How do recycling factories deal with the problem of people putting things in the wrong bins?
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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.
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)
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.
I live in Vegas and got a tour of our recycling facility. It’s fairly new and has high speed conveyors with lots of automatic sorters. Then people work on those lines and remove stuff that isn’t recyclable. It was super cool seeing the machines swiftly picking out glass bottles, then certain plastics, then aluminum.
Guide said their main problem is with items being placed inside other items. So if a cardboard box had a aluminum can inside, both items would likely be identified as trash and discarded.
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
Most stuff doesn’t get recycled. It’s a lot of feel good fluff for putting stuff in different bins.
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.
I was in a class at college and my prof told us that whether we separate our recyclables or not, they were sorted at the facilities anyways.
So I worked in a paper recycling facility, I’ll see if I can find the picture, but we had a literal, and I’m not exaggerating, LITERAL, mountain of plastic excess from recycling paper. it was soul crushing to realize that all that shit really does have to go somewhere, and it adds up quickly
Recycling is mostly a scam. Companies get paid to take away waste for recycling, but almost all of it goes to landfill. Aluminium is good, but there’s not much else worth recycling. Glass is cheaper to produce from scratch, paper isn’t of a high enough quality and it literally grows on trees anyway, most plastics are either unrecyclable because they’re dirty or of a type that is difficult to process, and there’s no demand for food waste for composting. Farmers don’t want it. So yeah.. aluminium.
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