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.
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