http://66.225.205.104/LM20100629.mp3
By now, most households in Mecklenburg County have received new 96-gallon recycling bins. Now, it's time to start using them. The county's new recycling program takes effect July 1st. You'll be able to recycle more items, and mix them together in one container. Bruce Gledhill is on a rescue mission of sorts. He wants to give new life to plastic bottles, aerosol cans, and milk cartons that were once doomed to the landfill. It's part of his job as the county's director of Solid Waste. A few years ago as Gledhill and his team looked at ways to get people to recycle more . . . they narrowed in on a new technology. "We knew that single stream technology was emerging at that time," Glenhill says. "We knew we wanted to recycle additional materials over the base materials we were recycling and that our technology couldn't do that and we also knew that somewhere around half of the people in the county were recycling and one of the concerns we had was it wasn't as convenient as throwing out your trash." Currently, people separate paper from the rest of their recycling - if they don't that job falls to the collectors. But single stream recycling gets rid of that sorting altogether. Or at least takes it out of human hands. Gledhill figures the amount that goes back to a landfill could go up to 10-percent . . . But if estimates are right, trucks will be dropping off a lot more recyclables. In the next five years, Gledhill expects this plant to process 90,000 tons of paper, plastics, glass and aluminum a year. That would be a 50 percent increase from what it processes now, or an additional 30,000 tons of trash turned into something people want. Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} Gledhill: There are a lot of conveyor belts in here, going in a lot of different directions. Essentially, the first thing this is going to do when it is fed into that hopper over there is it's going to go up through some sorting screens that will do side separation. So the paper then goes one way, where it goes through a quality control , manually sorted by the types of paper that it is. The stuff that falls through is the co-mingled containers that goes over to a line over here which has the automated equipment that separates the plastic, the steel and the aluminum from all the materials. Miller: So what's the error rate in one of these operations here? How much stuff would maybe go into the landfill? Gledhill: Right now the residue rate is about five percent. So 95 percent of what comes in here goes out as a recycled commodity. Five percent is contamination, can't be recycled, goes to the landfill. We expect that to be maybe a little bit higher once we go to single string.