Everything you ever wanted to know about recycling

I was given the opportunity to tour the Sonoco Recycling Facility in east Raleigh this past week. It was great, a good learning experience and really neat to boot.

Raleigh has switched to a “single stream” recycling program. That means that instead of sorting all your materials at the curb and putting those materials into different bins within the truck, you can mix all your items together and they get transported to the recycling facility mixed together. This is a cost-savings measure for the city of Raleigh as it means they can use less sophisticated waste pickup trucks, and the pickup crews can move faster and more efficiently. I also think that more people will be likely to recycle because now it should take less work to recycle.

The impact of comingling recycling materials is that once it arrives at the MRF (materials recovery facility), it then all must be separated. That’s what we learned about in our tour of the facility. I tried to document in pictures and videos. It is really an amazing process and watching these people in action makes me want to work harder to keep contaminants out of my recycling bin.

A few tips I learned while I was there.

• Trash doesn’t belong in the recycling bin. There are people who have to pull it out by hand if you put trash with the recycleables in your bin.
• Follow Raleigh’s easy-to-use list of acceptable materials when selecting items for recycling.
• The biggest contaminate to the recycling stream are plastic clamshell packages and plastic bags, neither of which is recycleable.

To see the pictures and video of my tour, read the rest of the article.

Sonoco is pretty cool because they do not just do recycling. They are also part of a larger company, which means they take what they harvest from recycling and use it to make post-consumer recycled product packaging.

Here is some of the product packaging they produce.

Here is the initial pile of recycleable materials as they arrive at the facility. It’s a huge pile and they use this front-loader to push it onto the conveyer belt.

Here is a partial view of the machine that helps sort the material.

This is the bottom of that machine, and this collection area contains plastic bags. There are a lot of plastic bags there, and they will eventually be sent to the landfill. It costs more to recycle plastic bags than it does to make new ones.

This view from above shows the labor used in sorting the materials. The machine does sort out some materials mechanically, but the rest is left to the human workers.

Here’s a video of the sorters in action:

Here is another part of the sorting process. You can see that this portion requires much more labor than the one in the previous shot. After this, what’s left is mostly aluminum cans and steel cans.

Steel cans are removed via this cool magnet:

This video shows the eddy current in action, sending out the aluminum cans to be deposited in the cage below and depositing the remaining trash into another receptacle:

Here is the final step in the sorting – the glass (and trash) that winds up in this huge pile outside. The material is collected and sent to the glass recycler.

Look closely at this pile. Can you see all the trash? Can you pick out all the non-recyleable materials?

While we were there, they were baling paper, so they just threw all the paper down onto the floor which has a giant conveyer belt built into it. This strange view is looking down from above at the “river of paper” headed towards the baling machine. The conveyer belt in the floor moved foward in regular pulses and pushed this giant pile of paper toward the baler.

Here is the baler in action:

And here is the end product of this facility – giant bales of either cardboard, mixed paper, plastic bottles, plastic jugs, or aluminum or steel cans.