When you think about garbage, you and me everybody in America
generates about four pounds per person per day.
300 million tons that gets generated a year.
Then right now the majority of it,
more than half in the U.S.,
about 80 to 90 percent in other places,
goes directly to landfill
and that's crazy.
If you look at what's in the garbage,
there's energy there, there's materials,
and if you put them to a landfill,
you don't recover any of that.
While there are these movements of zero waste,
all data is showing
that the waste is gonna go up,
and it's not just
because of population growth.
Because of lifestyle, because we collect a lot of stuff.
Prehistoric man — they couldn't carry a lot of stuff, right?
They didn't have a house,
it's nomads — just take what you can carry.
So therefore, if you look at, you know,
what you consume, what you waste,
that's very much in balance a long time ago.
Today, the stuff that we have is immense.
Furniture, clothes and so on.
And the point is, at some point,
that will turn to waste.
The waste stream is basically
anything that nobody wants.
The stuff that you and I throw away.
So, typically it's made up of plastic material,
textile material, rubber,
paper, glass, metal,
food waste — organic waste — as well.
And, you know, scientifically what we look at
when we look at that
is we say
it's pretty much everything
in the periodic chart.
So you could find gold in there,
silver, copper. You find magnesium,
sodium from salt. Carbon.
But you and I, who generate the garbage,
we don't separate it properly.
So now that's why the idea is,
okay well, we'll just collect all of it
and then we'll bring it to a central facility
and that central facility can then do the sorting.
Most people don't think about this aspect
when they put their bin out at the curb.
It just disappears.
Well this is what happens to it.
We're hardcore manufacturing,
except we do it in reverse.
We're taking this sort of mixed up
stream of material and we're de-manufacturing.
So we're breaking it down into individual components.
We try to grab any material of value we can
We have basically 35 tractor trailers worth
of materials that we're selling out of the back end
of this plant every day.
I view this operation much like somebody
would view a Ford or Chevrolet manufacturing operation.
They're building cars.
I'm building bales. I'm building bales of newspaper,
bales of aluminum cans, bales of P.E.P. water and soda bottles.
That's our product, but that product is somebody else's resource
that they're they're purchasing.
So, I have to present them with a raw material that meets their standard.
So behind you is the material basically presented as it's come off of the truck,
all mixed up. Up here, we're looking for items that shouldn't be here in the first place.
Plastic film, plastic bags, this is our probably best area of defense.
Top three challenge would be
contamination, contamination and contamination.
Getting the right material in the bin.
You would get a plastic grocery bag to start
wrapping on one of those cogs,
and it would like build up like a snowball.
Plastic film, a garden hose,
rope, propane tanks, helium tanks.
Medical materials — people put hypodermic needles in a milk jug,
and then put the milk jug in the recycling bin.
So we have those kinds of hazards that our employees are facing.
We have difficulty with food contamination.
An unemptied ice cream container that has
melted — you know — tends to have
the melted ice cream go across all the paper
and it might be contaminating the entire load of recyclables
that we're trying to process.
So if it's a three-quarters full yogurt container
because you don't like the taste
don't put it in the recycling bin.
Some of the biggest hazards for us
are really the batteries.
Why? You know are they batteries recyclable? Sure!
Batteries are recyclable, but not in this setting.
A battery on these machines that gets crushed
causes a spark, shorts it out
and causes a fire.
We have fires in our plants
more than what we would ever like to see.
(TV Anchor): "Hundreds of firefighters still
battling the blaze at a Willimantic (CT) business
that processes garbage and waste materials."
And everything has a battery
Your phone has a battery, greeting cards.
If you still use greeting cards,
they have batteries. They make noise, they sing, they ...
those sorts of things present such a fire hazard.
It's the flammable explosive that could
shut this business down
and hurt a lot of people.
We've added more and more employees to manage
the contamination that shouldn't be there in the first place.
Half of the people are there
to remove the items that shouldn't be there,
not to make them go where they should go.
You got four lines of paper,
so paper goes over the top.
Bottles and cans are going to drop through the screen,
kind of like a pinball machine.
There's an overhead magnet grabbing all the tin cans.
Fair amount of cardboard ... I mean, that's increased
as people have done home shopping online
and that sort of thing.
The composition of the waste stream,
it's actually variable over the years.
Plastics have gone up huge amounts.
Before the internet everybody read their news
on newspapers, everybody printed stuff out.
Today, we get all of our news electronically,
so the amount of paper mix has changed.
80 percent of what we received back in 2006 was newspaper.
Now today, that's less than 50 percent of everything
that we handle. There's less readership,
so there's less newspaper out there,
and it's been replaced by plastics, by bottles and cans,
by more cardboard.
