What Happens When You Recycle
What happens to the stuff you recycle? To find out, MidWeek follows a bin from a local school to a sorting and packing center at Sand Island, and discovers that it’s a fascinating process people who frequent our local elementary schools with empty milk cartons, wine bottles and pickle jars as well as newspapers and cardboard boxes, it ends there, without wondering where the materials go from there.
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For most people who frequent our local elementary schools with empty milk cartons, wine bottles and pickle jars as well as newspapers and cardboard boxes, it ends there, without wondering where the materials go from there.
Then there are the odd people - such as MidWeek editor Don Chapman and myself - who can’t help wondering exactly what happens to that old newspaper or used ketchup bottle.
To get the proper answer, we followed the bins to Hawaii Recovery System’s processing and sorting facility on Sand Island.
It was a cloudy morning when site manager Craig Matsuo gave me a tour of the outdoor, seaside facility. Brown pulped paper covered most of the entrance, and the scent of sea salt mixed with compost filled my nostrils.
“We pull in, roughly, about 200 tons per week and 10 tons of rubbish,” says Matsuo. “Out of that, about 170 tons is paper, and the remaining 30 are aluminum cans, plastic products and glass bottles.”
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The process starts when the bins are first weighed for their gross weight before they enter the facility. They then empty the paper load, get weighed again for cans and plastic, and then dump the remaining materials in the appropriate station in the facility.
Matsuo leads MidWeek photographer Nathalie Walker and me around the yard, stomping through puddles in a beeline past bales of newspapers and piles of paper yet to be sorted to our first stop, the compactor.
We enter a covered area where workers throw cardboard onto a conveyer belt that leads to a compactor - a machine that reaches about 15 feet high, is really loud and runs all day.
“Because it comes in mixed to us, we’ll separate the cardboard and the newspaper, and depending on what commodities we’re bailing, the operator will scoop it into the compactor,” he says, the roar of the compactor accepting materials and compressing them behind him, then pushing the materials into a long square paper log. The thought of making PlayDoh spaghetti enters my mind. “It’s easier to pull out the cardboard from the newspaper,” he explains, saying the cardboard is lighter and easier to spot. “Then the newspaper gets baled first.”
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The compactor also is used to compact aluminum cans and plastic products after sorting. He later shows us the bales of plastic water bottles and rainbow cubes of cans - the bales look like they belong in a contemporary art gallery for an exhibition on the tragedy that is human consumption of resources.
On the way there, we stop by a large mound of whole and broken bottles - most of which formerly held beer or wine - that could reach well over any semi truck, in terms of height.
“This is about a week’s worth of work for us,” says Matsuo as Nathalie and I gasp at the daunting pile of broken glass. “The glass - we sort of just run it over, load it into containers like that (he points to a large shipping container) and then we send it out to the Mainland or glass recycling mills.”
A large loader comes out of nowhere and begins to pick up the bottles from the large pile to dump them on another, effectively
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