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What happens to recyclables after they leave the curb?

Carney’s rep explains hand-sorting system during tour of facility
Ray Christensen explains the workings of the depot during a Squamish Chamber of Commerce tour of the facility.

Ever wonder what happens to that empty milk jug and scrap paper from your child’s art project once thrown into the recycle tote? Wonder no more. 

Once the contents of the bright blue tote have been dumped into the back of the Carney’s truck, it travels down the road to the Carney’s Waste Systems depot at 38950 Queens Way in the Squamish Industrial Park. 

There, the cardboard, boxboard, mixed papers, plastic and tin and aluminum cans are dumped on the cement floor of Carney’s giant shed. 

Two to three staff members per day sort the recyclables into contaminated and uncontaminated. 

“We do a floor separation and a bobcat comes in and grabs a load and they will kind of spread it out, and we hand-pick it,” Ray Christensen, sales manager at Carney’s Waste Systems, said during a Squamish Chamber of Commerce tour of the facility last week. “We pull out a lot of stuff.” 

The contaminated material is separated out, and the uncontaminated material goes on a conveyor belt and into a compactor.

If there are any black bags full of recycling, they go straight to garbage because they are almost always contaminated. 

“We can open nine out of 10 bags and we’ll find some garbage in there,” Christensen said, noting the same goes for grocery bags. 

“Human nature is I’m going to start doing my recycling, I rinse out my yogurt container, I put my ketchup bottle in there and as I go down my counter and my kids are yelling at me, I am grabbing stuff and I put in the bag and I tie a knot and I put it in the recycling,” he explained. 

Plastic bags and plastic wrap cannot go into the recycling bin but can be recycled at Carney’s Recycling Centre or the Squamish Landfill.

If pizza boxes are contaminated with food, they cannot be recycled. Food containers such as ketchup and mayonnaise jars need to be rinsed. If anything can be squeezed out, it is too contaminated to recycle, Christensen said.

Overall, 4.6 per cent of Squamish residents’ recyclables are contaminated, according to Christensen. Close to 329 metres of contaminated material a month has to be taken to the landfill. Glass is separated out and taken to the landfill and after grinding it down, it’s used as surface covering on roads within the dump. 

Each shipload of clean recycled material that goes to a larger recycler can have a maximum of five per cent contaminated material. About 120 metric tonnes of recyclables per week are shipped to a bigger recycling manufacturer, where the material is again sorted and separated into different grades of paper and plastic, Christensen said. It is then sent to a remanufacturer to be made into something new.

Cardboard is the most valuable recycled commodity, but it has lost its lustre on the markets over the years. In 1998 a tonne of cardboard would fetch $300. These days it brings in about $65 to $70 a tonne. The cardboard goes to facilities in Tacoma, Wash. Demand has decreased for paper and cardboard, he said.

“You look at paper, the newspaper mills used to buy paper like crazy because they were cranking out newspapers. They aren’t doing that anymore so mills aren’t paying for that,” he said. 

Carney’s also takes Styrofoam that is then transferred to a company in Coquitlam. The company gets about two 36-metre bins full of Styrofoam a week.

Mattresses get taken from the Squamish landfill and carted to a Vancouver company that breaks them down. 

Christensen said while it is important to recycle, there are other factors to consider.

“We consume and we throw,” he said.

“There’s reducing, reusing, changing your buying practices as well.”

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