Digging through Trash for Answers
Not literally, but figuratively.
I am fascinated by waste. Where does it go? How is it taken care of? What happens to it when we close the trash bin’s lid?
And how long can our planet sustain this never-ending accumulation that we can almost guarantee will never cease?
Waste is such a hidden and occult aspect of our society; it’s something we don’t want to talk or think about. It’s out of sight, out of mind.
But I just couldn’t help but wonder — what is happening to all the trash that I throw out?
So I went on a little investigative quest to figure out how I could be a more responsible “waster.”
The agency in charge of waste disposal in my county hosts community engagement tours of its facility every month so I signed up to go in an attempt to assuage my doubts. I fully expected to be the only one to show up to this tour but I was pleasantly surprised to see a mix of children and families, older couples, and interested individuals.
Here’s what I found out from the tour
Where trash goes
Once your trash cans are collected by the trash trucks they are taken to one of six facilities to be consolidated. Of the trash from those six facilities, most of the county’s waste is brought to what is called ‘Renewable Energy Facility 1.’ This is where waste is chopped into small pieces, sorted out for metals to recycle, and then combusted into piles of ash.
What is quite neat about this process is that the resulting steam and heat from burning the waste is used to generate energy to power the facilities (said in my simplest unscientific words). In addition to the waste being turned into energy to power the entire facility, it generates extra energy sold to the local utility company to power over 30,000 homes.
To be honest, I was quite stunned by the efficiency of the trash’s life cycle. Whoever thought of converting the waste combustion process into an energy-producing process…true genius, I must say.
The rest of the ash from the combustion process is taken to a landfill and buried there. What I found interesting is that my county has basically run out of space for landfilling. So several years back a decision was made to build ‘Renewable Energy Facility 2 (REF2),’ which reduces the amount of waste going to the landfill by 90% and extends the landfill’s availability till 2053. What happens after 2053? That, I do not know.
But I do know that getting to see the inside of this facility was truly epic.
We were able to peek into the area where the operators were controlling the claws and one of the kids on the tour shouted “Look Mom, professional claw machine operators!!”
Unfortunately, those operators wouldn’t be receiving stuffed animal prizes for their claw machine skills.
How recycling works
The next stop was to the Recovered Materials Processing Facility aka where your recycling is taken to. This was what I was really curious about…if recycling is truly carried out or if it is some sort of sham.
We got to see from a bird-eye perspective through a glass-covered room all the machinery that is used to sort and organize recyclables. There’s one machine that uses Eddy current to attract metal materials dragging them into one lane, whereas the rest of the non-metals would fall into another lane for further sorting. This lane would lead into an area where people masked with gloves and a full-covered suit would quickly toss out items they thought didn’t belong in the lane. Their arms moved with such precision and speed that only years of practice could bring.
The then-sorted materials would fall into huge piles waiting to go through a machine to be squeezed and packaged into uniform colorful cubes.
These cubes were taken to warehouse-like centers where they would wait for whichever private companies to purchase them and be repackaged into whatever their next life form would be. The private companies that purchase from the county were not disclosed during the tour but I wonder how the recyclable purchasing market has changed since China (a once major importer of U.S. trash & recycled products) is no longer a player.
It was also alarmingly enlightening to see this facility and see what materials are considered recyclable and the rest of which fall into the category of unpermissible, and actually damaging to the recycling process.
Finding out that the stuff that you have been diligently sorting out of your trash to recycle is not recyclable was disheartening for some of the tour members.
One lady shook her head and sighed “I thought I was doing my part.” Another man kept asking for clarification on how to properly recycle those packages with razor heads that are half plastic and half cardboard.
So what’s the point?
I came out of this experience feeling like I understood a bit more about how waste management works. Of course, I recognize that this tour was packaged into a format to appease the public’s queries and probably doesn’t even touch upon all the issues that are going wrong.
However, I realize how greatly we lack education on waste management processes and the general rules on recycling. I wonder if more people were to see the giant heaps of waste and understand what a product’s life cycle meant — from material extraction to end-of-life — things would be different.
Maybe not. And that’s fine too. As much as we need consumers to be educated and conscious of their decisions, we just as much need systems that efficiently and sustainably handle our consumption needs.
So I am glad to have witnessed this system, albeit not perfect, but attempting to find circular solutions.
