Question about recycling:

[brentspeak]

My town requests that residents put all glass bottles, cans, and plastic bottles together in the same garbage can for recyclables pickup day. But how do recyclers separate the glass from the plastic from the cans? What about stuff that shouldn't have been put in the recyclables garbage can in the first place like, say, somebody's TV dinner tray. And how (and why) does plastic get recycled?

[roody]

1. unsure also

I think that they take it to a facility where workers with gloves on sort out the mess. They must have to send some of it to the garbage. The earth would be much happier if we made less waste. Please think when buying!!! If our tap water is good and/or filtered, we should drink it, not bottled water.

[zalinda]

2. They dump everything into a sorting station

I've seen the process on our local TV. Workers are paid min wage to sort stuff. They stand at a conveyor belt and pick up items and toss them in either huge bins or a certain area. But then the workers who pick up at the curb do try and not take stuff that doesn't belong.

zalinda

[brentspeak]

7. Those guys deserve a lot more than minimum wage for

picking out garbage like that.

[Throckmorton]

9. They do get more than minimum

My wife's family business is recycling, they have been in the business since before the great depression (Democrat's to boot). They pay their line works about $2.00 over Connecticut Minimum, which is a lot higher than the federal minimum wage. They also get the same health care benefits as the owners. They employ over 175 people doing this. The towns around here pay $62.00 per ton to sent garbage to the regional incinerator, but only pay $8.00 per ton to dump the recyclables at the sorting stations.

They sell all of the plastic they can get to China.

BTW, most of the garbage goes in a separate waste stream to the incinerator, the bottle, cans, paper, etc go into different trucks.

[brentspeak]

10. Good to know

there are still some business owners out there who are decent to their employees.

[Javaman]

12. Dang, China buys our plastic too? nt

[Bobbie47]

3. We had to wash out

the cans and jars and put it in a bin that was provided by the garbage company, then it was sorted somewhere else. We got a list from the garbage company on what plastics they wanted, some they didn't want but can't remember what the # was.

[unblock]

4. we have to separate it ourselves into yellow bucket and green bucket

and then the truck comes along and they dump both buckets into the same big bin....

:eyes:

[Kickoutthejams23]

5. Many municipalities now remove the aluminum cans.

Then put the rest into the landfill. No market right now for plastic and paper. Most can't "afford" to recycle them. Easier and cheaper to simply place with other garbage.

[prole_for_peace]

6. my city stopped its recycling program - it was too "expensive"

it shouldn't be about saving or making money. it should be about helping to save the WORLD! they are asses.

[Dead_Parrot]

8. Some can be automated...

For instance, an electromagnet will pick out ferrous metals (steel cans), and a linear accelerator will pick out not ferrous metals. But different coloured glass, and the different plastics, tend to be sorted out by hand.

As to your second question, there's a list here of the different household plastics, and some recycled products... But as others have said, they often just get collected and dumped.
:grr:

[jpak]

14. There are other means too

Maine has a 5-15 cent refundable deposit on all recyclable containers (not just beer and soda cans and bottles - the program was initiated in 1976)

There is a least one recycling center in each town that accepts the containers and returns your deposit. (Mom-and-Pop outfits employ one or more people).

Our neighbor managed the town's recycling center (at the local landfill).
She had chalkboard tally of all the money the town made off each recycling stream - it was a lot...

[kestrel91316]

11. Here in the City of Los Angeles our trash pickup is divided into

three colored bins: green for compostable yard waste/tree trimmings, black for traditional landfill garbage, and blue for recyclables - aluminum cans, and all plastics with the recycleable triangle on them. Workers at a facility sort out the different categories of stuff. I think they hire the handicapped/developmentally disabled to do this, so they can be productive and feel useful.

They also take our paper/cardboard and caontainer glass. Cn't get this stuck into the bove paragraph 'cause i don't know how to do this HTML thing.

[tinrobot]

13. In my neighborhood, the blue bins are picked bare

There's always a guy with a shopping cart full of cans going through the blue bins. It's not a big deal, because the stuff still gets recycled, but with all the blue bins always empty, it makes me wonder what's the point of having garbage trucks for those...

[kestrel91316]

15. I make sure my refundable containers are on the bottom of the bin, out

of reach of prying hands.......I want the refund $ to go to the city, not some derelict (we have lots of wino/druggie homeless here). They can't get past all the cardboard and noncontainer plastics to get to the cash-able stuff.