View Full Version : Where do the recycling bags get sorted?
We have a new trash company which offered road side recycling, we buy our own clear trash bags and put all recycling items in it and set it by our can. I watched the trash man toss that bag in the trash truck and squash it with the other trash. I called of course asking how this gets sorted??? I care, I put a good deal of time into recycling and sorting, to see it go in the back of the truck with the rest of trash. The answer was that they look for the clear bags and sort those.
Question is WHEN does this happen? If this is the case all trash would get dumped somewhere and would be picked through. I can not imagine this happening.
ApatheticNoMore
6-1-15, 4:08pm
Personally, I suspect a lot of the claims to recycle by such trash companies aren't true or maybe aren't entirely true (they only recycle the low hanging fruit - if a glass bottle happens to be lying on the top or something :)).
My apartment trash is allegedly picked up by a company that recycles after you put it in the trash can with everything else. I believe this so little that I take my recycling to a recycling place. I'm not paranoid about everything (though maybe I should be :)), I believe when the city claims to recycle as they have separate recycling bins, probably separate trash trucks though I haven't watched them that carefully. But apartments aren't served by the city and some of the claims seem not very credible, so glass bottles that get thrown in with everything else for instance and thus get very dirty no matter how clean they might have been will get recycled and won't get broken into shards in the meantime, etc.? And of course filthy cardboard and so on can't be recycled anyway, it needs to be clean. And we aren't told to use separate bags or anything.
I guess the way to try to really find out would be to contact the company.
I suppose you never really know if your curbside recyclables actually don't end up in the landfill, but there is probably is a money advantage for the trash services to actually recycle. It saves them fees in landfill costs, plus recyclables have a dollar value. My best guess is that if the recyclables get tossed in with regular trash at the curb, it ends up in the landfill. It would just be too much work to separate after it's been mixed in with everything else. But maybe there is some new technology that makes this easier? I am lucky enough to have a free recycling center near my home, which saves me a fee from my trash service for recyclables. I take a load to them every month or so.
One time I carefully bundled all my cardboard and put all my other recyclables in the trash companies "special" recycling containers (with the recycle emblem on the side) and put it out by the road for pick-up. From way back off the road, where our house is, I watched them one morning. They supposedly offered recycling. Well, the guy threw it all in with the garbage. (This was many years ago when they didn't have that "Put it all together and we'll separate it plan." I was livid. I jumped in my car and ran him down. I stopped him and he got out of the car and I was screaming at him. He had absolutely NO CLUE what I was upset about. I called the company and they were apologetic......but man was I pissed!!
Yeah.......you never know for sure. Until it's made illegal to dump recyclables, these garbage companies can do whatever they want. Hopefully, the fees for dumping garbage will get so high........and taking things to be recycled will be profitable, these things will happen.
I forget what's it called......when you can put everything together (poop-soaked diapers, rotten food, vomit, dog poop, etc., etc.) and they supposedly sort it all out, but I've read that LOTS of recyclables still get tossed.
What an embarrassing society we are...........
What odd serendipity, I just three hours ago decided to look deeper into our single stream recycling program to see how it works. If you're lucky enough to live in a place with a functional ssr program, the recycling actually is picked up separately and does have a hand-sorted component to weed out the trash. Then it gets spun, magnetized, shaken and blown about. Some kind of scanner can spot the plastic that's usable. "On average, Republic Services' Brent Batliner said "about 20 to 30 percent of St. Louis County's residential waste is being diverted from the landfill. "But you can go into some areas where you’re up to 50, 60 percent, for that particular neighborhood," Batliner said. "And you go into other areas where you may be as low as 5 or 10 percent."
So even where it's good, it's not great. And it still costs a great deal to both create all this stuff and then re-work it. Rethink, reduce, reuse, then recycle. :)
http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/does-single-stream-recycling-really-work-yes-and-no
Kib I understand the sorting of recyclables if the bags are set apart from trash. I guess I just don't were or how all the trucks of trash getting sorted through. If that was the case why even bag it separately?
I have only used this new bag system a couple times. I am just taking my recyclables back to recycling stations I was using before I guess.
Just read your link and I understand that situation. Ours is all going in one truck, no separate recycle truck.
The only thing I could hope is that there's some sort of machine - or people - that identifies the special bags and picks them out of the general trash somehow. It sounds pretty lame, frankly. :( But I would call your local sanitation department and ask them before you give up entirely.
ApatheticNoMore
6-1-15, 5:31pm
I've never even heard them tell us to put it in separate bags, we just throw it in the trash and somehow the recycling magically gets recycled. No, it doesn't' seem believable. The thing is when your dealing with private companies there is no local sanitation department to contact. Like I said, personally I don't distrust the city at this point, I distrust fly by night private trash collection agencies that the apartments hire, that claim to magically recycle.
I don't stress too much about it - I figure even if it ends up in a landfill, it will get recycled at some point in the future, as those landfill sites will make great places for future generations to mine for all sorts of resources.
