Erin Johnson is at Sims Municipal Recycling Facility. February 13, 2018 at 1:57 PM Brooklyn, New York NYC's only commercial-scale wind turbine, featuring views of Upper New York Bay and the skyline. Sims Municipal Recycling provides recycling services for NYC recovering metal, glass, plastic and paper from curbside collection programs. Our Brooklyn recycling center is the largest commingled recycling facility in North America.

1. Sims Municipal Recycling Facility In Massachusetts Area
2. Massachusetts Recycling Rules

Editor's note: This article has been significantly revised post-publication to correct for factual errors in the original version.Most of us do not think much about recycling. We might clean bottles and jars, crush cartons and break down boxes. We might sort these items into their designated bins or bags, but once we lose sight of the recyclables, the rest of the process is an abstraction. Recycling makes us feel good, but few of us know what actually happens to a plastic bottle after we drop it into a bin. What happens is the bottle enters an elaborate global system within which its plastic is sold, shipped, melted, resold, and shipped again—sometimes zigzagging the globe before becoming a carpet, clothing, or repeating life as a bottle. This process is possible because plastic is a stubborn substance, which resists decomposition. With a presumed life span of over 500 years, it’s safe to say that every plastic bottle you have used exists somewhere on this planet, in some form or another.In New York City, household recyclables are picked up curbside, once a week by the Department of Sanitation (DSNY).

After being tossed in the back of the diesel-fueled truck, each load makes its way to New York City’s Material Recovery Facility, or MRF (pronounced “murf”), which is operated by Sims Municipal Recycling, a company owned by Sims Metal Management. “Typically, 50% of what you put in your recycling bin is never recycled. It's sorted and thrown out,” said Tom Szaky, CEO of TerraCycle, a recycling company. This is partly due to user error, a common problem which occurs when people place unrecyclable materials into recycling bins.At the MRF, recyclables change hands from the city to the waste world—most often to private-sector companies.

While states and cities mandate and market recycling with green symbols and variations of catchy ‘reuse–reduce–recycle’ tag lines, it is not uncommon for them to pay outside companies to handle the actual process. New York City, for instance, pays Sims approximately $70 to $75 per ton to take the recyclables. Sims, in turn, pays the city a percentage of sales based on monthly national rates. In December of 2013, Sims unveiled a chic new Selldorf Architect-designed, $110-million Sunset Park, Brooklyn facility. New York City contributed $60 million to the new digs, which are large enough to accommodate the annual flow of household recyclables from all five boroughs—more than 250,000 tons. Sims’s new facility in Sunset Park, Brooklyn (Nikolas Koenig / Selldorf Architects)“This is where recycled items begin their journey,” said Sims’s education coordinator, Eadaoin Quinn during a tour of the plant.

“Recycling can be a fairly long process. It’s not like you put it in your bin and suddenly it’s a new thing.”The first stop on the tour, called the “tipping floor,” is where the DSNY trucks drop off their loads in a football field-sized room filled with about a thousand tons of recyclables.A giant crane, dwarfed by the mountains of discarded material in the enormous room, picks up the waste, tossing it onto a conveyer belt. “Bags of recyclables come in on trucks and barges and are loaded onto the conveyer belt, then are torn open by a machine that slices each bag open,” Quinn said.

“Unfortunately the bags themselves can’t be recycled—they are too dirty, so they will end up in a landfill.” Even recyclable plastic items are difficult to process if they haven’t been cleaned properly—hence, the leaflets calling for us to “rinse our recyclables.” The cleaner a plastic bottle is, the easier it is to reincarnate it as something new. From the vast floor, recycling hopefuls move along an intricate automated assembly line of conveyers, tumblers, metal detectors, and even a few human sorters, in order to be categorized by commodity.

The conveyor-belt system sorts glass first, within two minutes. Metals are then extracted by magnets or other means. Thick and unruly plastics (#2) such as high-density polyethylene HDPE—a fancy name for your laundry-detergent containers—get compacted into bulky wads of color, then restrained in bales by rope. And finally, used plastic beverage bottles (#1) are aggregated into a stream. From start to finish, a plastic bottle spends fewer than 30 minutes on a Sims conveyer belt.

