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History | MARPAN

History

Marpan Supply/Marpan Recycling has been in business in Tallahassee since 1966. For over 50 years we have been engaged in the container services business. Container Services includes leasing and providing all maintenance for garbage and recycling containers in all sizes (Front and Rear Loader, Hook-Lift and Roll-off Containers, Compactors and Balers). In 1968 we received our first State of Florida Lightbulb Contract and kept that through 1986 when we received our first exclusive Lamp Contract with the State of Florida. Marpan held that exclusive contract through 2012. 

Marpan has a store located at 215 East Pershing street where you can find everything from batteries to flags to flashlights to street signs to safety equipment and first aid. Over the years, Marpan has sold many different items including hospital beds, dorm furniture, red clay for baseball fields, RedWing boots to the Tallahassee Fire Department, filing cabinets and binoculars to name a few! Stop in and chat with Bert, our Marpan Store Sales Manager, to hear more about all the different items we have sold in our store and the stories that go along with them. 

Kim Williams has been President and Larry Lassiter has been Vice President since 1985.  We have a team of seasoned employees who are locally based and capable of building, operating and maintaining our recycling systems. The first venture into the recycling business started in 1991 with a trip to Sweden to see a recycling plant for fluorescent lamps.  After learning of the mercury contamination in the Florida Everglades we realized as a lamp supplier to the State of Florida and more than 70 percent of the Local Governmental Agencies in Florida we had an obligation to help solve a problem linked to fluorescent lamp disposal in municipal solid waste incinerators.  After confirming that the MRT System from Sweden did work, Kim Williams returned and lobbied the Florida Legislature in 1992 and 1993 until it became law to require commercial users of fluorescent lamps to recycle.  Kim Williams also built a fluorescent lamp recycling physical plant in Tallahassee (1994) for Recycle-lights of Minneapolis, Minnesota.  We still own the plant and the business is operated today by Veolia Environmental Services, an International Solid Waste Corporation.

 

 

 

 

We have been in the Hook-Lift and Roll-off Hauling business since 1994 and we have been in the Recycling Material Processing Business at our Class III Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) since 2008.

In May 2013 we celebrated our 5-year anniversary of operating our MRF.  Planning for our MRF began in 2005 when we signed a contract to buy the Plant Site and then began the process of adding the site to the Comprehensive Plan’s Urban Services Area and then rezoning the property to Industrial use.

In January 2009, Leon County and Marpan began a Public-Private Partnership that closed the Leon County Landfill to the Public and diverted the waste stream to Marpan Recycling’s MRF, where we process the waste and recycle on average 67% of what had been buried previously in the Landfill.  We then take our residual to the Leon County Landfill for burial.  This has worked extremely well and increased the Recycling rate in Leon County by requiring all of this material to be processed before going to the landfill.

In February 2009, Waste Management asked if we would process their Curbside Dual Stream Recyclables from their Leon County franchised area.  We built a small sorting line to process their over 300 tons of material per month.  We needed a bigger line to improve our process to increase our recycling rate and through our industry contacts, realized that Single Stream Recycling was taking hold in America, primarily because it increased public participation by making recycling simple.  The haulers love it because it saves them $15 to $20 per ton to collect recyclables. 

So we looked at an existing building on our site and decided to design and construct a larger line with more automation to handle curbside material and to plan the plant to be expanded to include a Single Stream Process. 

We completed the Dual Stream Line and opened it in March of 2012 and then we added onto the building and built the necessary processing lines to handle all this material in a single stream.  The completed facility began to run single stream on January 7, 2013. October 1, 2013 all residential curbside recycling in Tallahassee will become Single Stream and brought to Marpan Recycling’s Dual Stream Line to be processed.