Tuesday, Oct. 25, 2011

Tour could debunk the recycling myth

Although I make a good effort, I am not the greenest person on the planet. Heck, I'm not even the greenest person in North Raleigh. But I take my recycling pretty seriously.

In fact, I have been known to dig through the occasional public trashcan so I can redirect recyclables to the appropriate receptacle.

So you can imagine my excitement when recently I was able to write an article about Raleigh's expanded recycling program.

In response, a reader wrote to tell me that he has a friend who is well-informed about this kind of stuff, and this friend told him that "due to current market conditions, most of what we recycle is going to the landfill."

This is a rumor I have heard before. Personally, I have never seriously entertained the thought that recycling is an elaborate ruse perpetrated by the government, but it seems many people are buying this line.

According to Bianca Howard, the community education specialist for Raleigh's Solid Waste Services, Sonoco Recycling purchases and processes our materials, and they are contractually obligated to find an end user for our recycled materials.

"In addition to Sonoco Recycling, Raleigh is home to Waste Management RecycleAmerica, a materials recovery facility that sorts and bales recyclable materials from up and down the East Coast," Howard said. "Neither Sonoco Recycling nor RecycleAmerica would stay in business if they didn't have buyers for the materials they sort."

To quiet the skeptics, Howard encourages residents "to witness how materials are separated and baled by attending a tour at Sonoco." If you'd like to get a closer look at the process without booking yourself on a tour, you can view a video posted by N.C. State students at: tinyurl.com/3pj832j.

The Sonoco Recycling processing facility is a noisy, cavernous building with a huge conveyor belt system running through it. The process begins when a truck arrives and dumps its contents on the floor of the facility. Those materials are then shoveled onto the conveyor belt by a bucket loader.

As the materials move along the belt, they are separated into like groups. Some of the separating is done by machine, but much of it is done by dozens of workers standing along the belt, picking out various items - sort of like Lucy and Ethel working in the candy factory, except the Sonoco folks are sorting trash, not shoving chocolates into their mouths.

According to plant manager Patrick McDonald, Sonoco is primarily a packaging company. They run this recycling arm of the company to obtain paper they will recycle into packaging for products like Kleenex tissues and Pringles potato chips.

They sell off excess paper and all of the plastic, glass and metal. It is a for-profit venture, McDonald said.

Normally, 5 percent to 8 percent of the materials that come into the facility are trash and not recyclable, and those materials do have to be disposed of. "Those costs are significant," McDonald said, "so we have a financial interest in minimizing what we throw away."