A bottle binned yesterday, quite possibly already here, will be through the recovery system in a day. In the United States, there are few facilities that recycle used plastic bottles. Just a few years ago, a used plastic bottle was almost always guaranteed a free trip to China. In 2011, the United States sold 2 million tons of discarded plastic, worth a billion dollars, to China alone. Now those bottles are likely to end up in Riverside, California, at CarbonLite. Intended to create a closed-loop, bottle-to-bottle system here in the U.S., CarbonLite is one of the country’s largest facilities.

Opened in 2012, with a ribbon-cutting ceremony attended by Governor Jerry Brown, the 220,000-square-foot space recycles more than 2 billion bottles a year. CarbonLite facility in Riverside, California (Debra Winter)“There is plastic in everything—in your car, in your home, in every part of your life,” says CarbonLite’s CEO, Leon Farahnik. “Globally, 100 billion pounds of PET are used in a year: 70 billion pounds goes to carpet and clothing; 30 billion pounds goes into packaging.” That’s a lot of plastic. The good news is that PET plastic can be used again and again, which means that the resources that go into them—mainly crude oil and natural gas—need only be recovered once (if it’s recycled). And yet, despite the fact that manufacturing bottles from recycled PET (rPET) uses less energy and less water, it is often more expensive than virgin material, especially when oil prices are low. “Right now our material is higher priced,” Farahnik said.

However companies are increasingly trying to incorporate those recycled materials into their products. Walmart, for example, set a goal in 2014 to increase post-consumer plastics in the products they carry by by 2020.

When asked why companies currently use post-consumer material in their products considering it’s more expensive, Farahnik said, “They are under a lot of pressure with the environment. Tremendous pressure. All you hear about is these oceans and everybody gets blamed for it.” Over of plastic waste finds it way into the oceans each year, resulting in at least around the world, and considerable damage to marine life.Farahnik believes that the success of recycling hinges on government-mandated bottle deposits—or bottle bills as they are sometimes called—the bane of big beverage companies, who lobby hard against this type of legislation in the United States. “Recycling won’t be fully successful unless it is mandated by federal law that every state should have a deposit system,” says Farahnik. In states with financial incentives—there are 10, including California, Maine, and New York, and each state law is different— the consumer is charged an additional price on each recyclable glass or plastic bottle which can be recovered only after the bottle is returned to a designated recycling station.

For bottles discarded in regular trash, “scavengers” or “canners” (the people you see picking through trash cans for bottles to redeem for cash) do the recovery work. The incentive of deposits has been shown to work. California has a legislated deposit system and a recycling rate.

Sims Municipal Recycling Facility In Massachusetts Area

A state like Texas, with no bottle deposit, recycles less than. Farahnik’s 22-year-old son Jason works as a project manager at CarbonLite and offered a tour of the recycling facility.

We started just outside the facility, where bales of bottles are forklifted off trucks, broken up, and dropped onto the conveyer belts inside. The loosened bottles are prewashed to be separated from any trash and debris. Then bottles are sent through laser sorting machines where beams of light detect the difference between clear plastic and green plastic.

The machine then zaps the bottles to the correct color conveyer system. Bottles are washed in a hot, soapy gooey mess that heats them just enough so that their labels and caps fall away. Freshly made plastic flakes (Debra Winter)“The bottles are then ground into cornflake-sized pieces, washed again and dried, and heated again to eliminate any contaminants,” Jason says. Recycled plastic bottle flakes (rPET) will be shipped to manufacturers in the U.S., China and beyond, where it will be used to make carpets or polyester fabric—even teddy-bear stuffing. Carey says, “There is no doubt that the collection rates in beverage containers in bottle-bill states are higher than in a non-bottle-bill states.” Yet for PepsiCo, the current bottle bills aren’t economically feasible to scale across the U.S. Because of its large population.Other countries have gone even further, levying an extended producer responsibility (EPR) on manufacturers of single-use products, in order to share their responsibility.

