Trash Talk

Oscar

Before we get into this post, just a quick note hoping everyone is having a good summer. I took a bit of time off to finish a class I was taking at LCCC over the past five weeks but now that it's over, I hope to get back into posting new stuff and always open to new ideas or thoughts for future stories you'd like to see on Robert's Reader.

We're going to do a little trash talking...Not the "Your momma's so fat" sort of story, but more along the line of something literal.

It all started when I was taking out the recycling the other day. I watched Celeste washing out a glass jar before putting it into the kitchen bin to go out and said, "Why do we wash out everything when I know it's just going to get ground up, crushed, melted down and basically turned to pulp once it leaves the curb?" She said, "It's the rule...we're supposed to wash it and take the lids off before we put it out for recycling." Well, I follow rules as well as the next citizen, but I stood my ground and said, "I don't get it. They give us this gigantic 96-gallon tote and want us to fill it with glass of every color, newspaper, paper bags, junk mail, magazines, aluminum, tin and steel. Why not just leave the steel lid on it?"

And then, I started thinking about other stuff. Did I have to look for the "union label" of 1 through 7 recycling symbol on all the plastic crap? And what the heck did PET, PETE, HDPE mean? How about cardboard? Did I need to break down all the Amazon boxes that graced our doorstep every month? What about beer and soda cartons, cereal boxes without the plastic bag inside? Didn't this all go into the big bin together and go out to the curb? My wife said, yes...it all needs to be separated. I wasn't so sure, so I called our trash company. It turns out she was right and I was wro...(sorry, can't finish that sentence).

When I was younger, there was no recycling pickup. No separate bin. Trash was trash - you dumped it into those bent up metal trash cans and it was whisked away by the Rubbish Fairy. Even if you were environmentally aware (I was President of my high school Environmental Club, ENACT), the only thing you could do with recycling was to take it to the local recycling center if your town had one. Even then, they didn't take everything and God forbid if you accidentally tossed a brown bottle in the bin with the clear glass. The last guy I saw do this accidentally was hauled off in a windowless van and is rumored to be in Guantanamo Bay scrubbing mosquito larva off military trucks.

Today, we have what is called Single Stream Recycling. One truck comes and picks up your regular perishables, and a separate truck comes for our recycling every other week. Clean, neat, efficient right? Yeah, not so much.

Quick quiz: Which of the following are "allowable" recycling for your rollaway bin?

• Broken glass bottles

• Light bulbs

• Ceramic dishes

• Pyrex

• China

• Mirrors

• Windows

• Steel or aluminum cookware

• Drinking glasses

• Clay flowerpots

• Facial tissues

• Napkins

• Paper plates/cups

• Shredded Paper

• Styrofoam products

• Liquid paints

• Chemicals

• Plastic lids

• Plastic storage bags

• Plastic coat hangers

• Plastic coffee cups

• Plastic meat trays

• Plastic caps

• Egg Cartons

• Greasy pizza boxes

• Metal Coat hangers

• Metal pipes

• Wire

• Batteries

• Yard waste and brush

• Rubber hoses

• Motor oil

• Plastic lawn chairs

• Plastic kids' toys

Turns out NONE of the items listed above are considered recyclable and some are actually harmful to landfills and people in general. Many of the items like those thin throwaway plastic bags you get from the grocery store as well as broken glass and especially hoses can gum up and destroy the recycling sorting equipment once it reaches the material recovery facility.

Before you go out and dive headfirst into your recycling bin before next week's pickup to retrieve the offending items, know that the folks at the MRF (Material Recycling Facility - affectionately pronounced MURF) have taken into account that some people are well meaning but don't have enough brain cells to rub together to warm a candle. MURFs have what they call the Human Line of Defense, which basically is a team of people that pre-sorts what you put in the bin before it goes into the sorter.

Let's break down what happens when you put your recycling out at the curb. Once your local sanitation company picks up your recycling, they bring it to the MRF center (Ours is in Wind Gap) where it's dumped onto a vast concrete platform called a Tipping Floor. Next, a front end loaded scoops up large volumes of material and deposits everything you've single streamed as potentially recyclable into a huge hopper which feeds a series of conveyor belts.

Human workers stand in rows on either side of the conveyor belt to weed out materials that could either explode or damage the sensitive equipment downstream. This includes propane tanks, aerosol cans, lithium batteries, etc. They also pull out what's called in the industry "tanglers" - This includes plastic bags, garden hoses, electrical cords and clothing that can wrap around rotating equipment.

Items that can't be recycled that are dangerous get sent to a hazardous waste facility for further disposal. Certain items like aerosol cans and combustible batteries are sent to incinerators.

