Trip to the Recycling Center

With Earth Day fast approaching, I have been hard at work encouraging the kids to reduce their carbon footprint.  For our family it is near impossible to reduce all the amount of waste we have.  But we can make sure that we are recycling all that we can and using products that are made with recycled materials.  We can also read boxes and bottles and try to only buy items that can be recycled in our area.  I recently watched the documentary entitled Tapped about the bottled water industry.  If you get a chance....I HIGHLY recommend it.

Anyway, we went on a tour of a local recycling center.

I had never actually been to this facility before, they even have a recycle bin for old books.

I love this picture.  Taking kids with autism on a field trip is a massive challenge.  There are so many unknown variables.  Since this is a processing facility, we had the noise to deal with.  But Brayden can be superhypersensitive about smells also.  This was how he dealt with that situation.

These are piles of plastic and aluminum crammed together and waiting for pickup.  I guess I never really thought much about the process of how we buy materials made out of recycled products.  Well the recycled products must come from somewhere.  Recycling centers like this are necessary to sort for those of us who are in the dark.  They sort and sell it to facilities around the state that turns this into new products.    Look at those piles.  Can you imagine how much garbage that was prior to being crushed down?

Here he is sorting aluminum cans up the conveyor belt.  He is watching for pieces of "contamination" or plastic, paper, etc.

The cans are sent through that tube into the truck.  When the trailer is full, it's hauled to companies to meltdown and reuse.

This is another section of the sorting facility.  You can't see the people on the top level.  They are sorting to make the recycling that is being processed is as free of contaminates as possible. 

This is our crew on their way out.  It was soooo cold and started to sprinkle the rain.  Bad day for an outside trip, but it was still very informational and we learned alot.

Sorry pics are out of order.  This is a pile of pressed magazines.

This is a glass pulverizer.

We ended up getting some pieces of glass in our shoes.  Good thing we did a check when we got to the van.