Where I live our mixed/unsorted recycleables are picked up by a different truck. It isn't free, we are charged for having it picked up. We are even charged for dropping it off at the waste transfer station ourselves. Apparently with today's commodity prices, recycling materials doesn't provide quite enough profit for our community-owned waste handling service to break even on recycling.
We have three separate jumbo totes: garbage, recycling, and yard waste/compost, and three separate trucks. Our utility (Republic) seems to be pretty serious about the process--we recently got a flyer informing us that our garbage would be name-tagged and checked for errant food waste. I feel sorry for the workers who have to dig through all kinds of biological refuse, kitty litter, and the like to pick out some rotten vegetable matter. And privacy--pthht! No more of that.
Seattle already recycles 60% of its waste, and I spend far too much time dutifully washing, sorting, stacking, pitching, and driving around to various recycling facilities. I hope the planet appreciates my efforts. :(
I've never even heard them tell us to put it in separate bags, we just throw it in the trash and somehow the recycling magically gets recycled. No, it doesn't' seem believable. The thing is when your dealing with private companies there is no local sanitation department to contact. Like I said, personally I don't distrust the city at this point, I distrust fly by night private trash collection agencies that the apartments hire, that claim to magically recycle.I must admit that sounds pretty unlikely beyond what you said, a quick picky-picky off the top perhaps. >:(
Tussiemussies
6-2-15, 12:15am
Our recycling doesn't go out on the same day as the trash. There is a specified recycling date so we know that everything that is picked up will be recycled. When we lived in Shamokin, PA, they had a great recycling plant. You had to separate your own and then bring it to a recycling building and put everything in it's respective pile. The town saved money this way. They also had a compost pile...oh and the magazines went to a truck in a totally different part of town. Everything was kept very clean and neat and you were watched to make sure your item went into the right pile!
Curb side pick up over the last 20 years I have had a few types and many many different companies. I have mostly used the drop off sites at the townships.We have moved a great deal so I understand all are different. This is a new contract company we pay privately but they signed to give better deal to residents of the township. Last company did not offer any curbside, so this was a selling point.
Once again in my life I am studying garbage. Son worked two weeks at a plastic recycling facility, really nasty place being very unsafe and dirty. They hire mostly all Mexican that do not speak english who would not complain of conditions. He was hired as a supervisor. He left quick. They had to burn yes burn the plastics to smell which type they were, no guards on the grinders and filth. He was amazed that this could happen in the modern world. Two weeks after he left a fellow fell into the grinder. The place is still fighting the death and still RUNNING. It made him never recycle. I could not understand but now that I am digging into my clean sorted recycling I am starting wonder.
I am now a stay at home wife, with more time to pay attention to these types of things. My dh is anti-recycle and I am for it. During the last year or so we've not recycled but four weeks ago I began. I was so proud of my full bins! I then watched as the regular trash truck came by and picked it up. How disheartening. I did call the provider, and it was a fluke - they must run their route each week or the clients complain and the recycle truck was broken down so they picked up all the curbside stuff with one truck that one day. This has since resolved and I am back to seeing three trucks each trash day (the third is yard waste).
Our city curb-side recycling is placed in a special plastic tote where we divide it within the tote in 4 smaller plastic containers (glass, plastic 1-5, newspapers, cardboard, metal, aluminum, other paper). We also pay extra for this service, above the cost of the regular city trash pick-up. Empty containers need to be cleaned before being tossed in the recycling tote. A recycling truck picks it up once a week, not the regular trash truck. The recycling truck has compartments for glass, metal cans/lids, aluminum, cardboard, newspaper, and "other" paper. We also have a privately owned recycling center and we take our large cardboard boxes there.
I've wondered about this as well. We don't have curbside in our area so we take it to one of several recycling stations.
At church, Republic (they bought out all the small locals), picks up trash and then makes another visit on another day to empty the recycle dumpster. What they do with it after that I don't know but I've often wondered based on watching the recycle and trash go into the same truck at my MIL's in SC.
What odd serendipity, I just three hours ago decided to look deeper into our single stream recycling program to see how it works. If you're lucky enough to live in a place with a functional ssr program, the recycling actually is picked up separately and does have a hand-sorted component to weed out the trash. Then it gets spun, magnetized, shaken and blown about. Some kind of scanner can spot the plastic that's usable. "On average, Republic Services' Brent Batliner said "about 20 to 30 percent of St. Louis County's residential waste is being diverted from the landfill. "But you can go into some areas where you’re up to 50, 60 percent, for that particular neighborhood," Batliner said. "And you go into other areas where you may be as low as 5 or 10 percent."
