A LOOK INSIDE A RECYCLING CENTER
I visited a local recycling center in Woodinville in August 2024 through a tour hosted by Zero Waste Washington and I have some thoughts…
Recycling is often the first thing that comes to mind when I tell people that I’m a zero waste consultant. It has also become a hot topic that creates buzzy headlines especially following the implementation of Operation National Sword (China’s effort to significantly reduce the amount of contaminated recycling sent to its country) in 2018.
It’s become normal to question whether recycling even matters anymore. While our recycling system is imperfect and isn’t as effective as it could be in an ideal world, it’s still a critical piece of our zero waste work.
In short, recycling is all about sorting and selling. When we can separate aluminum cans from paper from milk jugs and group the similar materials together, they can be sold to buyers who will turn these items into something new. This is how products with recycled content are made.
The problem comes when our recycling gets contaminated with items that shouldn’t be there. On my tour, I saw a worn down roll of carpet, an old boot, and lots (and lots and lots!) of plastic bags. Just going about my life, I’ve seen people drop half-full iced coffees, cigarette butts, and other garbage into the recycling. These are the types of items that clog up the sorting machinery or make it difficult to sort out high quality materials. No one wants to buy coffee-soaked cardboard or moldy milk jugs. When our local recycling plant can’t sort our materials well, it’s very likely that buyers will not want them and they will end up being sent to the landfill.
The inside of WM’s Cascade Commercial Recycling Center looks like Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory except instead of a river of chocolate, there’s a river of trash. All of the materials we throw into our recycling bins flow up ramps, across vibrating tables, and through machines that swirl and twirl the materials. The space is overwhelmingly loud with the vibrations of heavy machinery as they process about 570 tons of materials every day (or 40 tons per hour).
The process starts in a staging area. The trucks that pick up your recycling at the curb dump the materials onto the floor into enormous piles. Those piles are fed into a funnel that leads to a conveyor belt that slowly moves the materials through the building through various machines.
At different points in the building, our recyclables are sorted manually by a handful of people, with an optical sorter that uses lasers and specifically targeted jets of air, and with other creative feats of mechanical engineering. At the end of the process, we are left with bales of sorted materials that can be sold to the highest bidder. According to my tour guide, about 10% of the materials that enter the recycling plant are “residuals”, meaning they are not able to be put into bales and therefore are sent to the landfill. Everything else ends up in a bale with the goal of being purchased and turned into a product made of recycled content.
As we know from news headlines, this doesn’t always happen perfectly. Even as a professional that works closely with the waste industry, I don’t have full clarity on where these bales end up. It can be deeply frustrating to believe you’re doing all the right things and somehow perfectly recyclable materials are ending up in landfills around the world. This is why it’s critical that we continue to learn how to make our recycling system better and more effective as the world continues to change.
If you’re still overwhelmed by recycling and struggle with how confusing it can be, there are two key things I want us all to remember:
The materials in your recycling bin should be CLEAN, EMPTY, AND DRY. You don’t need to wash every single speck of pasta sauce out of the jar but please do try to get enough off that it won’t dirty up the other items in your bin.
Recycling rules differ depending on where you live. Always ALWAYS refer to your city’s local recycling guidelines for what belongs in your curbside bin. Here are the rules for Seattle for quick reference.
To read more about the current state of recycling, check out our blog: Let’s Get Real About Recycling (4-minute read).