Many of us gather items such as used soup cans, milk jugs, and old medicine bottles to be recycled. But what actually gets recycled… or reused? WMRA’s Ayse Pirge explores two places in the Shenandoah Valley with different approaches to processing reusables.
[sound of machinery]
ROSS HEWITT: This is where the product gets dumped in. So, this is your in-bound bunk.
Ross Hewitt is the owner of RCS Waste & Recycling in Winchester. They handle the area’s commingled and commercial recycling, 75 tons of recyclable items every day. “Commingled” refers to single-stream recycling, in which materials are placed in containers without being sorted first.
HEWITT: So, this plant… was built to handle residential recycling. So, like in your planned communities, or towns…when that recycling gets picked up, and it’s all mixed together, it gets brought here, and then dumped in these bunks.
Hewitt shows me a mixed bottle bunk, which includes things such as soup cans and milk jugs. There is also a bunk, or bin, where everything is mixed together, such as cardboard and aluminum. These items will go through the conveyors and get separated.
Hewitt says it takes roughly 15 people to run the plant. Each person has their own category that they sort, such as milk jugs. At the quality control line, items that can’t be recycled get picked out. These may include–
HEWITT: Garden hoses, engine blocks, dead animals, I mean just crazy stuff.
Whatever is left at the end of the conveyor line, after the picking is done, is considered trash, and will go into a trash compactor. Hewitt says around 10% of the mixed recyclables they receive is unrecoverable.
HEWITT: ‘Wishcycling’ they call it. People… hope it gets recycled, they can’t.
As for items that do get recycled, some may end up in unexpected places. The PET water bottles here, for example, will end up in Alabama to produce LVT flooring.There are also number two plastics, such as milk jugs, that are used to make corrugated pipes. They also recycle items such as concrete and brick. Hewitt says magnet separators pull steel and aluminum off of the conveyor. Much of it ends up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, or Ohio, and gets melted down for reuse.
Hewitt says the biggest challenge in selling recycled materials to manufacturers is that a lot of times, their products are competing with cheaper, new materials, such as resin and plastic.
HEWITT: So, you have some municipalities, states… that mandate a certain percentage. So, it’s kind of like these companies are buying it because they’re mandated.
But what about items that can be repurposed without being processed in a facility – simply reused?
Valley Creative Reuse in Harrisonburg also ‘recycles’ materials – in a way. It’s not a conventional arts and crafts store, but one where people can donate, as well as purchase, any supplies that they need. They also host classes and workshops. Morgan Kraybill Gross founded Valley Creative Reuse in 2023, inspired by the model she saw in Pittsburgh.
MORGAN KRAYBILL GROSS: And it was there that I discovered one room… where it was just floor to ceiling art and crafts supplies. And my brain lit up… So, it was after learning about the model, the creative reuse model in Pittsburgh… that seed was first planted.
Gross says they’ve had a really strong community response from the beginning.
GROSS: Early on, we spent a lot of time just having community conversations, trying to figure out if this was something that people were even interested in. And we kept getting yes, yes, yes.
She says they have what is called a fill-a-bag pricing system, and they want the items to be affordable.
GROSS: We have four brown bag sizes. Each of them are priced. And for the most part, things just go into whatever bag size you choose…We call it the Tetris effect, where people are trying to decide how much they can pack into their bag.
They also have some items with a brown handwritten price tag on them, as well as beads and jewelry, which people can fill into bottles.
GROSS: These are old medicine bottles, exactly. So, everything that we can reuse and repurpose around here, we do. We try to avoid having to purchase anything new as best we can.
Gross says they’re constantly sorting through donations that they receive, and describes the situation in the store as “organized chaos.”
GROSS: So, over in this area, we have paper crafting… like pompoms, and popsicle sticks… old CDs, and other types of things for repurposing. We’ve got office supplies and stencils.
Also glitter, googly eyes, envelopes… and even old calendars. Some of the donations they have received in the past stand out.
GROSS: Our very first donation was … these brightly colored spools of wire that was used by… a company that was making durable medical device equipment… so it was these wires that would go into… a pacemaker, for example.
Another unusual donation– parts from an old piano.
GROSS: That’s exactly the type of thing that, you know, we can’t take everybody’s broken down pianos, but…they had it nicely organized, and broken down into kind of usable pieces. So, we took them.
She says around half of these piano parts are already gone. As the saying goes, one person’s trash can be another’s treasure.
