How Ridwell helps the recycling system work better
By dropping your batteries, plastic film, threads, and more into your Ridwell bin each week, you're actually helping the process of recycling work more efficiently and safely. How, you ask? To learn how, we need to (metaphorically) dive into a recycling bin and explore its journey from your curb to its end destination.
After you leave out your recycling bins, your local recycling company will pick your items up and bring them to a regional facility to be processed. Before your soda can gets melted down to become a new can, it must be separated from the many other types of recycling it’s bouncing around with in the facility. Some materials also must be cleaned before they can be recycled, and along the way the facility has to constantly work to kick out any stowaway items that actually belong in the landfill.
This process of sorting your recycling is surprisingly complicated for a lot of reasons. First and foremost, the different materials have to be separated before they can truly be recycled. Imagine if before doing your laundry you had to pick out a bunch of Legos, plastic bags, and dirty pizza boxes. Sounds messy and frustrating, right? To do this sorting at speed and scale, recyclers rely on some truly big and fancy machinery, but machines aren’t perfect. It’s a challenge to sort all of the different types of recycling accurately, even for high tech equipment and hard-working people double checking things. As you may have noticed, an aluminum can, a glass bottle, and a cardboard box you’re trying to recycle are all wildly different sizes, shapes, and weights.
Making things even harder is contamination– when things that shouldn’t be in the recycling in the first place end up there and get in the way. This is where the plastic film you give to Ridwell comes in. When plastic film goes to recycling facilities instead of to Ridwell, it quite literally tangles up the recycling sorting machines. This is so common because one of the key ways to sort recycling is a screen- essentially a big moving treadmill with strategically designed holes in the surface that let two dimensional items like paper pass on, while three dimensional items like cans and bottles fall through to head elsewhere. The problem is that when plastic film (or other contaminants like clothing) ends up on these moving sorting screens, it wraps around them, turning what should be a discerning trap door into a conveyor belt. For a recycling facility, this is a major headache and means they have to shut down the machinery entirely and pause sorting until people can untangle all of the plastics from the screens. So every piece of plastic film you keep out of a facility helps keep things running smoothly.
The only thing worse than having to shut down expensive recycling machinery is the very real risk of a fire in a recycling warehouse. Recycling fires are surprisingly common, simply because one of the materials we recycle the most is paper. This means that recycling facilities are full of enormous piles and bales of paper– essentially huge quantities of kindling. Thanks to the popularity of cell phones, tablets, and laptops, we’re all accumulating lots of lithium ion batteries, and when you send these to a recycling facility, they can end up exposed to heat and pressure that can cause them to ignite. While some facilities are equipped to handle batteries and can offer safe curbside battery recycling, many facilities do not accept batteries and when unexpected ones in their recycling stream it can lead to disaster. When a battery ignites around a bunch of paper, the fiery results aren’t just disruptive; they’re terrifying and dangerous. A recent EPA report described how in Arizona a recycling fire: “burned for over a day and destroyed the facility, which caused the town of Fountain Hills, Ariz., to suspend its recycling program. Recyclable material was taken to a landfill temporarily until the town found another MRF (Materials Recovery Facility).
So by being a Ridwell member, you’re actually doing more than reducing clutter around the house and keeping pesky batteries out of the landfill. You’re literally helping make the extremely hard work of recycling easier and safer for the hard-working folks that do it every day. By keeping bothersome and sometimes dangerous contaminants out of the recycling stream, you’re making our holistic system of recycling in the US work just a bit better. Together, we’re building a world where it’s easier to do the right thing and send your unwanted materials where they need to go.