The best example of it is the Green Dot, or, out of Germany, which is now law in 50 countries around the world. The law requires packaging companies to pay for the environmental cost of their packaging.EPR’s have not been popular with big beverage companies in the U.S., where well over beverage bottles are used each year— are made of PET and of which are water bottles. Recycles only of its plastic beverage bottles—the rest ends up in a landfill, or as litter on the ground, or at sea. Given that plastic survives more than five centuries, it’s possible that the people of the future might conclude that our culture loved this versatile material that we carried everywhere, and made many of the items in our homes out of. They might be astonished that we buried so much of it amidst our trash.

“Future populations are going to look at landfills like they are goldmines, full of resources, and wonder what we were all thinking,” Jason said.This article has been updated to clarify several facts about the means and outcomes of recycling processes in New York City and elsewhere. We regret the errors.This article originally stated that New York City’s MRF was owned by Sims Metal Management.This article originally stated that over 50 percent of what is placed in New York City’s recycling ends up in a landfill. We have attributed this claim to its source and added context to clarify that this is often due to user error.This article originally suggested that dirty bottles are not recycled.This article originally stated that PepsiCo’s average bottle contains 10 percent rPET or less.We want to hear what you think about this article. To the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Massachusetts Recycling Rules

In 1881, the New York City Department of Street Cleaning was created in response to the public uproar over litter-lined streets and disorganized garbage collection. Originally called the Department of Street Cleaning, the agency took over waste responsibilities from the New York City Police Department. In 1933, the name was changed to the Department of Sanitation.Throughout the 1880’s, 75% of NYC’s waste was dumped into the Atlantic Ocean. In 1895, Commissioner George Waring instituted a waste management plan that eliminated ocean dumping and mandated recycling. Household waste was separated into three categories: food waste, which was steamed and compressed to eventually produce grease (for soap products) and fertilizer; rubbish, from which paper and other marketable materials were salvaged; and ash, which along with the nonsalable rubbish was landfilled. The Police Department, under the direction of its Commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt, enforced the recycling law.World War I brought an end to recycling in 1918 due to labor and materials shortages and the reinstatement of ocean dumping.

Over the next 20 years, the Sanitation Department would build and operate 22 incinerators and 89 landfills.Since the 1960’s, no new waste disposal facilities have been constructed in NYC. Active incinerators numbered eleven in 1964, seven in 1972, three in 1990, and zero in 1994.

Six landfills, filled to capacity, were closed between 1965 and 1991, leaving the City with only one remaining landfill: Fresh Kills in Staten Island for the next decade. The Fresh Kills Landfill was finally closed in 2001; the Department of Parks and Recreation plans to turn the 2,200-acre area into a public park over the next 30 years.Recycling began anew in New York City as a voluntary program in 1986. In July 1989, with the passage of Local Law 19, recycling became mandatory Collection of required materials was phased in, district by district.By 1997, all 59 districts in the five boroughs were recycling the same materials. Recycling requirements could now be promoted in comprehensive citywide advertising campaigns including TV, radio, newspaper, transit, and outdoor media.

Where is the audit number on your texas drivers license. Do I put both numbers or just one of the two? I don't want to do it wrong and have it take that much longer. I believe they're asking for the audit number from either your Texas Driver's License (that's what I put on mine), or the audit number from your Texas DPS Identification card. You should only have one. The driver license number is eight digits long and should not be confused with the audit number, which is on the side of your picture or near the bottom of the driver license. Renew your Texas driver license or ID card online with the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS). If you have moved, use this. Log in by entering your. Driver license or ID card number,; Date of birth,; Last four digits of Social Security number, and; Audit number (see driver license samples for location of audit number). Copyright © 1999 - 2011 Staying Alive. Texas Drivers License – Audit Number. ▫ Old Texas Drivers. ▫ Audit number is on left side of photo. ▫ New Texas Drivers. ▫ Audit number is at the bottom of the license, after “DD”.