How do recycling factories deal with the problem of people putting things in the wrong bins?
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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.
I was in jail for a few months about 10 years ago. They put me on the work crew and about 12 of us would go to eco cycle and sort trash. Its all on a conveyer belt and you’re assigned specific trash. They have these MASSIVE bins that you toss the specific trash into. That’s the only sorting method that I knew of, free labor from the jail.
We have great recycling. 3 bins, general (incineration), recycling (paper, plastic, card, batteries, clothing, small electronic items, glass, etc) and garden/food waste. Fortunately collection s. The recycling plant does all the sorting.
A lot of the time the blue bins and trash bins go to the same factories and they just go through the same process for both bins to collect and profit off of as much recycling they can. It’s very common for a lot of cities to dump it altogether and just go through it all at once. I use to work at one when I was real young. Worst job ever but now I can probably smell dead corpses and not gag from the smell.
My recycling collector pick up the bin and if you mix or put anything by mistake, he left the box and put a note on top. Same if your refuse bin is open they won’t pick it up. They ‘educate’ people this way. Recycling bin out every week, refuse bin every other week.
One box box plastic, one box for glass, one sack for cardboard, one big bin for normal trash, one little box for food waste(you have to put in a proper bag so they can take it) and one bin for garden waste. You have to do it all the recycling and pay council tax so they can pick it up. Free money?
Where I work we get paid bonus to do the right recycling. One person is to check the bins every week. No recycling means no bonus. They take little bit of money at the time and every month they show us the numbers.
They don’t. It all ends up in landfill.
[https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB&t=1600574430481](https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB&t=1600574430481)
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
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.
There’s no such thing as a “recycling factory.” When you recycle something, it goes to a central location that performs some rudimentary separating and cleaning, but their job isn’t to make anything. They’re just trying to get your trash to the point where it can be sold to factories. That is, regular factories. Those factories then use the recycled goods the same as any other raw materials.
When your recycling is too messy to be sold to factories, and your local government can’t afford to clean it up to the point that it can be sold, it just goes in the trash.
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