In March and April, the Town, in coordination with the Indian River County Solid Waste Disposal District and Waste Management, organized a couple of tours of the recycling facilities in St. Lucie County, where the recyclable materials collected in the Town of Orchid are processed. Members of the Community Association's Environmental Sustainability Committee were invited to join, as were members of the Town Council and Town Staff.
The tours started at the landfill in Indian River County, where recyclable materials from all over the county are first brought before they are then transferred for processing at St. Lucie County's landfill. Sue Flak, Recycling Education and Marketing Coordinator of the Solid Waste Disposal District, provided a thorough explanation of the differences between the landfills, how the landfill is closely monitored in regard to water runoff and methane production, and a new program the county is interested in launching to separately collect residential food scraps (fruits and vegetables) in exchange for compost.
The tour continued in St. Lucie County, where Jennifer Anglin and Edward McDuffie educated participants on the cycle of recycling. It was emphasized that recycling is a product that requires buyers and that the market for such materials is ever-changing and international. Your milk jug might end up halfway around the world as a picnic bench in a park! Presently, there is little interest in glass; BUT, don't worry, as St. Lucie is able to use ground-up glass, or glass sand, to aid their landfill construction, so it's still being put to good use. On the other hand, beverage cans are in high demand from buyers of recycled material, as is the plastic used to fabricate drinking bottles. And the products made from recycled materials are manifold! Styrofoam collected at recycling convenience centers can end up becoming a picture frame, for example.
The speed at which recycling goes from an enormous pile of mixed materials from the single-stream program in Indian River County to compressed bales of sorted items is tremendous. Workers sort 40 items per minute as they fly by on fast-moving conveyor belts! Specialized machinery is ready to offer a helping hand too. Paper and cardboard hop and skip over several axes of rubber-lined wheels, while other items fall through the wheels to conveyors below for further sorting. Magnetic metals are quickly sorted from other materials with the use of a giant spinning magnet that picks the metals up and drops them in a separate bin. A high-tech piston system uses air pressure to blow different types of plastics into a labyrinth of tubes that lead to large storage bins.
Once the recyclable materials are sorted by type, they are crushed into bales, which are stacked until they are ready to be collected for further processing. A single bale can weigh over 1000 pounds depending on the material!
The greatest challenge to this high-speed and complex process is recycling contamination, and that's something each one of us can help with. In Indian River County, the contamination rate in the blue carts is 25%, and a big portion of that is plastic bags. In order to bring that percentage down, it's important to be aware of what can and cannot be recycled in your curbside collection service. See our recycling information page for more details. And when in doubt, remember this advice from our tour guides: "Do not place it in the blue bin unless you are very certain it's recyclable!" Some of the contamination the tour group saw included handbags, dolls, clothing, Styrofoam, ribbon, and much more.
If you'd like to view a virtual tour from the comfort of your home and far away from the tremendous noise of the facility, then watch the St. Lucie County Solid Waste Disposal District video. The images in the slideshow below are from the tour on April 12, but there was another tour with other participants from the community on March 30, including Community Association Property Manager Larry Hoffman.
