Deboah J. Taylor’s column
Yes, Virginia, our recyclables
please recycle
A group of Ossego County residents toured Albany’s Sierra Processing to see exactly what happens to items that end up in local recycling bins. where does it go? Are they really recycled? how do they classify it?
When Ossego County’s official carrier, Casella Waste, empties recycling bins at the Northern and Southern Transfer Stations and the towns of Hartwick and Cherry Valley, drivers take it unsorted to Sierra Processing. Located across from the Port of Albany, Sierra Process is ready to sort and sell recyclables in his three Massachusetts counties as well as more than a dozen of his counties in the Capital District.
A giant hauler dumps a ton of unsorted recyclable waste onto the floors at either end of the 30,000-square-foot building, and sorting begins. A bulldozer pushes it onto a huge conveyor belt, where a vibrating process evens out the pile so fast-moving humans can find unrecyclable items like car batteries, lawn hoses, guns, knives, battery chargers, electrical cords, and more. A never-ending stream of items that can be pulled from fast-moving items. Conveyor His belt goes all the way up, down, sorting plastic, cardboard, aluminum, tin and glass into separate streams. The factory also uses robots for picking, pulling and sorting. And make a fuss.
Finally, the segregated recyclables are packed and loaded onto trucks at their final destination, where they are reprocessed into new merchandise. For example, Georgia-Pacific was buying paper and cardboard.
Sierra Processing Maintenance Manager David Christie leads the Ossego County group on a tour of the facility, and sees stacks of paper, cardboard, aluminum, tin, glass and plastic as his “products.” Christie wants it to be as clean and tidy as possible when it’s trucked out of the Sierra to customers.
About 90% of the items dumped on the floor at the start of the “Big Thought” go to recycling destinations, and about 10% go to landfills, according to Christie. These items include (but are not limited to) black trash bags that are filled but cannot be safely opened by workers because the contents are invisible.
The factory operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and employs about 35 people per shift. 400-450 tons of recyclable materials are processed every day.
So when you take a bag of recyclables to the trash every week, are all the “things” actually recycled? Yes, most of the time. We also need to be careful here.
Ossego County residents on the tour included representatives from the Ossego County Conservation Society Recycling Committee, Hartwick Town Recycling Volunteers, and members of the Cooperstown Area Coalition of Women Voters.
