2/23/2004

What happens to those pop cans and pizza boxes?

Tour reveals how recycling center works

Jessica Coomes
Daily Kent Stater

Pop cans, crushed together into gigantic shiny cubes, are stacked near a mountain of cardboard boxes, from Miller Lite to Success Rice.

Nearby in the garage, the Portage County Recycling Center’s most valuable commodity, office paper, sits in a cage. Piles of newspapers and magazines lay strewn in their respective piles.

Stored outside, bundled with wire, are compressed plastic jugs. The colorful laundry detergent jugs appear two-dimensional amidst the mostly white jugs.

The recyclables look a bit like modern art in this form, said Kelly Foxworthy, a member of Students Eliminating Environmental Destruction.

SEED members joined the League of Women Voters and the Kent Environmental Council Saturday morning for a tour of the recycling facility on Mogadore Road.

“We’ve become such a disposable society. We’re going to end up burying ourselves in this,” said Charles Ramer, district coordinator for the recycling center.

The center, which also services Kent State, recycled 12,500 tons last year, Ramer said, and 96 percent of everything that comes in to be recycled actually does.

“This is a kick-butt program,” he said.

During the tour, Wendelin Taylor, the center’s project coordinator, said Portage County recycles three times more than Cleveland, Akron or Cincinnati.

“Portage County is far ahead of the rest of the state in what it recycles,” she told the people on the tour.

Swanny Voneida of Twin Lakes has been helping with that for many years. She used to drop off her recyclables every week, but she now takes advantage of curb-side pick up.

Voneida, a member of both the environmental council and the league, came with some questions. She wanted to know why she can’t recycle yogurt containers.

“There’s not that big of a market,” Taylor answered.

Plastic containers that have a “1” or a “2” on the bottom of them have fewer additives to them and are easier to recycle than are containers with a “5” on the bottom, such as yogurt containers, Taylor said.

Taylor discouraged trying to recycle plastic grocery bags, Styrofoam or dirty pizza boxes. Aluminum foil, she said, is dangerous to recycle because trapped moisture can cause explosions when it’s being processed. And window glass is too fragile and dangerous to be recycled.

Sharp tin can lids are dangerous, too, and shouldn’t be sent to the center, Taylor told the audience. A series of “oohs” followed.

All recyclables should be rinsed out before they’re thrown into recycling bins. This “keeps the critters out,” Taylor said, and it also prevents bacteria from growing and smelling in the summer heat.

“Especially your tuna fish,” she said, laughing. “Or your cat food cans.”

The recycling center started recycling just bottles, cans and paper, but it now has programs to take household hazardous waste, tires, leaves, computers and appliances, Ramer said.

For those traditional recyclables, most everything that comes in gets dumped onto a conveyer belt, where the obviously contaminated items are picked off. Air will separate the cans and plastic into one hopper, a magnet will pick up the metal, and that leaves the glass, which is then hand-sorted by color.

Along the ledges of the conveyer belt, various un-recyclables have been picked up and set aside, including a tennis ball, a perfume sprayer and a crab toy.

Before the tour, the members met for a breakfast at the Portage Area Regional Transit Authority on Summit Road, and — to be environmentally friendly — took buses to the Recycling Center.

SEED members have been working to make recycling easier in dorms.

“We’re lazy,” Foxworthy said. “We want to make it more convenient to recycle.”

SEED member Niki Novello said she wanted to see the center to educate herself about what can be recycled, so she can educate others.

“People don’t see beyond the bin,” Novello said. “They don’t know what’s going on. People think it just disappears. We’re going to learn what can be recycled.”

SEED is sponsoring a forum on recycling March 18.

E-mail: jcoomes@kent.edu