By summer’s end, Ashland residents may be saying goodbye to their little blue recycle bins and welcoming new 96-gallon tote replacements. According to David Miller, the Ashland Rubbish and Recycle Coordinator, up to 5,700 of these wheeled behemoths will appear with the goal of collecting even more recyclables. While the existing blue bins are easily lifted by the truck operator, the new, much larger totes have a bar for a hook device on the truck to latch, lift and dump.
Once we place our paper, glass jars, bottles and aluminum cans in our bins (single-stream recycling, a system in which all paper fibers, plastics, metals and other containers are mixed in a collection truck, instead of being sorted by the depositor). Waste Management (WM) trucks come along to empty the bins and carry it all away. What happens next is an industrial reincarnation of the products we set out for recycling.
The aluminum cans we discard are melted down over and over with no loss of quality and made into new cans, airplane parts and softball bats among others. The Alcoa Corporation claims that 75 percent of all aluminum produced in the last 130 years is still in use today; the Glass Packaging Institute declares glass can be recycled endlessly without loss of strength or usability; and the Paper Recycling Coalition states recycled paper and cardboard can be remanufactured into lunch bags, coffee cup carriers, toilet paper, copy paper, egg cartons, kitty litter and more. The recyclables are transferred to Harvey’s & Sons in Westborough and separated with almost no human contact.
Miller noted that our orange trash bags go to the Wheelabrator energy-from-waste facility in Millbury, Mass., where 1,500 tons of trash from almost 40 communities are transformed daily into 45 MW of electricity.
Confused as to what to recycle and what to throw in the trash? WM will have a descriptive graphic inside the cover of the new tote. Miller said that plastic supermarket bags and used foam clamshell food containers need to be trashed and not recycled because they tend jam the recycling equipment. Questions about anything recycling can be directed to Miller at 508-532-7943.
Miller takes his job seriously. “Recycling is inherently a duty that every resident of planet Earth is tasked with. It’s our responsibility to handle our waste as responsibly as we can. Over the last 14 years, I’ve witnessed Ashland’s recycling rate almost double and our trash tonnage reduced by 37 percent. I think that the residents of Ashland should be very proud of the program that they have helped build and mold into one of the state’s most successful.”
Finally, and ironically, when the little blue plastic bins are eliminated later this year, they will wind up being recycled themselves.
Les Clark reigns as the Recycle King in his house. He can be reached at [email protected]
Issue Date:
May, 2017
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