I recently had the absolute pleasure of being invited to tour Omaha’s curbside recycling facility! Firstar Fiber reached out and offered me a tour to show me what they’re all about. They showed me the facility and we chatted about ways to make recycling more efficient and valuable to our community.
I learned many things during my visit, but my greatest takeaway was this:
Omaha has a wishcycling problem.
What is Wishcycling?
Wishcycling is the practice of putting items in a recycling bin just because one hopes they are recyclable. I wish to not see these Christmas lights in the landfill so I’ll just pop them in the curbside bin.
Right?
Wrong.
That’s actually a really big problem for recycling centers.
Why does it cause problems?
The sorting process at Firstar involves a whole series of ginormous moving belts and other machinery.
Like this:
Items are brought in on trucks, dumped into a main loading area, then scooped onto the conveyer belts. From there, the items begin cruising around the facility being sorted by types. Paper here, plastic there, metal over yonder, and so forth. The machines are all designed to do a specific part of the sorting: There are filters, cameras, puffs of air, conveyer belts and all sorts of other automated technologies that help to sort the materials so they can be baled and sold off to become new materials.
When residents throw in random items that this process is not designed for – lets say a garden hose, or a string of Christmas lights – those items get all tingly tanglied up in the machines. Workers are assigned to pull contaminants from the line, but this manual process reduces the efficiency of the whole automated process.
And when workers don’t see and pull the items in time, entanglements happen.
Not only does this literally grind the process to a halt but it can also cause fires! This is obviously a safety concern for the workers, and repairs to the machinery can be expensive and time consuming.
What do we do about it?
As community members and recycling partners, our job is to learn to recycle right. When we throw items into our curbside bins that don’t belong there or we are unsure if they belong there, we reduce the efficiency of the whole process.
A key element of a zero waste lifestyle is simply thinking about where things go when we “throw away” an item. There is no such thing as “away” – it always goes somewhere. Understanding how our local recycling systems work is a great way to jump into the more nitty gritty elements of waste management and a circular economy.
It absolutely does seem confusing at first, but I promise it gets easier with time. Part of the problem is simply that every recycler in every community is different, therefore the answer to “is this recylable” is going to be different from place to place.
Where to Start
There is a really great book titled Can I Recycle This: A Guide To Better Recycling that I highly recommend for folks just jumping into the recycling world. It explains many of the basic concepts that apply pretty much anywhere, as well as why it is important to learn.
Omaha also has a really intuitive recycling guide that residents can use to look up specific items. It
Re: “Recycling Is Not The Answer”
I’m writing a whole post about that next, but for now just remember this – Systems are made up of individuals. If we want to see systemic change, our individual behavior must be modified sometimes too. Simply learning about what recycling services are available to you is a great way to tune into the broader sustainability community in your area.
Even here in Nebraska, there are amazing groups building the foundations of a sustainable future. We are all working with the systems we have to create the systems we wish to see.
And I just think that’s neato!