Recycling

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Waste Sorting

As much as the government encourages and asks the society to sort out different materials and send them in to be recycled, most of us today are still not environmental conscious enough (or just pure too lazy) to do such type of self-sorting or separation on a consistent basis.  Even though most of today’s trash locations have special bins for the collection of recyclable materials such as plastic and glass, most trash collected today are still jumbled up together in a big pile.  Inside of these huge trash piles, there are many valuable and recyclable materials, thus a sorting process to identify these materials is implemented.  Although there are many different types of waste sorting processes (some are more advanced than others - more automated), they all have the same basics.  In this section we will focus on the basics, which can be summarized in seven general steps (information abstracted from Facilities & Services of University of Illinois): PROCESS OF WASTE SORTING Step One: Trash is collected and sent to a waste sorting facility in a large container truck. Step Two: The trash from the truck is placed on belt conveyers that will transport the mixture of materials throughout the facility, where people at different designated locations will remove specific materials.  Yes!  Humans, not machines, are still doing the sorting at this point.  The employees line up along the sides of the sorting belt and start to manually pull out recyclable materials (plastics, metals, papers, glass, etc.) and drop them down the shutes into already categorized storage bunkers underneath them. Large and bulky items in the trash, such as big cardboard boxes, equipment, and various metals, are first removed. Step Three: The conveyor belt will continue to transport the remaining materials inside the main sorting building room, where workers will continue to sort the other materials. Step Four: After sorting, the remaining material still on the belt conveyer is considered unusable trash.  This trash is compacted, trucked, and dumped into a landfill. Step Five: The sorted-out recyclable materials, based on their specific categories (usually caterorized by glass, aluminum, steel, color paper, white paper, plastic, cardboard, magazine, and soda cans) are then sent to a baler where each material will be compressed into bales and sent to a warehouse for temporal storage. Step Seven: Different categories of bales of recyclables are then shipped/sold to respective recycling mills. A VIDEO of the sorting process is available from Chittenden Community Television. *Please realize that this section focuses on today’s sorting process for a mix of materials resides in trash collections.  For an idea on the latest recycling process for various solid materials, which included those that are sorted out of those trash piles, please visit our section Current Recycling Processes – Solids.  For an idea on the latest compound material sorting / recycling process, please visit our section Current Recycling Processes – Compound Material.  For an idea on the latest composite material recycling process, please visit our section Current Recycling Processes– Composite.

Figure: People sorting the different types of materials in waste.. [Courtesy of: Canterbury City Council.]

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QUICK LINKS (Specific Table of Contents): Section I: Introduction Section II: Present (YOU ARE CURRENTLY IN THIS SECTION) Section III: Future

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