Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 10, 1993 TAG: 9305100320
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: NF-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: WENDI GIBSON RICHERT NEWSFUN WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
OK, some folks do give their garbage to Cycle Systems, but in the recycling business - yes, it is a business - most of the trash accepted there is paid for by a buyer, such as Beachum. You can haul in some of your recyclable garbage for money. For example, aluminum pays 23 to 26 cents a pound.
Cycle Systems is 75 years old this year. And a quick study of its history tells you it's been a leader in recycling long before it was the cool thing to do.
Cycle Systems began as a junkyard, collecting scraps of materials and selling them to product makers. Today, the industry collects even more materials, and it processes, packages and ships them off in greater numbers than ever before.
It owes much of its success to the fact that recycling always has been an Earth-friendly moneymaker. After all, there's only so much room on the Earth to put all the garbage we generate. Each American, Cycle Systems averages, tosses 5 pounds of garbage a day. For all America, that's almost 250 million tons of trash a year.
By recycling, you can make that number smaller and help save the Earth. Recycling your garbage helps conserve energy by saving the amount of electricity that goes into making new products. It saves natural resources by giving product makers the same ores and elements they used to get by mining underground. Recycling also eliminates the need to bury garbage in landfills.
But not every product can be recycled. Beachum points to the refrigerator as an example. Sure, its metal casing is recyclable. But its motor is not. Neither is its plastic molding on the inside. Beachum says kids can solve this problem when they grow up by developing new refrigerators and other products that can be made with recycled parts.
If you don't think you can wait until you're grown up, though, you can start helping the environment now. And, indeed, you should. Recycling no longer is just something nice you can do for the environment. It's the law.
This year in Virginia, 15 percent of every 6.7 million tons of garbage must be recycled (that's a little more than a million tons). By 1995, that percentage will be increased to 25 percent for every 6.8 million tons of trash.
Recycling is painless and remarkably easy. It even can be fun. Knowing that your garbage will be made into a product once again is amazing enough. But seeing part of the process in action is truly a sight.
On a rainy day when much of the Cycle Systems recycling yard was turned to mud, Beachum led me on a tour of Roanoke's junkyard to see where your recycled goods go once you put them into the bins.
Some of the garbage is received from the recycling center at the front of Cycle Systems where citizens sort and deposit their trash. But most of it is delivered directly to the recycling yard in large loads by towns and businesses who recycle, or folks who collect the recyclable goods for money. Cycle Systems buys this trash, and the price is based on how much the garbage weighs and how well it is sorted.
From there, the goods are dumped - literally - onto the ground. This makes a terrific amount of noise. The sound of glass bottles hitting the ground is much like a thousand loud whistles amid breaking glass. The aluminum cans are just as loud.
After the materials are dumped, they must be sorted so that glass has no plastic in it, aluminum cans have no tin mixed in, and so on. The trash is fed through a machine which picks out the contaminated pieces - that's recycling jargon for trash that isn't sorted correctly.
The sorting machine depends on the product. Aluminum cans are fed through a machine with two magnets which pick up all magnetic cans and leave the aluminum behind (a magnet does not stick to aluminum). Paper is fed through a giant spinning tube with holes in it. This separates certain kinds of paper. Some of the trash is hand-inspected, too.
Each material goes to its own section of the Cycle Systems yard. There are plants for processing copper, aluminum, scrap iron, construction waste, paper, glass and plastic. When all the products are separated, they are squashed together in tight, heavy bundles called "bales." A bale easily could weight more than a 1,000 pounds. A bale of aluminum cans weighs about 1,500 pounds.
Plastic and glass products are melted down instead of being squashed into bales.
Cycle Systems - which paid for the trash to begin with - turns around and sells these bales to manufacturers, who turn them into new products. Beachum says most recycled products are turned into the same product over and over again. Coke cans become Coke cans, computer paper becomes computer paper and newsprint becomes newsprint. (About 10 percent of the paper NewsFun is printed on is recycled paper.)
If you don't already recycle, make a point to do it. You might try doing what Cathy Hurst's fifth-grade science class at Green Valley Elementary School did. Pupils saved their recyclable trash for seven days before taking it on a field trip to Cycle Systems, where they recycled it.
After a week, you'd probably be surprised at all the trash you collected that you used to throw away. Now, imagine saving the Earth by recycling it - instead of burying it.
by CNB