Rumpke Waste & Recycling is pouring $60 million into upgrading its recycling facility in St. Bernard, a sweeping renovation that will shut the plant down starting in February and keep it offline until it reopens in November 2027. The facility currently handles more than 500 tons of material every day for the greater Cincinnati area, and the company says that volume will keep flowing even while the plant itself is torn apart and rebuilt.
According to WVXU, the upgrades will swap out older disc scanners for a bank of 17 optical scanners, up from roughly six today, alongside artificial intelligence sorting and ballistic separation technology designed to pull different materials apart more precisely. The Cincinnati Enquirer reports the 13-year-old facility will grow by about one third and come out the other side with nearly all-new separating equipment. Rumpke is also adding 30,000 square feet to the site, space the station notes will be used both for storing processed recyclables and for making room for the new sorting machinery.
Why Rumpke Says the Overhaul Is Necessary
Company officials point to a recycling stream that keeps shifting in composition, with more types of containers now showing up in curbside bins than the current equipment was built to handle. The station quotes the company's reasoning directly: “The recycling stream is constantly changing. There is a growing need for more containers to be able to be recycled,” per the same account. That shifting mix is part of why Rumpke says the newer optical and AI-driven sorting technology has become necessary rather than optional.
Rumpke says households and businesses shouldn't notice a disruption once the plant goes dark in February. The company plans to reroute collected material to other facilities for processing during construction, the station reports, meaning curbside pickup schedules are expected to continue as normal even though the St. Bernard sorting line itself will be down for about nine months, until the facility reopens in November 2027.
A Facility With a History of Reinvestment
The current St. Bernard plant isn't new to upgrades. It was built in 2013 for $32 million, the same report notes, and Rumpke followed that with a $6.5 million renovation completed in 2010 at the Cincinnati recycling center, according to CityBeat. That earlier round of upgrades allowed the facility to begin accepting pizza boxes and all plastic bottles and jugs without lids, CityBeat reported at the time.
More recently, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported in 2021 that Rumpke had already invested more than $2 million in AI-based sorting robots at the St. Bernard site. Rumpke's own description of its Cincinnati Recycling Facility at 5535 Vine St. notes the 100,000-square-foot plant opened in November 2013, replacing an earlier building destroyed by fire in 2012, and currently processes more than 1.5 million pounds of material daily at a rate of 55 tons per hour, according to Rumpke.
Columbus Plant Offers a Preview of What's Coming
Rumpke has already tested a version of this larger-scale approach elsewhere in Ohio. The company opened a $100 million, 226,000-square-foot recycling facility in Columbus capable of processing up to 250,000 tons of material annually from more than 50 counties across the state, according to Waste Dive. That facility relies on 19 optical sorters along with other artificial-intelligence-assisted features, Waste Dive reported, and Rumpke said the new plant is expected to boost the region's processing capability from 160,000 tons to 250,000 tons a year.
St. Bernard's renovated facility won't match Columbus in scale, but the direction is similar: more optical scanners, heavier reliance on AI sorting, and added square footage to keep pace with a recycling stream that keeps throwing new materials into the mix. For now, Rumpke customers in the Cincinnati area can expect business as usual at the curb, even as the plant behind the scenes undergoes its biggest transformation in more than a decade.
