If you’re of a certain age, you can remember a time when all the trash you accumulated in a week got tossed in one can, usually a metal can, and from then the trash promptly left your mind. Today we are all familiar with blue bins, recycling symbols, composting, and trash separation. But most of us still don’t know what happens to all those things we rinse and separate and often are unsure why it matters. City of Roses Disposal and Recycling (COR) is an expert in this field, and we have a lot to say on why recycling matters. 

The Lifecycle of Recyclables

Let’s start with a bit of education on what happens to plastic, glass, paper, and metal after you put it all in that recycle bin. COR’s focus is on the Greater Portland area, so we’ll stick to what we know best. Our trucks pick up those recycling bins and transport them to our material recovery facility, where everything is sorted along large conveyor belts. Screens separate items based on weight, magnets pull out the metals, and other machinery plucks out all other types of materials. Glass is already separated out from the other products. 

Once separated, recyclable items are shredded, grinded, crushed, and prepared for their next stop. Each commodity is sold to buyers and/or manufacturers that break it down to raw materials or sell to another company that will do the manufacturing. Paper products and glass are a boon for this area. We already have paper mills, and those mills use the recycled paper products, mixed with a bit of virgin fiber, to make new paper and cardboard. Glass is sent on to a plant near the Portland airport that crushes the old bottles to be used for new ones. We Oregonians consume a lot of beverages in bottles, so being able to recycle right here at home is a big plus. 

Plastics are a bit more challenging because they come in varying grades. Some plastics can be melted down into pellets for making other products, others become polyethylene that’s used in items like trash bags, and some plastic is transformed into an oil that is used in other chemicals or for items like cleaning solvents. That oil can even be used as a fuel. However, the downside to plastic is that there are still several variants that have no recyclable use, and the markets for plastics are driven by oil prices, so if oil prices are low, making new plastic is often cheaper than recycling. 

Environmental Benefits

But overall, recycling helps decrease demand on our landfills and is good for the environment in many ways. Bottles, aluminum, and paper all are originally sourced from products found in nature. Bottles stem from lime and sandstone, aluminum is made from bauxite, plastic stems from oil, and paper, of course, comes from trees. Extracting those naturally occurring components not only harms the earth but also takes energy, causing further damage to our planet. Recycling removes the need to strip mine, blast, or deforest. 

The habitats that surround areas where these products of nature occur remain safely undisturbed. 

The processes used to recycle are also good for the planet. According to Oregon Metro, scrap aluminum smelters take significantly less energy and produce upwards of 95% fewer emissions than the process it takes to turn bauxite into aluminum. Turning recycled bottles into new glass uses about 30% less energy than making new glass from natural minerals. And trees that help protect our climate by providing shade which minimized heat island effect and capturing CO2 can remain standing when paper is recycled. In the case of aluminum and glass, recycling can go on infinitely, which is just an added bonus to the environment. 

Finding the ROI Sweetspot

While recycling seems to be the answer ecologically speaking, logistically speaking, it has problems. If trash that should go to landfills is comingled with recycling, or if products are not properly rinsed, recycling becomes contaminated and unusable by the manufacturers. That’s when recycling centers mix it all together, bail it, and send it overseas. The plain truth is that labor costs for recycling are high, and the temptation to save money by shipping away the problem can be strong. But once we ship those products, we lose the transparency within the chain of custody, and we have no way of knowing if our waste materials are recycled elsewhere or tossed into a landfill or environmentally sensitive area in another country. 

Our belief at COR is that all waste should be kept local to encourage manufacturers and processors to adopt recycling as their regular business practice and stop relying on extracting natural resources. It can be expensive on the front end, but the return on investment is that we minimize our carbon footprint, create cleaner and safer neighborhoods, and spark new jobs, businesses and innovations by building an understanding of what happens to trash in our communities.

At COR we are helping lead Portland in this direction by working to develop a campus that houses not only our trash operations but also the manufacturers and processors that handle the recycled products. Now we have to pack up the recyclables onto our trucks and drive them to where they are processed and used. If we can have that all occur within one campus, we negate the need for all the additional degradation to the supply chain while reducing all our costs, as well as further reducing our regional carbon footprint. Additionally, we work more closely with businesses that touch recycling and other R&D organizations, and you never know what innovations can stem from that close proximity and shared knowledge. We want to take something that has no value and turn it into something valuable, using trash as a catalyst for a clean, sustainable, zero-emission, triple bottom line community. If you want to learn more about how you can help Portland become a leader in waste reduction, contact us. We have lots of plans and ideas.