[00:00] Today we're going to find out what really happens to your street-side recycling bin. We have our aluminum cans, we have cardboard milk jugs, and even Starbucks coffee cups. We're going to see where it all goes and where it all ends up.
[00:13] I've always been curious where the stuff I throw into my street-side recycling container actually goes. So I decided to follow the trucks here to my very own WM Recycling Facility in Salt Lake City, Utah.
[00:25] They've been trying to not to give us a tour of the monster handling all of our curbside recycling bins. And it is indeed a monster. One machine eats it all and he is hungry.
[00:37] WM recycles about 17 million tons of material every year. And this beast alone, this single machine, consumes about 450 tons per day. And today, this day, we get to see how it all works.
[00:50] From pneumatic optical laser sorters to magnetical force fields to giant rubber-fingered tumblers all working together to sort our recyclables. It's like the Hogwarts sorting hat, but instead of Hufflepuff and Slytherin,
[01:04] it's all paper stuff and scrap tin. Sorry. There are more than two miles worth of conveyor belts built into the machine, and everything has to run at the same time. It's like a giant organism chewing up throwaway cardboard boxes
[01:18] and aluminum cans and excreting solid bricks of individualized commodities ready to be recirculated back into society as new products. But how, you ask? Well, it all starts here on the tipping floor,
[01:31] where the waste collection trucks come to tip out their load right onto the concrete. This is where all the big trucks come and drop off the recycling bins and get collected off the street side curb. The big tractors can come in and mix it all up
[01:45] because they want a homogeneous or well-mixed recycling stream so the optical sorters, which I'll show you in a second, can separate everything as it goes through the miles and miles of conveyor belt.
[01:57] The big front loader scoops up and stirs up the big pile. This accomplishes two things. One, mixing helps to bust open any plastic bags, which are not supposed to be in your curbside containers, by the way.
[02:10] Recyclables are not supposed to be bagged up. The tractor can help rip some of the bags and fill out the internals which is good Mixing also creates more of a homogeneous mixture and don worry I had to look that word up too Homogeneous means all of the individual materials
[02:25] are spread out evenly, making the sorting equipment more effective. You'll see what I mean here in a second. I did spot a blinking light down on the tipping floor, which means someone tried to recycle a small toy that had an internal battery. This is super dangerous, actually, since a small
[02:41] battery fire in a huge pile of paper products could bring down the whole facility. And don't get me wrong, batteries can be recycled for sure, just not in your curbside bin. They need to go to
[02:53] dedicated drop-off locations. It's estimated that nearly 400 small fires a month occur at facilities like this one across the United States, all from people wishfully putting batteries in their curbside recycling bin. Not a great idea. Now that the battery has been pulled from the mix,
[03:09] we can get a big scoop of the recyclables and start it along the two-mile journey through the monster.
[03:21] Once it reaches the top of the first conveyor belt, this is where the manual human sorting happens. And it happens fast. This is where humans try to grab out anything that can't be recycled, like those plastic bags, long metal rods, shoes, or anything that the sorting machine wasn't built to sort.
[03:39] I even saw a child's car seat try to sneak past. These humans doing the manual sorting are the first line of defense against wish cycling. The guys here at the facility call it wish cycling when someone tosses something into the recycling bin
[03:54] because they wish it could be recycled, even though it's not meant to go in the bin. Right through basketballs that are probably stuck here until the end of time. These wish cycled items just end right back up at the landfill,
[04:06] since, like the batteries, this sorter just isn't built to handle us. Once the humans grab out as much of the actual trash as they can, we arrive at our first sorting machine. This is an absolutely terrifying rubber saw blade looking screen
[04:19] that allows the large pieces of ground corrugated cardboard to float along the top, effectively separating them from the rest of the mix. The remaining cans paper and plastic bottles slip through the rotating screen to the conveyor belts below and the sorting has begun The different commodities have different values and uses so they need to be separated into their own bales After the screen is when the optical sorting comes in using light and color to differentiate between objects It can sort
[04:48] the items with a strong puff of air up to 1,000 times a minute, blasting specific items up onto different conveyor belts for certain separations. Hard plastic bottles can head down one path and the white paper on another, or the colored plastics get separated from
[05:02] the clear plastics. The amount of air this building stores and uses is incredible, and it's super fun to see all the optical sorters in slow motion.
