How do recycling factories deal with the problem of people putting things in the wrong bins?
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Sometimes they don’t- they can just send the whole load to the landfill instead of processing it if there’s excessive trash contamination.
But recycling facilities usually employ either humans to stand on the conveyor lines and separate recyclables from trash, or automated equipment that does the same thing.
In most cases they don’t. Large share of things shipped to recycling plants ends up on landfill because it’s contaminated with non-recyclables.
Mostly trash it. But something like 60% of recycling winds up there anyway so I dont bother unless it’s like steel or aluminum that actually pays for it.
Paper/wood goes in the fire, organics go to the chickens, plastics go to the trash, cause it dosnt matter anyway.
Many places send the whole load to the landfill. If you are lucky, there will be humans at a conveyor belt sorting every bit into “burnables”, “metals”, “green waste”, and “trash”.
That’s why many containers say “pre-consumer recyled” instead of post-consumer. Factories would rather buy a trainload of pure cardboard trimmings from a factory than the load of old cardboard cereal boxes, pizza boxes and used Amazon prime boxes from community recycling centers.
Most stuff doesn’t get recycled. It’s a lot of feel good fluff for putting stuff in different bins.
It depends on the method of collection. Typically this falls into two categories either co mingled where all recyclables go into one bin or source separated where households put our materials to be collected which are already in there different boxes. Ie paper and board, cans, glass, plastic.
Typically source separated collections have a 5-7% contamination rate and co -mingled is circa 15-20% contamination rate.
The reason co mingled collections are preferred in many places is because the cost of collection is lower, the participation rates are higher and it is just so much simpler for the resident
They just throw it away (because it is contaminated) before it would hit the recycle separation process. Or if it is not completely dirty or wasted, the “bad” things that shouldn’t be in the recycle bin wind up in the last part of the separation process…which also goes to the landfill.
Here’s a video of a massive recycling sorting plant in Texas. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kb18xK_5u78&feature=emb_logo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kb18xK_5u78&feature=emb_logo)
Short answer: they don’t.
Long answer: they have teams of people and machines on a vast array of conveyor belts try to sort it. However, most of it(plastics) end up in the landfill or slips through. Which is part of the reason why other countries are refusing our recyclables. Like China which was 90% of the plastics recycling market.
We have single stream recycling. You are supposed to just mix everything together in the same bin. Glass, metal plastic, paper, etc. They have a massive sorting facility full of special machines that sort each material out. There are humans who pick out non-recyclables but mostly it’s machines.
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