Creature from the Black Lagoon? Swamp Thing?!

Neither. It’s garbage that travels from the transfer station to the recycling facility, where it gets tangled up in sorting machinery and shuts down the entire process. Think of it as the solid waste equivalent of wet wipes at pumping stations.

By Stephanie Johnston

Stephanie Johnston Ah, the romance of helping the public be responsible environmental stewards. A Waste Management material recovery facility (MRF) was temporarily shut down when inappropriate material got into sorting machinery gears.

Driven by news about “the Amazon effect” and the growing popularity of meal kits, Public Works Editorial Intern Justin Deffenbacher and I visited Waste Management’s Calumet City, lll., material recovery facility (MRF) to find out how these trends are impacting public agencies.

Answer: they are and they aren’t.

Municipal waste-reduction goals set in the 1980s and 90s measured success by weight because that was the easiest way to measure how much stuff wasn’t going into landfills. Since then, new and lighter packaging and changing priorities have made setting and communicating performance metrics much more complicated.

Today, a bale of PET bottles consumes 90,000 PET bottles instead of 65,000; bottled water suppliers learned the bottles could be thinner and still safely deliver the product -- a win/win because they’re using less packaging and paying less to get product to market. Your agency (or your collection and disposal contractor) is probably picking up more cardboard boxes, but they weigh less than newspapers and take up more cart space if not flattened. Televisions, computers, and cellphones also weigh less but lack many materials that made collecting and disassembling them profitable.

Stephanie Johnston Check it out! Someone threw their recycling cart into -- what else -- their recycling.

The formula for calculating packaging’s environmental impact is changing. Someone must explain this to a public already confused about what to do with old crockpots, rubber balls, batteries, and even bras – all of which Justin and I saw during our visit. I believe people want to do the right thing but can’t (when the option doesn’t exist) or won’t (unless punished in some way). If messaging by solid waste agencies was difficult before, it’s much more complex now.

Justin’s writing an article that provides more detail. In the meantime, what’s happening at your level? Are you seeing different types of waste streams? Are you talking more to your waste haulers about how the stream’s changing and how to respond? Let me know at [email protected].

And let’s just say he’ll never think of garbage in the same way. Everyone should get a tour like this!