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What Happens to Curbside Recyclables?
Ever wonder what happens to all those recyclables after the collection truck drives off? What magic separates the paper from the glass from the cans from the plastic?
Cedar Rapids/Linn County Solid Waste Agency contracts with a local recycling company to process and market all of Linn County's curbside recyclables. The material collected at curbside is brought to the material recovery facility (MRF) where is it sorted. The process includes conveyor belts, disk screens, magnetic separation, manual separation, and baling.
But getting the recyclables separated is only one part. For recycling to happen there have to be manufacturers who want the recovered material to make into new products and customers who want to buy those new products. So what has becomes of all this neatly sorted and baled material when it leaves the MRF?
Much of the newspaper, mixed paper, computer paper, and office paper will go to mills in Wisconsin and Michigan for production of a variety of paper products, including tissue paper, packaging, and more recycled content paper. Much of the cardboard collected in Linn County goes to Cedar River Paper (Cedar Rapids), the largest and most sophisticated 100% recycling paper mill in the United States.
Plastic soda/water bottles are made from very high quality plastic called PET (#1). Besides coming back to us in brand new soda bottles, this PET plastic is produced into dozens of products, including t-shirts, sweaters, tennis shoes, and backpacks. Recycled soda bottles go into carpets, tennis balls, combs, cassette tapes, car bumpers and car parts, boat sails, and furniture. Check out your fleece outerwear. It just might contain your old soda bottle.
Milk and juice jugs and detergent bottles are typically made from HDPE (#2) plastic. They will come back to stores as new containers or show up in parks as playground equipment, on backyard decks as plastic lumber, and in parking lots as speed bumps and parking blocks.
You will find a lot of recycled aluminum and steel in beverage and food cans. You will also find recycled steel in cars and ships and construction beams; in appliances, file cabinets, and paper clips. Recycled aluminum can be found in air planes, bicycles, foil, toys, and electronics. In fact, you will find recycled steel and aluminum virtually everywhere you find steel and aluminum.
Next time you toss your bottles, cans, and newspapers in the blue bin keep in mind that isn't the end of the line...
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