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“Bags of recyclables come in on trucks and barges and are loaded onto the conveyer belt, then are torn open by a machine that slices each bag open,” Quinn said. The first stop on the tour, called the “tipping floor,” is where the DSNY trucks drop off their loads in a football field-sized room filled with about a thousand tons of recyclables.Ī giant crane, dwarfed by the mountains of discarded material in the enormous room, picks up the waste, tossing it onto a conveyer belt. It’s not like you put it in your bin and suddenly it’s a new thing.” “This is where recycled items begin their journey,” said Sims’s education coordinator, Eadaoin Quinn during a tour of the plant. Sims’s new facility in Sunset Park, Brooklyn (Nikolas Koenig / Selldorf Architects) New York City contributed $60 million to the new digs, which are large enough to accommodate the annual flow of household recyclables from all five boroughs-more than 250,000 tons. In December of 2013, Sims unveiled a chic new Selldorf Architect-designed, $110-million Sunset Park, Brooklyn facility. Sims, in turn, pays the city a percentage of sales based on monthly national rates. New York City, for instance, pays Sims approximately $70 to $75 per ton to take the recyclables. While states and cities mandate and market recycling with green symbols and variations of catchy ‘reuse–reduce–recycle’ tag lines, it is not uncommon for them to pay outside companies to handle the actual process. ***Īt the MRF, recyclables change hands from the city to the waste world-most often to private-sector companies. This is partly due to user error, a common problem which occurs when people place unrecyclable materials into recycling bins. It's sorted and thrown out,” said Tom Szaky, CEO of TerraCycle, a recycling company. “Typically, 50% of what you put in your recycling bin is never recycled. In this case, the materials sifted include glass, metal, cartons and some plastics. A MRF sifts through recyclables to recover items that can be resold in the post-consumer (the recycling industry’s term for items thrown away by consumers) commodities markets. Instead, it sorts, recovers, and discards. **Īlthough this type of facility is commonly referred to as a recycling plant, it only handles part of the recycling process. After being tossed in the back of the diesel-fueled truck, each load makes its way to New York City’s Material Recovery Facility, or MRF (pronounced “murf”), which is operated by Sims Municipal Recycling, a company owned by Sims Metal Management. In New York City, household recyclables are picked up curbside, once a week by the Department of Sanitation (DSNY). With a presumed life span of over 500 years, it’s safe to say that every plastic bottle you have used exists somewhere on this planet, in some form or another. This process is possible because plastic is a stubborn substance, which resists decomposition. What happens is the bottle enters an elaborate global system within which its plastic is sold, shipped, melted, resold, and shipped again-sometimes zigzagging the globe before becoming a carpet, clothing, or repeating life as a bottle. Recycling makes us feel good, but few of us know what actually happens to a plastic bottle after we drop it into a bin. We might sort these items into their designated bins or bags, but once we lose sight of the recyclables, the rest of the process is an abstraction. We might clean bottles and jars, crush cartons and break down boxes. Most of us do not think much about recycling. Editor's note: This article has been significantly revised post-publication to correct for factual errors in the original version.
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