MOBILE, Ala. — Baldwin County’s new regional recycling plant in Summerdale has been honored as one of the top environmental projects on the Gulf Coast this year, joining a steel mill, two coastal restoration efforts and the state’s top conservation official among the people and projects recognized by a Mobile-based environmental and business coalition.
Partners for Environmental Progress, known as PEP, presented its 2026 Environmental Stewardship Awards on Sept. 22 during its annual membership meeting at the National Maritime Museum of the Gulf in downtown Mobile. The Solid Waste Disposal Authority of Baldwin County received an award for its Materials Recovery Facility in Summerdale, which PEP said is strengthening regional recycling and reducing the amount of waste sent to landfills.
The Baldwin County facility was one of five projects recognized this year. PEP also presented its 2026 Community Partner Award to Chris Blankenship, commissioner of the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.
The 2026 honorees
PEP’s Environmental Stewardship Awards recognize businesses, nonprofit organizations and municipalities whose work has made a significant and positive contribution to the Gulf Coast region. This year’s recipients included:
- Solid Waste Disposal Authority of Baldwin County, for its new Materials Recovery Facility, which strengthens regional recycling and reduces landfill waste.
- ArcelorMittal Calvert, for reducing greenhouse gas emissions through Electric Arc Furnace operations and recycled steel production.
- Moffatt & Nichol, for coastal restoration work that put dredged sediment to beneficial use to help protect the Dauphin Island Causeway while creating marsh habitat.
- Thompson Engineering, for using dredged sediment to restore coastal marsh habitat and improve shoreline resilience along Deer River.
Measuring the impact
PEP said the honored projects together have avoided 342,000 metric tons of carbon emissions, which the organization described as equivalent to taking one in five cars off Mobile County roads. The projects also:
- Kept more than 3,300 tons of recyclable materials out of landfills
- Put more than 1 million cubic yards of dredged material to beneficial use
- Restored or protected more than 4 1/2 miles of shoreline
Baldwin County’s recycling hub
The Summerdale Materials Recovery Facility, often called a MRF, is a sorting plant where mixed recyclables collected from homes and businesses are separated into marketable streams such as cardboard, paper, plastics and metals. Those materials are then baled and sold to manufacturers that use them to make new products.
The Solid Waste Disposal Authority of Baldwin County opened the roughly $25 million facility in March 2025. At the time of its opening, the authority said the 62,000-square-foot plant was designed to process up to 40,000 tons of recyclables a year and would serve about 55,000 households across Baldwin County and its participating municipalities. The campus also includes an education center, and the authority has described the plant as a regional hub capable of taking material from neighboring counties in southwest Alabama.
Before the facility opened, communities in the region had more limited options for processing recyclables locally. A large, modern MRF close to home can reduce the distance materials must be trucked, improve the quality of sorted materials and make curbside recycling programs more practical for smaller towns that could not support a sorting operation on their own.
Baldwin County has been one of the fastest-growing counties in Alabama for years, and that growth has added pressure on waste disposal capacity. Diverting recyclables from landfills extends the life of existing disposal sites, which are expensive and difficult to replace.
The other projects
ArcelorMittal Calvert
ArcelorMittal Calvert operates a large steel processing and finishing complex in Calvert, in north Mobile County. Electric arc furnaces make steel largely by melting recycled scrap with electricity, rather than producing iron from ore in coal-fired blast furnaces. The approach is widely recognized for producing significantly lower carbon emissions per ton of steel than traditional blast furnace production, and it gives scrap steel a second life.
Moffatt & Nichol and the Dauphin Island Causeway
The Dauphin Island Causeway carries the only road link between the mainland and Dauphin Island across the shallow waters of Mobile Bay and Mississippi Sound. The low-lying route has long been vulnerable to erosion and storm overwash. Using sediment dredged from nearby waterways to build up marsh alongside the causeway helps buffer the roadway from waves while creating habitat for fish, shellfish and birds. Moffatt & Nichol is an infrastructure engineering firm with extensive coastal and port experience.
Thompson Engineering and Deer River
Deer River flows into the western side of Mobile Bay in south Mobile County, an area where shoreline loss has eaten away at coastal marsh over the decades. Thompson Engineering, a Mobile-based engineering and environmental firm, was recognized for using dredged sediment to restore marsh habitat and improve shoreline resilience there.
Beneficial use of dredged material has become a key strategy along the northern Gulf. Instead of disposing of sediment removed from shipping channels and waterways offshore or in confined disposal sites, engineers place it where it can rebuild eroding marshes and shorelines, which in turn help protect inland areas from storm surge.
Blankenship honored for three decades of conservation work
PEP said its Community Partner Award recognizes Blankenship’s more than 30 years of leadership and service focused on conserving Alabama’s natural resources and strengthening Coastal Alabama’s resilience.
Blankenship spent much of his career with the department’s Marine Resources Division, which manages the state’s saltwater fisheries, before Gov. Kay Ivey appointed him commissioner of the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources in 2017. The department oversees state parks, state lands, wildlife and freshwater fisheries, and marine resources, and it has played a central role in coastal restoration projects funded in the years since the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
About Partners for Environmental Progress
Partners for Environmental Progress is a Mobile-based coalition of business, industry and education leaders that promotes science-based environmental practices and works to show that economic development and environmental protection can coexist. PEP has presented its Environmental Stewardship Awards and Community Partner Award since 2005.
The annual meeting brought members and guests together for networking and recognition of businesses and organizations PEP described as making a positive impact across the Gulf Coast.
“Each year, our Environmental Stewardship Awards give us an opportunity to showcase the innovative work happening throughout our region,” PEP Executive Director Jennifer Denson said in a statement. “This year’s recipients demonstrate that environmental responsibility and economic progress can go hand in hand.”
Denson added that the projects “are making a measurable difference today while helping build a stronger, more resilient Gulf Coast for the future.”
Denson has led PEP since 2007.