F.A.Q.’s
Why does GJ CRI ask customers to separate plastics, metals, etc. when other cities have commingled pick-up?
Grand Junction curbside recycling customers are asked to sort materials into four categories: 1) Glass, 2) Paper, 3) Corrugated, and 4) Metal and Plastic containers. Pre-sorting insures that the material is marketable and reduces on-the-job injuries to recycling workers.
Mixed materials cannot be marketed. Paper mills recycle paper, not glass, and steel mills don’t want plastic in their mix. Major cities and large national companies with lots of financial backing have what are called MRF’s (material recovery facilities), set up to sort materials mechanically. These are typically 3-4 million dollars just to build. Operational costs are enormous. The City of Grand Junction has no such facility. Instead, almost everything must be manually separated. It is much faster and easier for the individual to do the initial sorting in the kitchen. It is also safer. We have had serious injuries of our workers trying to remove lids from glass bottles or sort glass from steel. Glass can explode like a bomb if pre-heated by the sun (a piece of exploding glass just missed one of our employee’s jugular vein last summer).
After you separate material and set it at the curb, we empty it into different compartments in the trailer. We then separate glass by color. After picking up several thousand pounds of material by hand each day our hard working crews bring it back to the facility to complete the sorting process. We then bale, store and eventually load the material onto trucks. It is labor intensive process and one that requires the assistance of local residents to successfully complete.
The other issue is the end use of material. Cities that allow participants to mix their materials together end up sending lots of it to the landfill. Anywhere from 8 - 26% of the material picked up in those “single stream” programs is trashed. Programs that collect glass mixed with other materials cause huge problems for paper mills that may end up landfilling large quantities of contaminated paper because things like glass and metal damage their machinery and cannot be easily removed from the paper. When different colors of glass are mixed together, the glass is no longer marketable and becomes basically worthless. In too many instances mixed glass has been landfilled ( giving recycling programs a bad reputation.) Some programs have begun marketing their mixed glass as road base and landfill cover or in other experimental programs. We sort our glass by color and then market it to processors who are actually producing new bottles.
Why are we limited to recycle only #1 & #2 plastics here in GJ?
That is a matter of markets. There are technologies for recycling most plastics, but in order to invest in the equipment to do so and work on product lines that use that type of recycled content, processors must have a guaranteed volume and source. The majority of readily recyclable plastics produced are the numbers 1 and 2 and therefore these are the ones that most processors want. There are no plastics processors locally and all materials are sent hundreds of miles away.In order for smaller, more isolated areas like Grand Junction to afford processing and transportation costs we can only deal in the products that are most marketable. In the May 2007 edition, Resource Recycling summarized a recent survey completed on plastic bottle collection. When they asked program administrators across the country in cities that pick up all plastics in their mix, many basically had no idea what happened to the plastic once it was picked up. Some admitted that their only reason for telling participants to include all plastics in their recycling was that this increased the recovery of the #1 and #2. Others were aware that many of the mixed plastics recovered were sent oversees (a potential concern as some plastics, such as #3’s are highly toxic to make and to recycle).
Horizon Dairy reported that their #5 containers are collected on the eastern slope. Research would be needed to find out what actually happens to the #5 containers once they are collected and if reasonable markets exist for western slope product. Then it would be a matter of deciding whether or not we would have the volume to justify collection, processing, storage and shipping costs.
Why doesn’t GJ CRI accept glossy or non-corrugated cardboard?
The gloss on cardboard contains additives which are detrimental to the process of making new corrugated cardboard. “Linerboard” (also called “chipboard”) is made from the lowest quality of feedstock, often from cardboard that has already been recycled so often that it is at its end-of-life in terms of recyclability. These products are considered undesirable by the cardboard mills, although they will accept some of it from high volume producers and dispose of it later. Limited amounts of low grade cardboard are accepted for use in insulation production. Again, transportation costs and mill specifications prohibit the collection of large quantities of such cardboard for that industry.