New York City’s High-Tech Plant Transforms Recycling

SEATTLE (Waste Advantage): On this Earth Day, the 8.6 million people living in 3,46 9,925 New York City households will produce 24 million pounds of garbage, a little under three pounds per person. That’s the daily average of what 10,000 Sanitation workers pick up on their runs through city streets.

But the garbage isn’t really garbage anymore. A third of the waste is recyclable, and not in complicated ways like it used to be. Paper and cardboard go in green bins; metal, glass and plastic go in blue bins. Another third is food and other organic refuse like soiled napkins, paper towels and pizza boxes; that’s part of growing (pun intended) organic waste composting program using brown bins.

The remaining third, called black bag, is what’s left; it includes everything from diapers and sanitary supplies to razors and pens and plastic bags. Recycling used to happen on the fringes. Now, true trash is the exception.

The enthralling transformation is on display every day at the city’s high-tech recycling plant run by the private Sims company on the Brooklyn waterfront in Sunset Park. Blue bin stuff, 800 tons a day, comes in by barge and truck. Once a crane operator drops it on the conveyor belt, the machines take over.

Bags are ripped open, breaking the glass into tiny bits, which fall through a screen to be barged to the Jersey plant. A drum magnet yanks off ferrous metal like tin cans, which go out by rail.

An optical sorter, using a series of near-infrared cameras, divides the plastic with nozzles that shoot air: soda bottles here, milk jugs there, yogurt tubs one way, milk cartons another way. The nonferrous metal is culled by an eddy current generating a negative magnetic field.

Courtesy: https://wasteadvantage.com