9 Ways You Can Help Out Your Local Recycling Facility
Recently, I had the pleasure of touring the Sunset Park Material Recovery Facility in Brooklyn, NY run by Sims Municipal Recycling. This state-of-the-art facility has been in operation for 2 years and has a 20-year contract with the city of New York to manage all the glass/metal/plastic recycling and half the paper recycling from Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx, and Brooklyn. The property itself is home to bioswales, artificial reefs, a large wind turbine (which provides 4% of the facility’s energy), and many solar panels (which provide a further 15% of the facility’s energy).
Here are some tips I learned on my adventure that can help YOU be a better recycler!
1. Recycle Your Aluminum Foil
Sunset Park gets only get 10% of NYC’s foil! From take out to baking, foil is pretty ubiquitous, and even if there’s a bit of food residue on there, it is still one of the most important things to recycle. Mining bauxite (aluminum ore) and refining it into foil, cans, and other material takes a lot of energy so recycling aluminum is very financially viable. As long as the crust of your sandwich or your burrito leftovers isn’t in there, throw that foil in the glass/metal/plastic bin. Heavy food waste is no good because recycling is often separated by air jets that blow lighter things away from heavier things.
2. Keep the Lids on Containers
I’m not exactly sure why. Maybe because lids are small and can get stuck in machines or sorted incorrectly. But if the container and the lid are made from the same material, keep them together.
I had great fun with the timelapse feature on my phone! This claw crane is moving recyclables from a barge to the facility. Source: Sejal Soni.
3. Food & Recycling
Many avid recyclers thoroughly wash their recycling along with their dishes before throwing it into a bin. While cleaning is great, have you ever wondered whether the water used to clean recyclables is worth it?
Well, apparently it’s not. Residue of oils and other foods on recyclables is normal and expected. The people at Sunset Park will be the first to admit that the materials they sell to be made into new products are not clean. In fact, they say that the biggest concern with food in recycling is rats and other pests because recyclables will stay in your apartment/garage/back alley/kitchen for longer than trash will. Again, heavy food waste is no good because recycling is often separated by air jets that blow lighter things away from heavier things.
4. Cartons Are Not Paper
Cartons, like milk, juice, sometimes soup, and other things are cardboard on the outside, plastic on the inside, and sometimes have a layer of freshness-preserving foil in between. So are they even recyclable? YES. But not if you put them in the paper bin. In the city of New York, these types of containers are recycled as glass/metal/plastic, even through the paper part is all you see.
5. The Infamous Pizza Box
Here we have an interesting equation where cardboard + pizza grease = trash, right? Wrong! Well, sometimes.
Pizza boxes still contain a bounty of recyclable cardboard material, even if a few square inches of it is soaked in grease. When the cardboard is processed into new material, it goes through a bath of detergents and other chemicals that will separate the greasy bits from the clean bits, and the clean bits will be sent off to become new pizza boxes or packaging or paper or coffee cups.
6. Don’t Put Plastic Bags in the Recycling
As someone who collects recycling in a plastic bag and deposits the lot in her apartment building’s recycling bins, this was a newsflash. Plastic bags (and other non-rigid plastic like wrappers) get soaked in all the garbage juices from the collected recycling. This means they are dirty, wet, smelly bits of plastic that can clog machines and are so difficult to clean that facilities like Sunset Park can’t sell them to other companies, but have to pay other companies to take them (the facility receives 30 tons of plastic bags every day!).
The Slow-Mo feature is fun too! Source: Sejal Soni.
7. Electronics Are Not Recyclable on the Curbside
Many electronics, like cathode ray tube televisions (non-flatscreen), contain toxic components. This makes recycling problematic and expensive. Leaving them on the curbside can result in a fine for improper disposal, which probably makes it more cost-effective to drop electronics off at an electronics store, even if they charge you $10-$25 to do so.
8. HDPE (AKA #2 plastic) Is the Most Valuable Plastic
A 1-foot wide, 2-feet long, 1-inch thick sheet of High-Density Polyethylene sells for $45 on Amazon. This is one of the most economically viable things to recycle as it is often white or clear, which means that when it is recycled it can be dyed. Things like milk jugs and laundry detergent containers are HDPE so remember to recycle them, especially if they are white or clear.
It's tough to sort out different colors of glass so much of it gets broken into cullet that can be use under asphalt on roads. When rounded off a bit more, the cullet can be used in place of gravel as seen outside of Sunset Park Material Recovery Facility.
9. Visit, advocate, and RECYCLE
When in doubt: recycle. If you are unsure whether something can be recycled, do it anyway. Because if it’s not recyclable, the ballistic separators, eddy current separators, and optical sorters at your local recycling facility will funnel it off to where it needs to go.
To find out more, check out your city or town government website for info on where your recycling and trash goes once it leaves your curb. Take a minute to look into it because you might even be able to take a tour of your local facility to see and smell recycling in action!
Our group at Sunset Park Material Recovery Facility
Special thanks to the Columbia Environmental Law Society and Eadaoin Quinn of Sims Municipal Recycling.
Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with Sims Municipal Recycling or Sunset Park Material Recovery Facility
Thanks for reading!