Each year, Calgarians put approximately 70,000 tonnes of recyclable material
into blue carts and community recycling depots.
Paper.
Plastic.
Cans.
Jars.
It all adds up.
Our community saves mountains of valuable materials from going to waste in the landfill,
which in turn conserves our natural resources.
For example, we recycle enough cardboard and paper every year to save one million trees from being cut down.
At the same time, all those recyclable materials will be turned into useful new products many times over.
Meet Amanda, her whole family recycles.
They fill their cart each week, recycling things like cracker boxes, yogurt tubs, and even her jam jar from this morning’s breakfast.
Amanda: It’s pretty cool, I know that we are saving a lot of stuff from going into the garbage.
Amanda: I wonder though… where does it all go?
Good question!
Everything is taken to a recycling facility here in Calgary.
Here, recyclables are sorted and are shipped to manufacturers to be recycled into new things.
I’ll show you how it works.
Your recycling just arrived by truck. There it is on the floor.
Amanda: Whoa! I can’t believe how much there is!
Each week we get several hundred truckloads of recyclables like yours
Paper
Cardboard
Plastic containers
Food cans
Aluminum cans and foil
and glass jars and bottles.
And the facility can handle all of it.
You’re looking at one of the largest and most automated plants of its kind in North America.
Amanda: I never thought it would be so automated,
Amanda: I always imagined a bunch of people sorting stuff.
Amanda: So do the machines do everything?
Well the equipment does most of it, but workers play a big role too, as you’ll see.
We’ll begin at the first stage where materials are loaded on to the conveyor line.
Notice how workers are setting some things aside?
Amanda: Yah, I see some clear plastic bags that have shredded paper in them . . .
Amanda: and some garbage bags...
I wish everyone could see this.
Most Calgarians do a great job putting their materials loosely into the blue cart.
They also bag their shredded paper and plastic bags separately, just like we ask.
Workers separate those bags by hand and set them aside for recycling.
But regular garbage bags are a different story.
Because we can’t see what’s in them, the workers aren’t allowed to open them. It’s for their safety.
Instead, these bags go straight to the landfill – even though they might have recyclable material in them.
Amanda: So everything needs to go in loose and only shredded paper and plastic bags need to be bagged?
You got it.
Amanda: That’s easy.
Sure is!
An even more serious problem is material we get like propane tanks,
Car parts,
and scrap metal.
Our equipment can’t handle this stuff. If these things ever got onto the high speed conveyor line they could seriously injure our workers.
And these materials also damage the machines, rip conveyor belts and can even stop the whole operation.
Amanda: Yikes! I’ll make sure to leave those types of things out.
Amanda: So now that we’ve seen the presorting area, can you show me what the rest of the equipment does?
Sure.
Once the different materials clear the pre-sorting area, our equipment rolls into action.
Essentially, what we have is a network of conveyor belts carrying the materials from one station to the next.
At certain stations, machines separate the glass, cardboard, newspaper, metal cans, plastics and so on.
Workers pull out unwanted items that might have slipped through.
The equipment we use is highly specialized.
Things like disc screens, optical sorters, magnets and eddy currents.
Amanda: Umm… that sounds pretty complicated.
Let me show you a couple of examples.
Isn’t that the jar you just recycled? And your cracker box?
Amanda: I think so, it looks like them.
Watch your cracker box.
It will come to some large disc screens that grab only the really big pieces of cardboard, sending them into a container we call a bunker.
Your box is smaller so it falls down through gaps in the disc screens with everything else to be sorted later.
Now watch your glass jar. It’s going to pass through a rotating screen and get broken into small pieces.
Those glass shards fall down through a screen and land safely in their own bunker.
Meanwhile, everything else moves along the conveyor belts to the next station.
This is how it works at various stages for all the recyclables.
If it doesn’t get sorted out and sent to a bunker, it continues on to another conveyor belt to the next step.
Amanda: I see my cracker box again. What’s happening now?
It’s coming to the next station and the optical sorter.
The optical sorter is a special scanner that looks for specific items such as newspaper, and mixed paper,
things like your cracker box.
Once it sees these items, it uses a strong jet of air to knock them off the conveyor belt and into a bunker.
Amanda: What about the all the food cans, does it detect that too?
Actually magnets lift cans off the sorting line and into a bunker.
And after that, it’s plastic.
And we’re back to optical sorters.
They scan for certain types of plastics:
things like drink bottles, shampoo bottles or yogurt and margarine containers.
Different plastics are blasted with jets of air onto separate conveyor belts that deposit them into their own bunkers.
Meanwhile, workers remove beverage containers by hand,
items like plastic milk jugs that can be sent for a refund.
They also pick off other items that don’t belong and send them back to get sorted again.
Then we use an eddy current for materials like aluminum foil, cans and pie plates that magnets can’t pick up.
The eddy current repels these onto another conveyor belt and into a bunker.
Amanda: Wow. I can’t believe everything was sorted so fast!
It’s really efficient.
But we’re not quite done yet.
The last step is taking the material in the bunkers and bundling it so it can be sent off to be recycled into new products.
It’s an amazing process, and it’s one that begins with people like you Amanda.
You, your family and all Calgarians are saving precious materials from ending up in the landfill and instead turning them into something useful.
You’re helping the environment and making a difference.