From bin to bottle: the journey of Manchester's recyclables

What really happens to the recyclables I place on the curb every Monday morning?

I take it on faith that they are actually recycled, but as I've recently learned, just because companies tell you they are recycling items, doesn't mean they won't end up in a toxic dump site in somewhere in the Third World.

To satisfy my conscience, I posed my question to Corcoran Environmental Services, the Kennebunk, Me., company that has a 50-year contract with City of Manchester, NH, to handle the city's recycling and yard waste.

In an email, Operations Manager Mike McCray told me that once picked up at the curb, Manchester's recyclables are taken directly to this Allied Waste sorting facility in Hooksett, otherwise known, according to a sign on Industrial Drive, as the "The Recyclery":

 

Here recyclables are first separated (plastic from aluminum, etc.) and then condensed into bales like these:

Once enough bales are accumulated, McCray said they are transported from the Hooksett facility to materials processors up and down the East Coast.

For example:

• Used corrugated boxes are pulped and remade into new boxes at mills such as the one operated by Smurfit-Stone in Uncasville, Conn.;

• Mixed paper is de-inked, bleached, pulped and made into recycled Chinet paper plates and other paper products at mills owned by Huhtamaki, a Finnish packaging conglomerate;

• Aluminum is sold to Southern aluminum processors such as Alcoa, which will shred, melt, pour and roll the material into sheet aluminum for new aluminum cans or other sheet aluminum applications;

• PET materials (plastic soda bottles) are sent to processors who will use the material in such applications as rug manufacturing and polar fleece;

• HDPE (white milk jugs) and LDPE (plastic wrap) materials are generally sent to processors that will use for products such as TREX plastic lumber, toys, mud flaps and other plastic car parts;

• Tin cans are shipped to a shredder, melted and made into new items of light iron; and

• Glass is crushed, any metal is removed,  and then it is electronically sorted by color, screened and transported to a furnace where it is made into new bottles. If contaminated, the glass is used as aggregate.

"There are so many different markets for each material based on supply and demand at any one time," McCray said in his email. 

In other words, my empty beer bottles aren't being dumped in the ground or in the oceans. Conscience clear.

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