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Apr 29, 2008 9:22 pm US/Pacific
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Good Questions: Recycling Sorting
SACRAMENTO (CBS13) ―
Tonight's Good Question is something I've always wanted to know: How do they sort recycling? I took a field trip to the Sacramento Recycling and Transfer Station to see how it's done firsthand, and boy, was I surprised!
Five hundred tons of recycling comes into the Sacramento station each day, and it's all dumped together. So, all that recycling you so carefully sort and separate ends up here in a giant pile.
"Most of the blue bins people may have outside their houses [hold] paper, cardboard, plastics, bottles and cans," said Kurt Standen of BLT Enterprises. "It eventually winds up on a tipping floor in a material recovery facility."
It doesn't stay there long, though.
"Our front end loader's picking material up, piling it so it's out of the way and eventually they'll pull over to this area and drop it into the conveyor bins.
Then it's dropped onto conveyer belts, where folks with fast hands pull out cardboard and plastic bags and things that can't be recycled.
Machines eventually take over, separating paper, which makes up 70 percent of recycling here, in a system reminiscent of salmon swimming upstream. Aluminum cans are culled using something called an eddy current. An electrical charge repels the eluminum and then it's shot into silos.
With the price of milk these days, it's surprising to see so many plastic cartons.
"You can kind of hear that better than you can see it but this is one of my favorite things: A giant magnetic belt picking up metal, things like tuna cans, soup cans, anything metallic," said Kurt.
Northing much falls through the cracks here. Even shards of glass are filtered out through screens. To hear it described by my tour guide, the General Manager, the whole process is poetry in motion.
"The product isn't quite as pretty as this stuff coming off the line," he said.
Everything eventually ends up in bunkers, then crunched together and belted and bailed.
"We'll make nice square 1,300 pound bails out of it and get it ready for shipment.
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