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Hi, I'm Jim Kordiak, Anoka County Commissioner
I represent the cities of Fridley, Columbia Heights and Hilltop and I'm also the
Commissioner responsible for Anoka County's recycling programs.
As a county, one of our biggest challenges is to adequately convey to our
residents the importance of recycling and the role that they must make
to make recycling programs successful.
Anoka County works with twenty one municipalities and recycling service
providers to collaborate on projects
and to provide education to our residents
We've seen many changes over these twenty years that we work closely together on.
although these changes has made recycling easier, it still sometimes
can be confusing.
That's why i like to introduce two new programs
Recycling Then and Now and Recycling 101.
They will help us to explain the recycling technologies that's used to get
materials from the recycling bin to brand new recycled products that we use
everyday.
We hope that you'll join us and recycle all that you can
our natural resources are too precious to waste.
--music--
Grandpa, grandpa.
Grandpa, stop them! They're putting recyclable in a garbage truck!
it's all right michael
that's not a garbage truck that's a recycling truck. But it looks just like a garbage truck.
yes it does
Sit down Michael, let me tell you all about our new recycling program.
You see, Michael
recycling has come a long way over the years.
Today we can put all of our cardboard
newspaper
mixed paper
glass bottles and jars
1 and 2 plastic containers with necks
and our metal beverage and food cans
into one single recycling bin
Then, we can wheel that bin out to the curb, and the recycling truck
like the one you saw today
comes to pick it up.
Wow, Grandpa, was recycling always that easy?
I'm afraid not.
That's why there are so many people who don't do it.
They just don't realize
how much recycling has changed.
back when your mom was younger there wasn't much we could recycle
Stella!
let's load up the paper.
When we got a chance
we would load the old newspapers into the car and take them to the local paper drive.
Or sometimes we'd take our pop cans to be recycled at the scrap metal yard.
We didn't have recycling trucks coming to our house back then.
When we finally did get recycling at the curb,
we had a separate all the different recyclables into seperate bins.
We even had to separate different colors of glass.
That sounds like a lot of hard work.
It was.
And we couldn't even recycle plastic or all of mixed paper yet.
As time went by and technology advanced
recycling got a little easier and you could put all of your paper into one
bin.
Plastic, metal and glass into another
that's how you and your mom do it at your house. 0:04:10.7590,:04:14.359 Wow, grandpa, it really has gotten easier for us to recycle.
What happens to all the stuff after the truck picks it up?
Well, Michael,
the truck hauls all of the recyclables to a place called the materials recovery
facility, or MRF
At the MRF, the truck dumps its contents out onto the tipping floor, where a big
front loader comes and pushes all of the recyclables into two conveyors built
right on the ground.
The conveyors then take the materials up to the sorting line.
Materials in the sorting lines are sorted by hand
Cardboard boxes and brown paper bags are pulled off first.
All of the remaining paper and containers continue on the conveyor
and then through a series of filters called
news screens.
These screen separate out as much a newspaper as possible from the other
materials.
any paper materials that go through the new screens are sent to a second group
of hands sorters, removing material that isn't newspaper.
The materials that were not separated by the new screens continue on the conveyor through
angle screens.
They separate out all of the plastic, glass, metal and aluminum containers.
Any paper that is separated is sorted by hand again
to make sure it is the right quality.
Once all of the paper products have been removed
the containers are brought back to the tipping floor
where they're pushed into another in- ground conveyor that takes them thru
the containers sorting equipment.
First, all of the containers pass through a large, rotating drum covered with holes.
The drum lets any small materials mixed in with the containers
fall through the hole and off of the line.
The drum is also lined with magnets that pull steel cans and other metal
items away from the other material.
The separated steel product are sent into a storage area
where they'll wait to be compacted and sent to a steel manufacturing market
to be recycled. The mixture of glass plastic and aluminum cans remaining on
the conveyor
then goes through a filter called an air classifier
where it sends glass in one direction,
plastic bottles and aluminum cans in the other.
Glass is then sorted by hand into three different colored groups.
When sorted, the glass is stored outside
until it can be shipped to market.
The plastic and aluminum cans then go through a vibrating conveyor to separate
them from one another. The separated materials run on parallel sorting
lines and the plastic is sorted
into one of three categories
milk jugs, detergent bottles, and soda or water bottles.
Plastic bottles are tossed into chutes that blow them into a storage silo where
they wait until they're compacted.
Finally, the aluminum cans are separated automatically by a special magnet called an eddie current
that repels them from the conveyor belt.
The cans are also flown into a separate storage silo before being compacted.
Once all of the material has been sorted and stored the different materials are
compacted into a form that is easier to store, handle, and ship.
The result is large compacted bricks called bales.
These bales are then delivered to different markets that would use it to
make brand new products. For example, the bricks of aluminum cans are shipped to
processing centers that can make them into brand-new cans.
The aluminum
shredded into small chips
melted and then rolled into enormous sheets of aluminum.
These sheets are then cut and formed into new aluminum cans.
Nearly fifty percent of every aluminum can is recycled content.
Paper bricks are set to paper mills where they are de-inked and turned into pulp.
The pulp is bleached dried and fed through steam heated rollers that dry and
flatten it. It can then be trimmed, rolled and sent to printing plants.
Recycled plastic containers are sent to a facility that washes and chops them
into small flakes.
The flakes are dried, melted
filtered and formed into strands.
the strands are cooled and chopped into pellets which can then be used to make
a variety of plastic products.
the glass that has gone through the MRF is also a broken-down, filtered
and mixed with sand, ash and limestone before being melted.
The molten glass can then be formed into glass bottles and containers of any shape and size.
Gee grandpa, you sure have seen a lot of changes with recycling.
What do you think it'll be like when I grow up?
Will we have any garbage at all?
I sure hope not!
After all,
Garbage isn't really garbage,
it's just material waiting for someone to figure out how to recycle it.
-- music --