Once the pre-sort is complete, the remaining material moves onto a series of large rotating disc screens or trommels, which separates material based on its size. Lighter, flat, two-dimensional objects like paper and cardboard are lifted across the top of the discs and put on an overhead conveyor belt. The heavier three-dimensional stuff (think bottles, cans and jars) falls through gaps onto a second conveyor belt below.

Then the real magic starts.

On the three-dimensional belt, a large powerful "overband" magnet pulls out all the ferrous (iron containing) metals such as steel and tin. What's left continues down the belt to something called an eddy current separator. This device induces an electrical current in items like aluminum and rather than attracting it like a magnet, it repels the aluminum launching them off the conveyor belt into a separate collection bin.

What's left on the belt will be plastics and glass, which pass under optical scanner. These scanners use near-infrared light to identify different types of plastics based on the way each resin polymer reflects the light. Once each type of plastic is identified (Example PET #1 or HDPE #2), a signal goes out to a bank of air jets positioned further down the conveyor and at the precise moment the targeted item passes, a strong puff of compressed air will shoot it off the conveyor belt into the appropriate storage bunker.

This leaves glass on the belt, which is typically the heaviest of recycling items - the glass is separated by falling through specifically sized gaps in the screening and sorted into bins by size. Surprisingly, MRFs do not generally require color-sorting of glass and will accept mixed color (clear, amber, green) as long as it is clean and free of contaminants.

Of all the items recycled, glass is actually the least desirable because it often breaks somewhere in the sorting process and can grind into and damage the sorting equipment. Some MRFs do not accept glass at all for this reason. Glass that breaks falls into what is called a dumpster "cullet".

Okay...now that we've sorted your recycling, where does it go?

At the end of the cycle, we bring the humans back into the picture. Human workers perform the final quality control check, removing the contaminants that machines may have mixed. When they're satisfied the materials are sufficiently separated into pure streams, they're moved to a baler. The baler compacts the material into large, dense, rectangular blocks, weighting between 1,000 and 1,500 pounds each and are tied with baling wire. The baled blocks are then ready to be sold and shipped to various manufacturers.

For decades, China was the biggest buyer of our recycled bales and imported nearly half the globe's discarded, paper, plastic and metals to use as raw materials for its factories. At its peak, the United States sent as much as 70% of our plastic and a significant amount of paper to Chinese ports.

On January 1, 2018, China notified the World Trade Organization of its intent to implement what they called the "National Sword" policy as part of a broader anti-pollution campaign. The policy banned the import of 24 categories of solid waste and stopped China from becoming the world's dumping ground.

This put the United States and our recycling industry in freefall - overnight, we had a massive oversupply of recyclable material with no place to sell it. The U.S. lacked the domestic infrastructure to process what we recycled. The sanitation companies, who once were getting between $6 and $20 a ton selling our recycled bales were now paying $125 per ton to continue to recycle or to simply abandon recycling programs and sending everything to a landfill for $68 a ton. Some trash companies increased rates to cover their costs and continued to recycle. Some simply stopped their recycling and dumped it all in the landfill.

U.S. companies have come to realize that unless we start to find uses for our recycled materials, we're going to find ourselves up to our necks in refuse. Here in 2026, 65% of U.S. manufacturers incorporate recycled materials in their production.

• Aluminum recycling saves 95% of the energy compared to producing new aluminum and the U.S. is currently recycling about 75% of aluminum.

• Paper recycling reduces greenhouse gasses by 74% and we're currently recycling about 68% of paper.

• Approximately 30% of plastic waste in the U.S. is recycled annually.

• Approximately 31% of glass is recycled here in the U.S. in 2026.

• Only 12.7% of textiles are currently being recycled in the U.S. this year.

Overall, the United States is now recycling approximately 65% of our available material in 2026.

The following companies are leading the charge to recycle - either in their production and/or use of recycled materials in their products:

• Accenture

• Intel

• Estee Lauder

• Eaton

• Texas Instruments

• Nike

• Lush

• The Body Shop

• MAC

• Tesco

Here's a couple of videos I found on YouTube that pretty much show the recycling process. This first one sort of reminds me of the kind of movies you had to watch in school years ago and while it's about 15 years old, it does a nice job of showing that the process hasn't changed much in years:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CFE5tD1CCI

Here's a second video that shows an actual MRF in action - a few variations from the write-up above, but essentially the same information:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McBX0KLVofA

I hope you found this post interesting. I learned quite a bit in the research and am happy to see companies starting to take recycling more seriously. It's good for all of us.