[05:21] That's enough of that. There's a total of 13 optical sorters at this facility, and spread out all over the conveyor belt. Everything is still happening super fast, which means each sorter doesn't need to be perfect, since another optical sorter downstream will separate the feet again, purifying the lines even more.
[05:39] Another really big problem this WM sorting facility has to deal with are the jokes. That's what they call the plastic shopping bags, which float around, getting caught in rollers and contaminating the other products.
[05:51] Grocery bags themselves are super recyclable, don't get me wrong. They're worth about $200 a ton if you can consolidate them all into one spot. To try and contain the ghosts, WM uses what I call the Bag Sucker 9000
[06:04] to try and suction these clean bags away from the rest of the material. But as you can see, it is not a perfect solution, and it would be better if people just kept the bags and dropped them off at specific collection points,
[06:16] like at Home Depot or Lowe's or Walmart sometimes have. The ghosts are especially brutal when they get caught in rollers or cause damage to the machine, since everything is so interconnected. The coolest part of this whole sorting process, though, is how WM uses the magnets to sort the aluminum and steel cans from the tracks.
[06:34] And you might be like, hey Jerry, aluminum isn't magnetic, how could they possibly use magnets to sort aluminum? And you are mostly correct. Once the magnetically charged conveyor belts lift the steel and tin cans up off the main
[06:47] belts onto their own line the aluminum obviously continues onward unaffected by regular magnets That is of course until the aluminum cans pass over a second electromagnet that generating something called an eddy current
[07:01] The aluminum passes over these locating inductive magnets, which, instead of attracting the aluminum, it charges the electrons inside of the aluminum and then repels those electrons, bringing the cans over top
[07:13] of the inductive magnetic force field, which looks amazing in slow motion. Nope. The cans just ride over the miniature force field like something out of Star Wars, while the rest of the material, unaffected by magnets,
[07:27] hits the barrier and falls to the separate conveyor. The floated cans ride through another series of conveyor belts to their own bunker, where they get collected en masse before getting bailed, which we'll see in a second. One recycled aluminum can can save enough energy to power a TV for three hours,
[07:43] or about the equivalent of half a gallon of gasoline. So if you like TV or cheaper gasoline, recycling is very important. Now that we've separated the dark plastic from the light plastic and the paper from the cardboard
[07:55] and the aluminum from the tin, they're all stored neatly in their very own nice big bunkers. Once the bunkers are sufficiently full, WM can open the bunkers individually and channel the final material into a two-ram baler
[08:09] which compresses the cans or the cardboard or the milk jugs into big, dense, easy-to-transport bales ready to be sold. The cans can obviously go on to get melted down. I have a super cool video on that process.
[08:23] The plastics, of course, can get shredded and turned back into pellets to make new jugs and bottles. It is valuable stuff if you can collect it in bulks. And the paper, of course, both the brown cardboard and white paper, get extruded, baled up, and trucked out to get turned into pulps,
[08:38] which can then be formed into new paper rolls, cardboard boxes, or your next homework assignment. Fun fact, here in the USA, the average cardboard box is made with about 50% recycled content, which saves a whole lot of trees.
[08:51] Europe is doing much better at about 85% recycled content in their new boxes, but we'll catch up, eventually. Either way, this facility is amazing. And that, my friends, is how the materials you stick inside of your street-side recycling bin
[09:05] are sorted and recycled, as long as it's one of the materials that was supposed to be there in the first place. Thanks a ton for watching, and I'll see you around.