It’s a Friday night, and you and your family decide to order a pizza for dinner. You each take a couple of slices and throw the empty box into the recycling bin next to your cleaned-out peanut butter jar and pile of empty water bottles from throughout the week. You then leave the bin outside for collection to go off and start a new life as a “new” recycled product.
But have you ever thought about what really happens to all of that stuff after it gets piled into a truck and driven off down the street?
To understand what happens to all of those recyclables, you first have to understand how the New Jersey recycling system works.
Recycling in New Jersey
The state’s recycling process is broken down by county, as was decided in the 1987 New Jersey Statewide Mandatory Source Separation and Recycling Act, which was a “major milestone in our state’s solid waste management history and helped establish New Jersey as a leader in this field,” says the Department of Environmental Protection.
This act created mandates on recyclable materials and required each county to come up with a recycling plan, designating which materials have to be recycled in residential, commercial and institutional sectors. Once the county plans were created, each municipality within the county had to adopt the plan.
Each county has its own strategies in terms of collection programs and procedures, single- or dual-stream collection, material requirements and more.
As for the materials highlighted in the plan, the basic list is mostly the same across the state, said Steven Rinaldi of the DEP’s Bureau of Sustainability.
“In most cases, it’s going to be the same basic materials throughout the state, like bottles, cans, paper and cardboard,” Rinaldi said. “But there are some counties that will recycle additional materials based on the markets available to them.”
Once the recyclable items are collected, they are sent to processing centers. There are about 23 processing centers in New Jersey, mostly privately owned, that work with the counties and municipalities to take in their recyclables.
Processing centers
There are around 23 processing centers in the state.
Some of them are single-stream centers, meaning they accept and sort all the materials from one container, such as bottles, cans and paper. One example is the Republic Services facility in Mine Hill, which is a class A recycling center that collects aluminum, brown paper bags, chipboard/paperboard, glass containers, office paper, newspaper, and other paper, plastics Nos. 1 through 5, polyboard/drink boxes, steel containers and telephone books in its single-stream recycling process.
This facility has a capacity of 550 tons per day and takes in about three-quarters of Morris County’s collected recyclables, said Anthony Marrone, district recycling coordinator for the Morris County Municipal Utilities Authority. The Republic Services facility also accepts collected items from Sussex County and Warren County.
Some facilities accept only certain materials, likely coming from towns that do dual-stream collection, meaning that fiber (paper and cardboard) needs to be placed in a separate bin from bottles and cans.
One example of a specialty facility is the Trinity Paper Recycling Center in Mine Hill, which takes only corrugated cardboard, mixed office paper and newspaper.
Rinaldi said around 70% of the state collects single-stream and the rest does dual-stream collection.
“We’re lucky to have a nice infrastructure of these facilities in our state to handle all of the material,” he said.
Each processing center uses a mix of machinery and manual labor to separate the materials, which are then baled (paper, cardboard, plastic) or collected and packaged (crushed glass) to be sold to domestic or international markets, where they will be made into new items.
There are numerous end markets for the materials. For example, Rinaldi said, plastic will often go to markets that make carpeting, clothing or new plastic containers.
“There are lots of unusual markets out there for some of these materials, but those are some of the major ones,” he said. “Recycling is a business; it’s not garbage. These are raw materials that are used to make new products.”
For a full tour of a facility and more details about the sorting process itself, check out the Recycling Center Tour of Republic Services in Mine Hill, a virtual tour video that was put together by the Morris County MUA.
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What you can do
Although most of the recycling process happens after the materials leave your curb, there are a few things that you can do as a resident to help move along the process.
Both Rinaldi and Marrone said one of the biggest issues in the recycling process is contaminants.
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