Most of us do not think much about recycling. We might clean bottles and jars, crush cartons and break down boxes. We might sort these items into their designated bins or bags, but once we lose sight of the recyclables, the rest of the process is an abstraction. Recycling makes us feel good, but few of us know what actually happens to a plastic bottle after we drop it into a bin.
What happens is, the bottle enters an elaborate global system within which its plastic is sold, shipped, melted, resold, and shipped again—sometimes zigzagging the globe before becoming a carpet, clothing, or repeating life as a bottle. This process is possible because plastic is a stubborn substance which resists decomposition. With a presumed life span of over 500 years, it is safe to say that every plastic bottle you have used exists somewhere on this planet, in some form or another.
In a large city, household recyclables are picked up curbside, once a week by authorities after being tossed in the back of the diesel-fueled truck, each load makes its way to a Material Recovery Facility, or MRF.
Although this type of facility is commonly referred to as a recycling plant, it only handles part of the recycling process. Instead, it sorts, recovers, and discards. An MRF sifts through recyclables to recover items that can be resold in the post-consumer (the recycling industry’s term for items thrown away by consumers) commodities markets. In this case, the materials sifted include glass, metal, cartons and some plastics. It discards the rest.
Typically, 50% of what you put in your recycling bin is never recycled. It’s sorted and thrown out. This is partly due to user error, a common problem which occurs when people place unrecyclable materials into recycling bins. At the MRF, recyclables change hands from the city to the waste world — most often to private-sector companies. While states and cities mandate and market recycling with green symbols and variations of catchy ‘reuse–reduce–recycle’ tag lines, it is not uncommon for them to pay outside companies to handle the actual process.
This is where recycled items begin their journey; Recycling can be a fairly long process. It’s not like you put it in your bin and suddenly it’s a new thing.
The first stop on the tour, called the “tipping floor,” is where the garbage trucks drop off their loads in a large room filled with about a thousand tons of recyclables. From that vast floor, recycling hopefuls move along an intricate automated assembly line of conveyers, tumblers, metal detectors, and even a few human sorters, to be categorized by commodity. The conveyor-belt system sorts glass first, within two minutes. Metals are then extracted by magnets or other means.
Thick and unruly plastics such as high-density polyethylene, a fancy name for your laundry-detergent containers, get compacted into bulky wads of color, then restrained in bales by rope. And finally, used plastic beverage bottles are aggregated into a stream. From start to finish, a plastic bottle spends fewer than 30 minutes on a conveyer belt. A bottle binned yesterday, quite possibly already here, will be through the recovery system in a day.
By: June C. Gawigawen