So even where it's good, it's not great. And it still costs a great deal to both create all this stuff and then re-work it. Rethink, reduce, reuse, then recycle. :)
http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/does-single-stream-recycling-really-work-yes-and-no
The county I work for recently opened a single stream Materials Recycling Facility in partnership with the City of Milwaukee. The pickup works as you described, with all recyclables collected in a single bin. Shifting from sorted material to single stream has increased our volume about 17%, indicating people who couldn't be bothered to sort before are willing to toss everything into one bin. The upfront investment was high, but we're expecting a decent ROI from increased material sales, reduced landfill costs and third party processing fees.
Yes, even though single stream doesn't collect quite the high quality that separated goods does, so many more people participate and, usually, so many more types of material are included that it more than makes up for the cost in population dense areas. I used to have to separate into eight different categories and drive my stuff to the dump, I might have been one of ten people in Bisbee that dedicated. I was in heaven when I moved here and could just collect it in one bin, picked up curbside and cheaper than what i was paying for garbage only before. Too bad they can't come up with something small scale that works this well.
Yes, even though single stream doesn't collect quite the high quality that separated goods does, so many more people participate and, usually, so many more types of material are included that it more than makes up for the cost in population dense areas. I used to have to separate into eight different categories and drive my stuff to the dump, I might have been one of ten people in Bisbee that dedicated. I was in heaven when I moved here and could just collect it in one bin, picked up curbside and cheaper than what i was paying for garbage only before. Too bad they can't come up with something small scale that works this well.
I'm told by our specialists that the newer technology for sorting has closed that gap considerably (although it costs tens of millions to get there). You need a high volume of tonnage to make it feasible. One interesting challenge we've had is dividing the materials sales revenue between the partners. The suburban waste has a more valuable composition (more metal and "good" glass) than the urban waste, and tends to have less unusable "residue" material.
That's interesting, I wonder why. Here, (city of Tucson) our bins have ID numbers and you will get a stern letter or even a fine if you're caught (or reported) putting the wrong stuff in your bin. It doesn't change the percentage of glass v metal v plastic of course, but I imagine it keeps the stream cleaner.
That's interesting, I wonder why. Here, (city of Tucson) our bins have ID numbers and you will get a stern letter or even a fine if you're caught (or reported) putting the wrong stuff in your bin. It doesn't change the percentage of glass v metal v plastic of course, but I imagine it keeps the stream cleaner.
One theory I've heard is that urban dwellers are more likely to collect bottles and cans to sell directly to salvage yards.
That makes a lot of sense. Do you have bottle and can deposits? I'll bet places with that have an even harder time of it.
Teacher Terry
6-2-15, 12:50pm
WE recently went to single stream & our recycle can is as big as our garbage can. Different trucks pick them up & they only pick up recycle stuff 2x's per month. If it all goes in the same truck they are lying. I can't imagine them picking the clear bags out.
Miss Cellane
6-2-15, 2:00pm
I don't stress too much about it - I figure even if it ends up in a landfill, it will get recycled at some point in the future, as those landfill sites will make great places for future generations to mine for all sorts of resources.
Sad, but probably very true.
Here, we used to sort our recycling, but two years ago they switched to single-stream. Trash pick-up costs money--you have to use special city trash bags that cost $1.50 for a 15 gallon bag or $2.25 for a 30 gallon bag. Recycling is free and goes in any plastic container 30 gallons or less in size (if you don't want to spend the $8 to get the official city recycling bin).
The city sends two trucks around on trash day, one for the trash and one for the recycling. You can also take recycling to the transfer station, where you are watched like a hawk to make sure everything goes in the correct dumpster/bin/pile. You have to take CFL bulbs there, and old TVs and printers and other electronics, and pay the $5-$10 cost for them, so I've seen the transfer station guys in action. They are pretty strict, so I'm assuming that the curbside recycling is taken as seriouslly.
True.
https://abandonedchildren.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/balatas-2.jpg
A lot of recycling only happens IF there is a contract to purchase the material targeted. But it's easier to have people putting the right items in the right bins all the time than switching back and forth.
Boston uses single stream for recyclables, I'm not sure which are actually being recycled at this point. Yard waste is separate and that is composted.
The real recycling happens when people go around collecting out the deposit bottles thrown in with the recycling. Or when people scavenge the larger metal objects put out before the garbage trucks make the rounds.
I get concerned about what happens after the initial processing, too. Recycling plastic is difficult and I wonder how much of it just gets compacted and left in giant cubes. Still better than it blowing all over the earth, I guess.
I get concerned about what happens after the initial processing, too. Recycling plastic is difficult and I wonder how much of it just gets compacted and left in giant cubes. Still better than it blowing all over the earth, I guess.
Some in the industry are hoping for a surge in 3-D printing to push up the demand for some types of plastic.
ToomuchStuff
6-2-15, 8:42pm
I've seen stuff go in the same truck before, and this includes yard waste. It left me wondering several things;
Is this common? Do they just collect the separate money and put it all in the dump (and pay a fine or someone off it caught)? Do they have a sorting spot (and would the news/call for action type thing, investigate)? Do they only recycle when the payback is higher, and trash it when it is lower (cost verses benefit)?
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