What happens to your recycling after it leaves your hands? So you did your part: you dutifully cleaned your bottles and cans and kept them separate from your garbage, then you put it out for pick-up or hauled the stuff to one of the many drop-off sites. Then what? Does that tomato sauce can really get recycled? Or, does it end up in a <gasp!> landfill? The answer may surprise you.
Anywhere from 7 percent to 85 percent of materials that enter the single-stream recycling process—the kind where you put all your recycling together into one bin—end up in landfills either because of contamination or failures with mechanical sorting processes. So in the best case scenario, using the single-stream method, one out of every ten cans you put into the bin ends up in the landfill. Just because it goes in a blue bin doesn’t guarantee it will be recycled.
The Resource Center does it differently, and the results? Director of Recycling Collections, Mike McNamee, takes us on a tour of the sorting facility and explains why individuals make a difference every step of the way. People, not machines, guarantee that it will be recycled.
Mike McNamee shows how paper embedded with crushed glass can cause problems for recyclers. At the Resource Center, crushed glass is removed before the material is sent to the processor.
When paper and glass are co-mingled (thrown in and crushed together), glass gets embedded in paper. The crushed glass can wears down the grinders at the processor. Mike discusses the importance of ensuring the paper is free of such containment.
Because the Resource Center uses the “three-stream” collections method—glass goes into glass bins, paper into paper bins and cans go into another bin—the chance of contamination is greatly reduced. That’s why we can guarantee that 99 percent of what we pick-up does in fact get recycled. That means each can you carefully separate from your garbage and put into a bin will end up into something new. The other way, the automated single-stream process, accepts a certain percentage of material loss to increase efficiency. If you care about recycling—if your business is processing these materials—it is a difference that matters.
