The Materials Recovery Facility is really important. It acts as the traffic control center for all of the waste in Recycle City. The city's garbage and recycling trucks bring the waste from all of the houses, schools, businesses, and office buildings to the facility for sorting.
Step inside and see how much of Recycle City's waste can be put to use again.
Here, materials from recycling bins are loaded onto a conveyor belt and separated by type of material. Hazardous waste, such as poisons, paints, or chemicals, shouldn't be thrown into the recycling stream, but rather taken to the Recycle City Hazardous Waste Center.
Reusable or recyclable waste is sorted into separate bins—newspaper, office paper and cardboard, aluminum cans, tin and steel cans, glass, and plastic. After everything's sorted, the materials are compacted and baled. These bales are transported by truck, train or container ship and sold to different companies to make them into new products.
In addition to recyclables, Recycle City separately collects yard trimmings and food waste for recycling. This organic waste is processed separately to be made into compost, which can be added to soil to help grow fruits and vegetables in gardens.
When you mow the lawn, prune your trees, or rake up leaves, the yard trimmings may not look like much, but they make up about 13 percent of the U.S. waste stream by weight.
At the Recycle City Materials Recovery Facility, yard trimmings are separated out for large-scale recycling. Some yard trimmings are made into mulch or wood chips. The rest is turned into a natural soil additive, called compost, that is used in landscaping, gardening, or farming.
Yard waste can be collected and composted by an entire community, as a school project, or at home in your own backyard.
When you add compost to your garden, you can improve soil texture, keep weeds from growing, increase soil's ability to absorb air and water for better plant growth, and decrease erosion. With compost, you also reduce the need to use chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
Food waste can also be recycled into compost. In the U.S., food waste makes up over 34 percent of what goes into landfills. Residents, businesses, and restaurants separate their food waste and put it in a separate bin with yard trimmings.
Even though paper and paper products can be easily recycled, they still make up about 15 percent of the waste stream.
So which kinds of paper are recyclable? Cardboard, newspaper, and high-quality papers (like paper for notebooks, copiers, computers, letterheads, and envelopes) can all be recycled. Different kinds of paper—like newsprint and high-quality white paper—are sorted into separate piles because they are processed differently. Recycle City collects just about everything made out of paper that hasn't been coated with plastic, printed with metallic ink, or soiled by food. Paper towels and food-soiled paper can be placed with food scraps and yard trimmings in the organic-material recycling bin and turned into compost.
Paper is recycled by shredding it into small pieces and mixing it with water. The mixture is beaten into mush, called pulp, that flows onto a moving screen where most of the water is taken out. Wood or paper fibers remain and the fiber is pressed through rollers that squeeze out more water. It is then dried in a steam-heated dryer. The result is recycled paper.
Plastic is made of petroleum, a limited (or “non-renewable”) resource. It makes up more than 12 percent of all waste by weight, but takes up almost 20 percent of its space (or volume). About half of plastic waste comes from packaging. The rest comes from all kinds of goods, such as computers, radios, disposable razors, and toys.
A piece of plastic that is thrown away will stay the same for many, many years. Today, only about seven percent of plastic is being recycled – mostly plastic soft drink bottles and milk jugs.
In your house, you can probably find two types of easily recyclable plastics.
The plastics from soft drink containers (Plastic #1, known as polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, for short) are used to make fiber, structural molding, and more containers.
Milk jug plastics (Plastic #2, called high-density polyethylene, or HDPE) can make bottles, toys, pipes, crates, and other products.
A mixture of these plastics goes into making garbage cans, park benches, plastic "lumber," manhole covers, and even railroad ties.
Separating plastic by type for recycling helps manufacturers produce higher quality recycled products. (An easy way to tell which plastic a container is made of is to look on the bottom for a number inside the chasing arrows.)
To be recycled, plastics are either shredded or melted down and then used to make new plastic products.
Although #1 and #2 plastics are the easiest ones to recycle, there are other types of plastics that will be more commonly recycled in the future – and are already recycled in some cities.
It makes good sense to recycle valuable resources such as metals. Why? Metals are easier for people to recover and reuse than to mine from the earth.
Tin-coated steel cans, such as soup and fruit cans, are made of iron ore and tin, which are limited resources. They are the product of geological processes that take millions of years to complete. Once these metals are gone, they are gone forever.
These cans require a different recycling process than aluminum cans. As a result, steel cans may not be accepted by some recycling companies. If they're not recycled, cans made of these metals eventually rust and break down, but throwing them away is a waste of valuable resources.
To be recycled, these cans are put into a huge container with holes in the bottom and then dunked in a caustic (acid-like) solution to dissolve the tin from the cans. Then, the steel cans are washed and sold as high-grade steel. The dissolved tin is made into bars that are sold to companies that need tin to make more cans or other products.
Almost all wood can be reused in some way. The best way to reuse or recycle it depends on its condition. Wood that's in good condition or is especially valuable, like oak, can be resold at places like Recycle City's Community Warehouse.
About 40 percent of wood recovered from buildings that are torn down can be reused. Wood that is in pretty bad shape can be remilled and remanufactured into things like furniture and flooring. Even wood that's in terrible condition can be recycled by chopping it into small pieces and making it into things like particle board.
However, painted wood is hard to recycle because old paint often contains lead, which is a toxic metal. Sometimes painted wood is chopped into a fine mulch and used as filler in construction. Researchers are looking for other ways to reuse it, so it doesn't have to go into a landfill.
You can recycle many types of glass. Glass bottles and jars can be reused and recycled an infinite number of times. (In fact, only light bulbs, ceramic glass, dishes, and window glass can't be recycled. Dishes and ceramic glass can be sold at garage sales, given to someone else, or donated to charity or a community warehouse.)
Glass is made from soda ash, sand, and lime. If it's thrown away, it stays there indefinitely because glass never breaks down into its original ingredients. To be recycled, glass is sorted by color, crushed into small pieces, and melted down into a liquid. Then, it is molded into new glass containers. Sometimes recycled glass is used to make insulation and road-construction materials.
In many parts of the country, recycling aluminum cans is a profitable activity. There is an established market for recycling them, making it easy for most people to participate. And, because they house some of the country's most popular drinks, you can find them almost everywhere.
Aluminum is made from bauxite, an ore that must be mined from the earth. It doesn't decompose or break down, so an aluminum can will always be an aluminum can—until someone recycles it! When recycled, aluminum is melted down and reshaped into new cans and other items. Making new aluminum cans from old ones requires only five percent as much electricity as making new cans from bauxite, so recycling them saves a lot of energy!
