When you take out your recycling on the day duly appointed for it, I’m betting some of you have niggling doubts. Does this stuff really get recycled? Or does the driver of the truck whisk his load off to some landfill while claiming that it is being recycled?
Well, banish those thoughts.
A recycling plant in Charlestown run by a company named Casella receives Boston’s recycling. It’s too big and complicated an operation to be a sham. Don’t take my word for it. You can go to Rutherford Avenue in the Bunker Hill Industrial Park and see for yourself what happens to your yogurt container, your empty pickle jar and last week’s newspaper pile.
A couple of weeks ago I went over with a group of about 20 people to see for myself. We went in cars, which enabled me to listen to my companions discussing the number of women who claimed to be virgins at their colleges many years ago. It was edifying.
After we arrived, however, we were introduced to more up-to-date topics. To keep us out of the way of the trucks depositing their loads, we followed a painted line into the building and up the stairs to a conference room where two women, Lisa and Kristen, explained what we were going to see. Then they led us over walkways beside debris-filled conveyor belts that snaked through various machines in the cavernous building. It was smelly and noisy, which you might expect from a place that handles 700 tons of detritus daily.
The belts, machines and the workers who tend them were all directed toward one purpose—sorting, said Lisa. Contradictorily the system is called “Zero-Sort,” to signify that the person who doesn’t have to sort is you. The city of Boston calls it single-stream recycling, and every neighborhood enjoys this system. It is hoped that removing the task of sorting will cause more Boston residents to recycle, and maybe it’s true, since Susan Cacino, Boston’s recycling director, said that since single-stream recycling was introduced last July 1, the tonnage being recycled has increased by 53 percent.
After a truck dumps its load, the first task is to get the glass out, since glass can damage machines and hands. Items that can’t be recycled, including plastic bags that can wrap around a screen and eat through a bearing, are also removed, Lisa said. Fibers—paper and cardboard—are separated, steel and tin are sent down a different path, various plastics are sent down another. It makes one grateful for engineers who know what they are doing. I might have thought of employing a magnet to extract steel and tin, but I would never have known to use an optical scanner, puffs of air, reverse magnets, eddy currents, screens and shakers to separate materials from one another. The lines have been upgraded twice with refined machinery since Casella bought the plant in the late 1990s.
The machines aren’t perfect. So there are line workers equipped with goggles, gloves and sometimes ear plugs to refine the sorting. The job looks boring, but maybe if you are a former felon, as Kristen said some of the workers are, you’d be happy to find work that would let you support yourself and stay out of the clink. Lisa said the plant’s turnover rate for employees is low.
Bales of sorted material sit at one end of the facility. Seventy percent of the materials go to American factories that reuse the materials, said Lisa. A factory in Milford, MA gets glass, which it makes into wine bottles. Another glass factory in Franklin, MA gets pieces under three inches. Plastics get reused as carpets, toys and furniture. Paper goes north to mills or is shipped to China, which doesn’t have enough trees to make the paper it needs. One of Casella’s customers is Nine Dragons, a paper mill owned by one of China’s wealthiest women.
The Charlestown facility accepts recyclable materials from individual haulers and 20 communities. Boston sends 30,000 tons a year at this point, but Casella could handle more tonnage than it does now. The cost to the city fluctuates depending on the market for recyclable material, which, as you might expect, plunged along with stock market a year and a half ago.
Both Lisa and Susan Cacino say the market has improved markedly, good evidence for those looking for hopeful signs in the economy. The contract this year, which is being renegotiated now, calls for Boston to pay $34 a ton to dispose of recyclable materials, compared to about $80 a ton for trash.
Casella takes groups through its Charlestown facility about once a month. Call 617-242-7746 if you want to sign up for yourself or a group.
Meanwhile, recycle. It should save the city, which eventually means us, money.
(617) 242-7746