Baltimore County, MD Department of Public Works, 28 Mar 2016

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From YouTube: Recycling Made Easy - Baltimore County Single Stream Collection

Description

Learn about single stream recycling in Baltimore County.

A

In single stream, you can collect full range of those things. The paper and the bottles and cans on the same day take them to a single facility, and at that point the sorting process begins rather than at the home. Well,.

B

In Baltimore County residentially, we create around four hundred and twenty thousand tons of trash a year. Some of the things that we offer that people might not normally know is that, besides what users have for a curb site where your residential garbage is that we also offer drop off the server other things and.

A

It's a quite wide range of paper, metal in terms of aluminum, steel, plastic and glass that we can now recycle. Then.

B

We also offer a residence drop-off center. We have a transfer station there, we transfer a good bit of garbage every year so that we're not filling the landfill up and so.

A

Recycling conserves landfill space and lengthens the life of the landfill that we all share as Baltimore County residents. So.

C

When you get to that capacity level, you have to think of how else you're going to handle your trash, but.

A

With single stream recycling we're going to be recovering more material, so that means we avoid more disposal costs. There's.

C

A maximum space in any landfill that can only hold so much I.

A

Think the process really starts in terms of the education that we put out, so the residents know what to expect as they go through that process. At.

C

The current time we are providing recycling to all single-family and townhomes and we are working towards working all the apartments and condominiums entire recycling program. One.

A

Of the major benefits of single stream recycling is that we can accept the wider variety of materials, which means that we can keep more material out of our landfill and lengthen its life. Apparently.

B

What we do in Baldwin County, if you go curbside what we set out for a single stream, is really only about rough times, ten to twelve percent of the total amount of material that we generate. We.

C

Would like to see more and more things come out of the trash stream into the recycling stream and right now we have that ability. We've increased the number of things that we can recycle now with our new contract and single stream. So that's a real benefit. The.

D

Residents come in, we check and see if they uh we checked, our ID make sure they're a Baltimore County resident, and then we direct them to the proper disposal of something site or whatever they got recyclables. It goes over here. If they're in a car and SUV, we let them dump their trash and off straight ahead. Metal recycling it over here if they got wood and all I got to pick up drumming construction, debris and stuff like that. We stand them down to the scale. So.

B

We've added to the program: what in the past was somewhat limited and we're always looking at ways of expanding that as well.

A

Once those materials are picked up, they're going to a facility in Elkridge Maryland, it's operated by waste management company and it's a single stream sorting facility. The.

E

Material arrives here, and this is where they're actually the D manufacturing of the product start. We start subjugating all the materials out. We start separating out the paper products, the aluminum's, the the metals the glass first area will see it is on our priests or area. That's the first place people can address it, the trucks offloaded on our tip and floor. It's a load o conveyor with a wheel, loader, and then it comes up to the pre-stored and that's where they'll remove any items that don't belong.

E

Any contaminants or any large plastic items for recovery will pull off like a bucket, some tub, there's not there, and then the material will go to our cardboard separation screen, and that is a screen that has large spacing it, though the cardboard can't go through it, so it'll actually surf over the top of it and the rest of the recyclables will drop through it all the newspapers.

E

Last year we crush all the glass out. We do not color separate it. We use it either goes back to a bottle. Manufacturer goes back as an aggregate use and then what's left, we have an optics order that will shoot out all the plastic it'll optically scan it as it goes, underneath of it and use little air Jets to segregate it out. Many other items are left over. That's really the kind of the whole process in a nutshell, maybe over simplified it. But you know we get a chance to see it.

E

It's a pretty neat process after it's all sorted, it drops into bunkers, and then we bail it as we bail out your compressed into a large cube and once we make the cubes out of it, then it will take the market for shipment load it on trucks. Here that will go on trucks for domestic mills. It will go export out of the Port of Baltimore to you know the Far East Asia China India. You know a lot of different places. It really enters a world economy.

E

Now it's a raw material for reuse and remanufacturing, we're just the first step in the process of taking that product back to remanufacturing into something else.

C

It's certainly a lot easier than it was before, because you don't have to remember which week it is whether it's the paper week or the blue bag week, and it seems to be a lot easier once you understand that you can't just put it out in a plastic bag anymore, I like recycling, because you can do it all that ones and everybody.

F

In my community can do it I'm very happy with the new initiative, it's it's very nice to be able to do the combined recycling of both paper and the plastics and cans and stuff its list rush. It's more recycling, we're finding that it's actually cut down on our trash, a fair amount. By being able to recycle more of the plastics we.

C

Appreciate the fact that people have taken to the single stream program, I believe.

F

That the more we can recycle the better it is for environment better. It is for the economy, and everything like that. All I can say is that I just hope that all the residents in Baltimore County will get on this program and do their recycling is, as the county has made it so easy for us to do.