So a system that was designed
around 80 percent newspaper
is now receiving something that looks different than that,
and we've had to adapt to that.
And this is now what becomes difficult,
because all systems that try to process something
need to be designed based on what's the input.
So if i've got a pure input of anything,
I can design a system
to extract what I need from it, and so on.
But if that input is changing,
well now you have a little bit of an issue.
Those material recovery facilities aren't sitting still.
They're trying to adapt to it, but you can't predict it.
The technology that we're using today is really optics-based,
so we're using near-infrared scanners,
optical scanners to identify plastics.
Program it for PET,
it shoots the PET bottles off with an air jet
when it sees it on the conveyor belt.
Another optical scanner,
that's firing on HDPE (High Density Poly Ethylene),
does the same thing.
Our newer plants that are being built
are being equipped with AI-based robotics
to do sorting technology.
A flattened aluminum can is going to have
an infinite kind of shape when it's smashed.
They're not all going to look the same,
so you have to let the technology learn
what you want to be selecting on.
Let's face it. Market forces and economics dictate what happens,
so if a facility here or in Europe or anywhere
takes in garbage, they get paid to take that in.
Then they do their separation, and they get to sell the recycles.
Whether that's metal, glass, plastic ... they sell that,
so another stream of revenue.
What they have left over,
they can't just pile it up.
So if they're going to send that to a landfill,
they've got to pay to dispose of it.
So that's a revenue loss, but if someplace else says,
"ship it to me, i'll buy it,"
and even if it's a dollar a ton,
well that's better than paying $20 a ton to dispose of it.
You've saved $21 a ton.
84% of what we process and manage today
is actually material that's going to go to a mill,
get recovered and turn into a different product.
About 16% of material that shouldn't be here in the first place
ends up going to disposal.
In this particular operation,
we're a zero landfill based facility.
Our residual — that material that shouldn't be here in the first place —
goes to a waste to energy facility in Baltimore.
What everybody thinks, then, is: reduce, reuse, recycle,
and i agree with that 100 percent.
The problem is practically, you can't stop there,
because not everything could be recycled.
That's where the energy extraction comes from.
The waste to energy, if you will.
This is a couple days of people's garbage
in a community on Long Island.
All that garbage that's generated,
we combusted in a boiler
to produce electricity, and here we make enough power
for about 75,000 homes.
So the garbage you put to the curb
is put to good use to generate electricity
around the clock to power your home.
The scale of garbage that we generate,
the rate of garbage that we generate,
can only be handled by two processes today:
landfill and thermal conversion.
People are against thermal conversion
and the perception in New York City
and in many large municipalities and cities is:
waste-to-energy is bad, it's an incinerator.
Incinerator is different than waste-to-energy,
but it's bad, I don't want this.
And they think, "You're going to burn the garbage?
Are you crazy? That was what done so many years (ago).
We stopped ... didn't we stop that?"
Yes, and this burning
is in a much more controlled environment.
We're extracting the energy, we're getting the materials
we're cleaning the emissions. So very different.
People don't make that connection.
They don't see their garbage going hundreds of miles
to a landfill and then just sitting in a landfill.
And I'm not disparaging the landfill industry.
They didn't make the garbage.
You did and I did. They're managing it for us.
So I think if people see the scale
and all of this going into a landfill,
then they will appreciate (it).
You need systems and technology
that can manage it at the scale that we generated at.
All the garbage that we make, not everything burns,
not everything is going to gasify,
and so on,
so you will always have a residual stream.
You will always have an ash.
And the question then is what do you do with it?
So one black bag that we would throw away
would result in maybe about this much ash.
So you could send this to the landfill and it's basically like putting in dirt.
You've extracted almost as much value as you can of everything,
and so now instead of sending that last bits
that have no value to the landfill,
well, maybe it could be put in building materials.
For example we can use it for pavement.
Even for low and for high traffic pavement
which is going to be perfect there.
Instead of going in the landfill,
we can sell it to construction companies.
You know in the U.S., we only do about 12% in waste-to-energy,
and you know we landfill about 55-60%.
I mean that should be completely reversed,
because every ton of garbage
that you make energy from,
that's a ton of CO2 offset.
That's a ton of fossil fuel coal
that you're not using.
The garbage that you and I throw away
is 2/3rds biogenic. It's renewable.
So it's renewable energy.
And not only is a renewable energy,
but it's quite steady renewable energy.
it's not like wind or solar.
We're going to throw away
four pounds per person per day,
and we're gonna do that every day.
If we have the ability to do a better environmental job
and there's been an established technology
that has been demonstrated over 40 years of operation,
why won't you use it,
when that has been shown to have
lower environmental impact than other options.
you