TOMRA Pacific opens recycling center in San Francisco

Tomra Pacific Inc., a unit of Tomra of North America, a provider of advanced recycling solutions, opened a new, user-friendly Tomra Recycling Center in San Francisco’s Bayshore Corridor.

The recycling center, which opened July 18, will serve the city’s largely unmet demand for consumer recycling facilities for the redemption of plastic, glass and aluminum CRV beverage containers.

“Citywide, San Francisco has only 15 locations where consumers can recycle their beverage containers, down from 35 locations just three years ago. For a city with a population of over 800,000, there is large unmet demand for facilities,” said Frank Canelo, Tomra Pacific’s operations manager for the Bay Area. “The new Tomra Recycling Center offers convenient drive-through service, as well as self-service ‘reverse vending’ machines, in a clean, friendly environment, capable of handling large amounts of container returns quickly and accurately.”

The center has the capacity to handle 5,000,000 containers on a monthly basis, which puts it among the largest centers in San Francisco. Located at 195 Bay Shore Boulevard, next to BevMo!, the Tomra Recycling Center will provide consumers with the opportunity to redeem empty beverage containers seven days a week.

Consumers will have two ways of returning containers to the center:

• Drive-through weighing service –offers a convenient way of processing large and small amounts of CRV containers for redemption.
• Self-service reverse vending machines – allows consumers to use an automated machine to count as many CRV containers as they would like to insert.

San Francisco has lost many recycling centers as a result of several grocery stores moving out of the city, resulting in the closure of drop-off centers located on their properties. Zoning restrictions have made it difficult for modern, new centers to set up.