W. Lincoln Ave. Approximately 100 tons of material per day, four to five large truckloads, are then transported to a facility in Watertown and onto Madison.
Kruschke said the cost of operational change wasn’t yet known. Sanitation service managers Rick Meyers said it was “definitely a higher cost.”
It has historically been financially prudent for the city to recycle. The 2021 recycling report, the latest available, said the recycling program avoided $1.2 million in landfill disposal costs and earned $2.1 million from the sale of materials.
In the event of a shutdown, the city would normally send its materials to a Waste Management facility in Germantown, but that plant is closed until the end of the year as part of a $38 million expansion.
There aren’t many other options in the region. A fire destroyed a plant near Burlington said Kruschke. “Outside of that, you’re going out to Whitewater, Madison and the Chicago area,” said the commissioner.
The city is exploring options to send its materials to Chicago as well. “It’s very fluid right now,” said Meyers. “We are likely going to find that we need to move to multiple sources to keep the material moving.”
Bauman asked what a new plant would cost, $15 million, $20 million? Yes, said the DPW representatives.
“The good thing is we are insured for the actual equipment inside,” said Kruschke.
Finding a new home could prove a challenge. The commissioner said DPW has engaged the Department of City Development (DCD).
“I would be wary about moving this into the central city,” said Bauman, noting the stigma attached to things like junk yards.
“We agree,” said Kruschke.
A 2021 DPW report used a vacant Century City parcel to study the potential of opening a third drop-off center, which caused DCD to caution against using the business park site even before the public got wind of the idea.
The 2015 Menomonee Valley plan calls for the existing Materials Recovery Facility site to be converted to light industrial use with an emphasis on its river connection. It’s part of a larger area envisioned as a food and beverage company cluster.
To the east of the recycling plant, the city recently approved a financing plan to build an extension of W. Mt. Vernon Ave. and prepare 15 river-facing acres for development.
2015 Tour Photos
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The necessity to truck rubbish out ot town (Madison in this case) reminds me that just as we need to be aware of “food miles” and its environmental effect, we should also consider “garbage miles”. This is the energy needed to simply move our trash around – regardless of whether it’s landfilled, recycled, or exported to poor countries.
In addition to solving recycling issues, we need to again acknowledge the root problem is overconsumption.
I believe the building in question was built in the 70s and operated as something called “Americology”. The idea was to extract recyclables from the general trash stream. I believe there were experiments with using the non-recyclable residue for power generation. None of this was practical, so the plant became a sorting operation – in theory with an input stream limited to mixed recyclables. Unfortunately, too much unrecyclable stuff gets mixed in, hence the fires and other technical problems.
I am surprised that Kruschke made the statement of “Why it was put there years ago is a great question.” Perhaps he is not old enough to know what the area once consisted of. When that building was built on the land there in the early 1970’s, is was literally a step above being a dump to begin with. It was city acquired land, full of railroad yards, Electric company coal storage, meat processing plants, scrap yards, and a canal that stunk to high heaven from the animal waste and runoff produced south of the canals. Even the road (Canal street) was crisscrossed by rail lines, which would tear the mufflers off of most cars that drove over them–long before the City cleaned it up. My guess is that the original company that went in there (AMERICOLOGY?) was heavily subsidized to go there. And at the time, the recycling plant was so state of the art that the newspaper and magazine articles heralded it as an amazing wonder of Milwaukee. That seriously changed though, when some sort of explosion–possibly from some sort of gas or compressed canister, damaged it even back then.
45 years…I was typing at the same time ( and some of the same thoughts), and didn’t see your comment until I posted.