We don’t really think much about trash. It’s just part of our everyday life - we throw things out when we’re done with them. But here in Waco, there are lots of reasons to give new life to some of the waste we generate. For KWBU, Michael Incavo has more on Waco’s recycling program.
Each American generates 4.4 pounds of waste per day according to the Environmental Protection Agency, and when you add it all up, that’s over 254 million tons a year. But roughly a third of that total each year is recycled.
For a decade here in Waco, the city has been streamlining the recycling process for its citizens.
Anna Dunbar is the Public Administrator for Recycling and Stormwater Compliance for Waco. Dunbar says the city designed its program to make recycling convenient and easy, following national guidelines from the Government Accounting Office.
“Statistically, it’s important for the program to be simple at low cost to the people,” Dunbar said. “Some cities have an extra cost if you’re gonna do curbside recycling and we don’t have that. We also provide the containers; we can deliver them to your household.”
“Interestingly”, Dunbar added, “studies have shown that the royal blue is now, in the United States, connected to recycling. So we have royal blue containers, we’ve tried to do as many things as we can to make it an easy program for people.”
The program began as a drop-off center, but now has expanded to a robust bi-weekly curbside pickup service similar to Houston’s.
Everything from paper to plastics to bathroom containers can go in that royal blue bin. But other recyclables like glass bottles, electronics, motor oil and brush can be brought to a nearby recycling drop-off center.
Some cities accept glass in curbside bins, but many places like Houston, which has the largest recycling program in the state, are realizing glass doesn’t mix well with other recyclables in a truck’s compactor.
At the city’s recycling facility, one Waco’s recycling trucks is just pulling into the compound. The sound of compactors, trucks and a conveyer system bringing recyclables up to a platform to be sorted fill the air.
Justin Myers, Sales Representative at Sunbright Recycling, has been working in the waste handling industry for years. Myers explains the process.
“This is where all the curbside goes”, Myers said. “It gets filtered into this bunker, passes up the sort line where it gets sorted up there, and once we get everything broken down from paper to plastic to cardboard, then we bail it, and then we’ll send it out.”
Sunbright converts the recyclable material they receive to a commodity which they then sell to mills, who use it to create other products.
“There’s just so many different things that you can do with this type of material”, Myers said. “We send it all over the country—we don’t send anything overseas. the possibilities for this material once it gets re-broken-down and remade—is really endless.”
There’s a whole market for recyclables which is often tied to other metrics like oil prices. Plastic, for example, is a petroleum product, and when oil prices are low, it’s cheaper for mills to manufacture new plastic. But when oil prices are high, recyclables like the clear polymer used in water bottles, are attractive to producers, who turn the bales or pellets into new bottles and other products. Sunbright processes up to twice as much material when oil prices are high.
“We process anywhere from 150 to 200 tons a day right now. Once the oil market goes back up and the mills are wanting to recycle more, then you look at processing anywhere from 200 to 300 tons per day. It fluctuates based on the market”, Myers said.
Recycling, it turns out, can have a larger local impact than you might assume.
When we throw trash away, that material heads down the road to a landfill within our city limits.
Dunbar estimates our landfill has about 8-10 years left.
“The object is to not only conserve these materials but divert the material from the landfill, because the landfill is the city of Waco’s landfill”, Dunbar said. “We want to save as much airspace as possible.”
And for Myers, even though recycling is his business and more recyclable material means more of it, he finds the conservational case compelling.
“The biggest reason to recycle is completely environmental and, you know, you look at a landfill, and if you could actually get people to separate their trash, I would say you could probably recycle a good 50% of that. Very eco-friendly, and it’s honestly the smartest thing to do”, Myers said outside the city’s recycling center.
Outside of the conservational benefits, the city even makes some revenue from the recycling program, though that’s decreasing.
When it comes to jobs, the City of Waco employs people to drive and work on the back of trucks. Sunbright employs sorters, drivers, dispatch staff to name a few. In fact, across Texas, more than 12,600 jobs are supported by the materials we recycle, according to the Texas Recycling Data Initiative’s conservative estimate.
So why take the time to sort your trash from your recyclables, to take out the glass bottles and the cardboard? Dunbar says simply separating your waste will conserve landfill space and give new life to otherwise useless material.
“We all must take personal responsibility for our waste in order to get to the next step which is waste reduction. We have to realize that when we buy that product we’re taking it for its entire lifespan—that includes getting rid of it.”
