THE QUESTIONS START at the blue recycling bin. Will this recycle? Should the lid stay on? Does it even matter?
Yes, it matters. New technologies allow recycling centers to sort and resell 80 percent of the material they receive. At Recology’s new Sonoma Marin material recovery facility in Santa Rosa, which officially opened Monday, the recovery rate can be up to 85 percent.
Recycling is a publicly financed industry that cleans up the mess of a private one — packaging. Public pressure on industry to use more environmentally responsible materials comes through the choices made by consumers when they shop.
Since China stopped importing recycled waste in 2018, domestic reuses have increased.
According to Amy Li, a commodities coordinator for Recology, most of their glass goes to Strategic Materials, a processor in Fairfield, where it is sorted by color and made into bottles. About 50 percent of their plastics go to a manufacturer in Chino in Southern California, and 50 percent goes overseas to Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam.
Their steel goes to West Coast Metals, an in-state manufacturer that distributes supplies throughout the Pacific Northwest. All of their aluminum is sold to Alabama. Their largest product is fiber, cardboard and paper, which constitutes about 80 percent of what comes in. Fiber mainly goes overseas as well, said Li, to manufacturing clients in Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam.
“Recology is a signatory to what’s called the Basel Convention, which is we’re committed to keeping our plastics domestic,” said Recology Sonoma Marin senior general manager Logan Harvey. “We try to keep plastics in U.S. and Canada.”
Sorting out life’s messes
Recology is a regional company, headquartered in San Francisco, with 26 affiliates in California, Oregon and Washington. Their new 85,000-square-foot $35 million facility in Santa Rosa sorts 400 tons of blue bin recyclables per day from 13 communities in Marin and Sonoma counties.
Their motto matches the task: “Life is a mess, and we sort it out.” The facility employs 35 full-time union workers, who earn about $22 an hour. It is an employee-owned company. The end products are clean sorted bales of material that become the raw ingredient for new items like paper bags, soda cans, wine bottles and carpets. But seeing is believing.
Trucks dump raw loads outside the building, where a backhoe shovels it onto a system of conveyor belts with a combined length of 1.58 miles.
The first thing to touch the material is human hands. Flanking a swift-moving conveyor stream, people pull off rope, plastic film and other objects that can’t be recycled or entangle the machines. It’s an obstacle course inside. Only the clean material will make it to the baler at the end.
“We found an elliptical machine one time,” said Harvey. “Hypodermic needles, even if they are capped, do not go into the blue recycling bin, because on our human sorting line they become porcupines.”
People should tear apart combined packaging, like cardboard with plastic glued to it, he said, and rinse off food waste.
“It doesn’t matter if there’s a lid on or off,” Harvey said. “The glass will break, and the machines can deal with it. Don’t worry about labels, they can handle it. We encourage customers to decline film or flimsy plastics including 6-pack rings, which harm birds, fish, sea turtles, and other animals.”
Next comes the small-medium-large machine, the ballistic separator. The material gets bounced around inside a contained span of vertical paddles. Cardboard jumps into a high bin that feeds a conveyor. Detergent jugs and other medium-sized materials shoot straight forward into a second bin. Small items and glass fall onto a third. At this stage, material types are still a little mixed, but more sorting machines lie ahead.
“Every item has multiple opportunities to be sorted,” said Harvey. There’s even another human-tended conveyor at the end called the “last chance” line.
Artificial intelligence plays a role
There are seven optical sorters run by artificial intelligence. They use computer vision to send instructions to multiple components within the same machine. The message is received by an air blower in front of a conveyor belt.
As an item travels beneath an illuminated scanner, it is identified by cameras above. The camera signals the blower, which calculates the item’s position and shoots a narrow blast of air that rockets a Rice-A-Roni box off the belt and into a separate bin. Each of the seven optical scanners are looking for a different type of material.
Next comes the eddy current — magnetic separators. Positive magnets pull steel into one bin. Negative magnets push aluminum into another. Aluminum cans are a big seller because they are so recyclable. A can turns into another can repeatedly, Harvey said.
After all this beating, the glass has broken and fallen to the bottom of the stream.
Plastic is still the biggest challenge in the waste stream, because it doesn’t return to the earth.
“Stay away from colored plastics,” said Harvey.
Clear or translucent items can recycle into a greater number of goods.
“The orange of a jug of Tide detergent is its brand,” he said. “But the orange plastic can only be made into other orange products. It’s also a problem that virgin plastics are still so cheap for producers and readily available.”
Even recycled plastics contain a percentage of virgin material.
“When shopping and facing a choice between condiments like ketchup and mustard presented in glass or in plastic, go for the glass,” said Recology spokesperson Robert Reed. “All we can do is speak to the marketplace with our consumer dollars.”
