READ THE SCRIPT:
[Margaret] When you take that last sip of milk, you toss the jug. No, not in the trash, in the recycling bin! There, it joins cans, bottles, and newspapers that are destined for another life as recycled products. But how exactly do these materials go from a bin on your curb to sorted out materials ready to be reused? Well, to start, they're brought to places like this: Kimble Company's recycling center in Twinsburg.
- We handle about 100,000 tons of material a year through this facility. 95% of what is gonna come through here is going to be bottles, cans, aluminum, tin cans, plastics, newspaper, cardboard.
[Margaret] Your recycling is probably somewhere in this mountain of garbage. And soon, it's loaded on a series of conveyor belts. In fact, most of the plant consists of these conveyor belts. They're everywhere. That's because this material has to be sorted. Paper, glass, and the different types of plastic and metal have to be separated because they're all recycled into different things. And the conveyor belt brings them to machines that help with the sorting. One uses a magnetic current to collect cans.
[Man] So, cat food cans that are tin and any type of tin cans, it'll take it and it will reverse magnet and toss it into a bin, so it self-sorts itself.
[Margaret] Another uses infrared lasers to separate different kinds of plastic.
- The optical sorter will use infrared to detect pop bottles, milk jugs, any type of plastics that you might use at home and separate it into different categories.
[Margaret] And gravity helps too. Glass is heavy, so it sinks to the bottom, where it's broken up into little bits before it's recycled. And paper is light, so it rises to the top on a conveyor belt. But much of the sorting of materials is done by people. They're called sorters, and they're at every stage working with the machines to separate materials. They're even at the very beginning of the process, taking out weird things that shouldn't even be in a recycling bin.
[Kevin] So, they'll be taking out any type of metals, car parts, Christmas lights, yard waste, things that really shouldn't be put into the system.
[Margaret] And that includes plastic bags.
[Kevin] Plastic bags are recyclable, but we do not recycle them at our facility because there's no end consumer for them at the moment.
[Margaret] The last sorter at the plant rescues recyclables that managed to sneak through the system without being properly sorted. Finally, all of the separated materials are crushed into these giant cubes like bales of hay. These cubes are stacked all around, waiting to be taken to their final destination, where they are cleaned and given another life. It's for this reason that plant manager Kevin Eidens has a recycling tip.
- Recyclables should be as clean as possible when entered into the recycle bin. We would like for you to rinse all the containers out before recycling.
[Margaret] But even if you can't scrape out that last bit of peanut butter, Kevin says you should still go ahead and toss it in the recycling bin.