Reckoning with plastics recycling
Marisa Endicott, PRESS DEMOCRAT
“They’re always coming up with some new solution that is still based on plastic waste recycling, and plastic recycling fundamentally doesn’t work,” Dell said.
At an 85,000-square-foot solid waste plant in south Santa Rosa, a tractor loader scooped up the blue bin contents from hundreds of Sonoma and Marin County curbside garbage customers. The mix of recyclables was then funneled through a maze of conveyor belts, chutes and optical sorters.
Paper traveled up along a fish ladder to be baled, while heavier materials continued down the line, where a separator diverted aluminum in one direction and a magnet pulled steel cans off the line and flung them into a cage. People posted along the way served as a “last line of defense,” as Recology Sonoma Marin‘s Senior General Manager Logan Harvey put it, making sure the discarded containers, cardboard and paper products were headed for the right place.
The whirring high-tech machinery is part of a $35 million upgrade completed two years ago at Recology Sonoma Marin’s Materials Recovery Facility. The Standish Avenue plant, the main destination for blue bin materials across Recology’s service area in the region, now takes in and processes roughly 350 tons of recycling a day — 40 to 50 tons per hour — from 13 communities in Sonoma and Marin counties.