WM in Fort Walton Beach held a ribbon cutting for its new recycling facility. The new state of the art, single-stream recycling facility is able to process up to 76,000 tons of material a year. WM invested about $30 million into the new facility. It will process materials from anywhere as far as Tallahassee, Biloxi, Mississippi, and even up to Jackson, Mississippi and beyond.
But much of the material recycled here will actually stay local. “A lot of your material here in Fort Walton will actually stay locally for local paper mills,” said Brent Bell, vice president of recycling for Waste Management. “Most of those paper mills now, they need recycled content. They don’t operate virgin mills now where they cut down trees like in the decades past. They actually need those cardboard boxes so they can turn them into new cardboard boxes.”