By: Anu Verma
Many Naperville residents aren’t sure what happens to the items they place in the blue bin after it leaves their curbside in the Groot truck. Under the single stream recycling system, we combine paper, aluminum, plastic and cardboard, and yes, glass as well, into our one blue bin.
Often the perception is that material goes to the facility and gets magically turned into new products. The reality is not that! The NEST Waste Team had the chance to visit the Groot material sorting facility in Elk Grove Village, and found that this is where material from our blue bins goes through an intense sorting process to create various commodity streams (large bales of one type of item each) for sale to the market.
Single stream recycling was introduced in 1990 as a lower cost alternative to dual-stream collection, meaning we didn’t have to sort our paper from everything else in the bins. It requires that once collected, our items must be sorted elsewhere in order to be recyclable. What the people at Groot don’t want to see is “wish-cycling”. Wish-cycling is when people place items in their recycling bin whose recyclability they are unsure of, and hope they will end up being recycled. Unfortunately, when unrecyclable items get into the bin, it must be physically sorted out, slowing the process, costing more, and anything that is missed by the various sorting steps and gets into the final products is considered contamination of that product.We saw the incoming recycling material in huge piles dumped into the building from trucks coming from all over the Chicago area. Materials are placed onto a multitude of conveyors that take them through both manual and automatic sorting steps. The automatic steps were things like magnets that pick up the iron-containing metals, a visual sorter that ‘sees’ the types of plastics and uses precise puffs of air to blow them off of the conveyor belt to a bin, and a super fast robotic arm that can pick things up with a vacuum and drop them into bins. Most cardboard is pulled out by hand, and paper is blown off of the line. It was all fascinating to watch!Here are some important recycling Don’ts we learned:
Don’t drop the coffee cup with some coffee in the recycling bin or a jar of peanut butter with some butter clinging to it. Items should be clean and dry.Don’t put medical waste in the recycling bin.No plastic bags, dry cleaners’ garment bags or hangers, hoses, Christmas lights, or shredded paper. These items are called ‘tanglers’ since they tend to get caught up in the crevices of the sorting machinery, and must be manually cut out. This is a risk to the workers as it is dangerous to climb into the machines.No lithium batteries!! They are a fire hazard (can, and often do, self-ignite) and are one of the biggest problems facing the waste industry today.No potato chip or tortilla chips bags or mylar balloons – there is no process to re-manufacture this material currently.
And a few Dos as well:
Please leave the caps on all containers (milk jugs, laundry soap or your water bottle for plastic), on larger ‘juice box’ type containers, and on glass jars (even if the lid material is not the same as the container. The lids generally are too small to be sorted by machinery, and will drop through the process and end up in the landfill. If lids are left on, they will get into the recyclable commodity bales. Do recycle your glass – there is currently a strong market that is looking for recycled glass to use in road base material. So you could soon be driving over that used pickle jar or wine bottle!Do recycle your pizza box if it only has a couple of grease stains (prefer no cheese and definitely no sauce). If the bottom has heavy grease stains, tear off the top and recycle that, or vice versa.
The bottom line is – we don’t have a magical recycling system. Rather, we have a hyper-disposable material world and the vast majority of packaging products won’t ever get a second chance at life if we don’t recycle. If we can recycle correctly and responsibly at our end, it will be cheaper and more effective down the recycling process chain, and help to minimize our carbon footprint in the long run.