Nancy Edmonds Hanson
Some say the glass is half-full. Some say it’s half-empty. But when it comes to no-sort recycling in Fargo, Moorhead, Dilworth and Barnesville, there’s no argument at all: The glass is out!
But, one year after the ban, it’s time for a reminder. Discarding glass is forbidden only in the single-sort bins in which the cities collect a mishmash of recyclable materials. That doesn’t mean those empty bottles and jars have to be tossed in which the regular garbage destined for dumping in the area’s landfills.
Instead, all it takes to ready discarded jars and bottles for a re-manufactured afterlife is a little effort – the kind of effort that families used to invest back in the days before the siren song of single-sort recycling. It’s easy: Save them separately, and then make an occasional a run to one of the drop sites that dot the cities. There, toss them into the separate dumpster set aside for glass. It’s a little more work, but it makes a satisfying crash. “The demand for glass is still there,” Mary Aldrich explains. But it’s nothing but trouble since convenient single-stream collection supplanted the more fastidious sorting that dominated recycling. “Glass has always been a hazard with single-stream. Broken glass contaminates everything else. It’s heavy to haul. When it breaks, it can injure our workers on the sorting line, and broken glass wreaks havoc on our equipment.”
But – and this is a big “but” – it’s valued in the re-manufacturing industry. According to the Glass Institute, glass is 100% recyclable and can be reworked endlessly without loss in quality or purity. While it must be hauled to distant factories at substantial expense for that to happen, a good deal of it can be used closer to home. In Otter Tail County, finely crushed glass is being substituted for sand as part of the base for building roads. Fargo has found a different use: It’s crushed and used in so-called “French drains” as a filter media within the Fargo Landfill Inert Site. The inert landfill is filled with nonorganic material like wood and construction debris from common household waste.
Mary is an expert on the subject of recycling. As sales manager of MinnKota Enviroservices in Fargo,she oversees the collection and marketing of materials that can be recycled for new uses. The company,which grew out of Beverage Wholesalers in 1977, has been a regional pioneer in separating what can be used again from the thousands of tons of true garbage headed to landfills. As interest in recycling has grown, MinnKota and its peers in other parts of the country have taken on the business of separating the usable portion of what households mindlessly discard and turning it into a commodity that’s in demand by industries that re-manufacture that garbage into gold.
Much of what goes into the blue single-sort recycling bins is destined to come back to those households in new form. Mary points to the millions of egg cartons produced each year by Pactiv in Moorhead – formed from discarded pulp paper, primarily newsprint. Cardboard and other types of paper – office paper, junk mail, magazines – head back to paper mills, where they’re pulped and eventually return to the homes where they were discarded as printing and writing paper, tissues and paper towels.
Certain plastics, too, can be used to make new products. “While you hear that plastic marked with 1 through 7 is recyclable, we can actually recycle grades 1, 2 and 5now,” Mary admits. “There aren’t markets for the rest of it.” Food,beverage, laundry and bathroom containers are recyclable in general,unless they’re labeled #6 or are black in color. Black plastics are too hard for machines to sort, so recyclers are no longer accepting them.
“If the containers have held milk or food, please wash them out and throw the caps away,” Mary requests. “Our people have to handle them on the sorting line.”Plastic caps should be removed and tossed in the garbage: “They fall out on the line and roll all over.”
MinnKota doesn’t accept plastic sacks, but they do have value. She recommends returning them to the supermarkets and big-box stores from whence they came. Most ship them to manufacturing plants that transform them into so-called“plastic lumber” for pallets and outdoor furniture.
Mary has been passionate about recycling, she says, since she was a child: “Growing up in Sisseton, Icollected bottles and turned themin for the nickel deposit.” She applauds the adult scavengers today who do much the same, gathering aluminum beverage cans and bringing them to MinnKota’s facility at 903 Fourth St. N. in return fora few cents per pound.
“Each American is said to generate five pounds of trash a day,”she points out. “That was only one pound in 1962. We used to toss a lot of it in the burn barrel. Now that’s a no-no because of pollution.Our garbage is different, too – so much plastic.” She adds, “Guess what else wasn’t in there when we were kids? Disposable diapers!”
During World War II, she says, Americans took great pains to recycle.“They saved soup tins and cans to help save America. It’s not about war now, but climate change and the environment.” And it benefits the economy, too: Recycling has become a $346 billion industry,employing 1.1 million people.
“Recycling is simple, not easy,” she reflects. “It’s a local issue with global impact. If you want to do something good for your community, recycling is it.”