For a plastic bottle, falling into a recycling bin at SMU means embarking on a journey that will include a trip around campus in a new truck, riding conveyor belts in a Plano materials recovery facility and, finally, going to a processing plant where it will be recycled. It may even find its way back to a campus soda machine as another bottle.
Items that fall into black-lined trash cans on campus make their way to the dumpster and from there to the landfill, where their stories end. But, when a bottle falls into one of the 150 new single stream recycle bins the Student Senate Environmental Committee and Campus Planning and Plant Operations recently purchased to add to classrooms in December, it develops potential.
From the recycle bin, the bottle will ride in the new international trash truck CCPO, bought in late September and dedicated to campus recycling.Combined with the new classroom bins, Environmental Committee Chair Joseph Grinnell called the roughly $90,000 vehicle investment a “monumental gesture on the part of the administration.”
Robert Taylor, environmental manager with CCPO, said they could have purchased eight other vehicles, but they needed the truck.
Grinnell said in a phone interview that since Student Senate approved the funds to purchase the minimum required order of 250 lids, he hopes to start placing the new bins in heavily used buildings on the north end of campus as soon as they are printed.
The truck and new bins are part of an effort to expand the campus recycling program, which won the North Texas Corporate Recycling Association Environmental Vision Award in early August.
“We’re 21 tons a month of recycle and I still think we’re only scratching the surface,” Taylor said. “I expect that number to continue to grow.”
The new truck runs daily from 8 a.m. to noon. The bottle — remember the bottle? — will sit in the back until the truck is full, which Taylor said currently takes about three to four days. Once full, it will go to Trinity Waste Services, a materials recovery facility in Plano.
The bottle will tumble from the truck to Trinity’s tipping floor, a large area where trucks tip their backs and let everything fall out. During a tour of Trinity’s facility, Tracie Row of Allied Waste Services said they prefer the co-mingled recyclables loose. A forklift operator pushes everything into piles, keeping a large area on the floor open for more drops.
As the bottle bounces up a conveyor belt, humans will manually remove the trash. Then a machine will separate all mixed paper from plastic, glass and metal by dropping everything from one conveyor belt to another. The second belt, close to the first, moves at a steep angle. Heavy objects follow gravity while paper sticks to nubs on the belt and flows up.
The bottle will ride another conveyor belt where magnets draw out metals. Humans will hand sort plastics by type: milk jugs into natural, detergent bottles into colored, and soda and water bottles into clear. The soda bottle will go with the pile of other clear plastics to a bundling machine, where it will be crushed and packed for shipping.
Once bundled, Ms. Row said plastic bundles are loaded onto truck beds or train cars and shipped to processing companies and manufacturers in the United States, Canada and Mexico.
Office wastebaskets have become recycle bins over the last year. Mr. Taylor said the program met with some initial resistance because people like the convenience of a trash can at their desks.
“What used to be our trash cans are now our recycle cans,” he said.
Dr. Richard Bozorth, director of undergraduate studies and associate professor of English, said that walking to the main office to dispose of trash can be annoying and he would be surprised if people don’t end up throwing garbage into their office recycling bins. He said the additional classroom bins are an admirable idea, but depend on people’s cooperation.
“I think nearly everyone would be happy to separate their recyclables, but the system won’t work well unless both regular trash cans and recycling bins are conveniently located so that you don’t have to search for a regular trash can,” he said. “Otherwise, people will do the easiest thing-treat the recycling bin as a regular trash can.”
