Leah Cantor
Recycling line workers sort out non-paper items that can sometimes be dangerous, or gross, such as hypodermic needles and diapers.
All the festivities of the holiday season have a dark side—between Thanksgiving and New Year's, household waste production in the nation goes up by 25%, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency. That's about 1 million tons of extra trash each week.
Stanford University Recycling estimates that "if every family reused just two feet of holiday ribbon, the 38,000 miles of ribbon saved could tie a bow around the entire planet."
A huge percentage of this trash could have been recycled, but gets dumped instead. Other things that should end up in the trash get tossed in the blue bin, causing havoc at the recycling facility and contaminating correctly recycled materials.
Worst of all, says Martha Lara, CEO of Towns Recycling LLC, the company that took over Santa Fe's recycling center in August, are "tanglers"—strings of Christmas lights, ribbon, and hoses that can get caught up in the gears of the sorting machines and bring the whole operation to a grinding halt.
This fall, Towns Recycling became solely responsible for sorting single-stream recyclables under contract with the joint city/county Santa Fe Solid Waste Management Agency.
It's just in time for holiday consumption to crank into high gear.
SFR wanted to see how the recycling facility works under the new company and how to lessen our own burden on the Earth this season. This reporter spent an afternoon on the sorting line.
Santa Fe's city curbside and county recycle collection programs deliver paper, plastic and metal to a building on Buckman Road in one jumbled mix. Pre-sorters take out things like clothing and toys, then materials move through machines that sort cardboard and plastic by churning the lighter, larger materials to the top and magnetically pulling out metal.
In a final sorting process, workers remove anything that's not paper. This stage is where SFR learns first-hand that Santa Feans throw a god-awful stew of non-recyclable items into the blue bins.
Reeking baby diapers come down the conveyor belt at an alarming rate; SFR pulls three from the mix in our one afternoon. A woman who works next to us, Hilda (who did not want her last name published), says the worst she's dealt with include hypodermic needles and barely-live kittens.
But most of the headaches at the facility this time of year are caused by well-meaning residents who are overly optimistic about how much of their holiday excess can be recycled.
Standing on a railing high above the heavy conveyor belts and churning teeth of the industrial sorting machines, Lara points out a wad of tangled lights that make it past the deft hands of the men pre-sorting the mix.
She holds her breath as the lights disappear into the machine. "One strand of lights can shut us down for an entire day," she says.
Other holiday items that cause problems are plastic packing materials such as peanuts or blow-up plastic airbags, and any gift wrap or holiday cards with metallic foil, glitter and plastic rhinestones.
These materials can make it past quality control and contaminate an entire bale of mixed paper, the company's primary product. If buyers find too much contamination, the whole batch could end up in the landfill.
In general, though, Lara says her company has lucked out because Santa Fe's waste stream is cleaner than that of most cities.
Lara is a member of the family that owns the Albuquerque-based business and has worked there since it opened in 2012. She spent recent years priming the company to take over Santa Fe's recyclable waste by visiting comparable facilities all over the country.
She says Towns Recycling is "one of the only mixed recycling facilities in the country able to sell mixed paper right now," because of the purity of their end product. While many facilities have lost money on recycling since China stopped buying from the US, Lara says Towns has been making a profit.
"The quality of the material coming in makes a huge difference," she says, crediting both the city's plastic bag ban and public education efforts.
Santa Fe has also gotten a good deal in bringing recycling back home. Previously, the agency contracted with Friedman Recycling in Albuquerque. By switching to Towns, the city and county will save around $240,000 per year in transportation costs and pay less for processing, Solid Waste Management Agency Executive Director Randall Kippenbrock writes by email.
In the past, Lara says, about 30% of the material brought to the facility ended up as landfill. Now that's dropped to about 10%. Towns sells bales of paper and cardboard directly on the market. Last month a mill in Mexico bought the mixed paper to make egg cartons, whereas this month Towns sold it to a mill in the United States. A mill in New Mexico is the primary purchaser for cardboard.
Mixed metal and plastics, though, are still being sold to other Albuquerque recyclers for sorting because, says Lara, "We just don't have the space to sort plastics here with the volume of material that comes in."
Do:
…Buy 100% recyclable wrapping paper and reusable cloth ribbon, use newspaper or scarves, or hide presents around the house for an epic scavenger hunt and don't wrap them at all.
…"Unwrap your presents all the way," says Lara. "Separate all the materials. Even if a box and the wrapping paper and the plastic packaging inside are all recyclable, if it's not separated we will have to throw it."
…Bring unwanted electronics to local nonprofit the Computer Charity (1925 Rosina Street Suite E. 983-2577) to be refurbished and given to people in need or responsibly recycled.
Don’t:
…Put plastic packing materials such as peanuts, plastic bags, or thin plastic film, ribbon, lights or tinsel in the recycling.
…Even think about stuffing that real or fake Christmas tree in the blue bin. Instead, take it Franklin Miles Park or to BuRRT to be turned into mulch.
…Let food scraps from your holiday party go to waste. Instead, call composting non-profit Reunity Resources, 393-1196, to drop off.
