How do recycling factories deal with the problem of people putting things in the wrong bins?
In: Other
In my city someone is paid minimum wage to sort recycling by hand. We comingle recycling in bags for pickup then it gets sorted at a central facility.
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.
Recovering steel is easier. Just have a magnetized overhead conveyor to separate them. The steel is pulled away from everything else. Done.
Anything else though is tougher. Typically people would be employed to sort through it. I did that for a little while and it freaking sucks.
If certains clients are shit at sorting at home we won’t even take the recycle bin to the recycling center. Just right to landfill.
Recycling is a lie, there is no recycling plants because it is not profitable so we pay third world countries to keep our plastics you got tons of information about this
[here for example uk cases](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/17/plastic-recycling-myth-what-really-happens-your-rubbish)
There is no real profitable way of recycling plastic it is all a lie since the commercialisation of plastic, gov and companies knew that it could be risky to sell plastic to the people knowingly that they were dumping it on other places so they invent the lie of recycling so you get the burden of saving the planet and they can still produce tons and tons of plastic every year.
I recycle and actually have to drive it to the center. More and more I’m looking at recycling as pushing my problems on to someone else. There is zero information on my landfills web site about where the recycling goes. For all I know it ends up in the ocean some place.
Great video about one project that is addressing this problem.
short answer though: right now most of it ends up at the dump.
Oooh finally my expertise. First, lots of sorting equipment using lasers, magnets, air, etc. High tech stuff. Robotic sorting is also just starting to take off. Also, people standing along the conveyors pulling out the worst stuff (plastic bags). Awful job and they worry everyday about being stuck with hypodermic needles.
Finally, after everything is sorted and baled, they have people walk around the outside of the bale and pull off visible contaminants. This is purely for marketing.
Bales are also inspected for moisture using a moisture meter (paper mostly). Too wet paper won’t sell.
PS: plastic recycling is mostly bunk. Plastic packaging companies aren’t even buying back recyclables, they prefer to use cheap virgin oil. Asshats!
Latest Answers