Recycling Center Facts

Video Transcript

"Hi! My name is Lynn Bestul. I'm the solid waste planner for New Hanover, North Carolina. Today, I'm here to talk to you a little bit about recycling center facts and in the industry what they are called it's a Material Recovery Facility the acronym is a MRF. And at these facilities, all the recycling that has been picked up throughout neighborhoods or businesses is dropped of at a MRF and at this MRfs they have a conveyor system that the material starts to go through, material is picked up, some of it is picked up manually. There are other methods with some of the lighter material, they use fans to blow certain pieces of the material off the conveyors. These are set up to handle all types of recyclables whether it's glass, plastic, aluminum, cardboard, paper, it all goes through these facilities. They'll use any current to pull aluminum cans off the conveyors, they'll use magnets if steel cans come through the facility and it usually a lot of the end result of the conveyors are where the newspaper will end up. Where the plastics jogs or pulled off the conveyor, that's where the fans come in to play and they'll push those light weight plastic containers off of the conveyor belts. These are the facilities like I was saying that all of that material you recycle go to. Most facilities don't have any tip fee which means you're not paying for dumping the material. Some of the facilities do have a cost for you to dump it and then what they all do, they'll process it, they bail it and they market that material to send it back to the manufacturers so it can be recycled into a new product. Okay, so with those recyclables, it's very important for you citizens and business owners to do the recycling as I was saying, aluminum can be recycled over and over again. The, we want to keep that material out of the landfills. Glass is another product that can be recycled over and over. Those things would sit in the landfill forever. So, again, these were the some the facts about recycling centers."