TRASH DISPOSAL: SCROLL DOWN TO VIDEO ON THE SUBJECT

This was apparently a video done for Century Village, yet there was no yellow container shown for the disposal of paper goods!

As unhelpful as this was, the man WAS right in saying that bottles should not be put in a plastic bag and the plastic bag of bottles then be put in the blue container. I know this from the brochure given Ken Graff and me when we went on a tour of the 45th Street recycling facility a few years ago. Ken took photos while I wrote an article on the subject for the Reporter.

We saw what happens to these plastic bags of bottles. A conveyor belt brings the contents of the blue recycle containers to a room high above the ground-floor dumpster disposal area where the trucks drop their loads. We could see this because we ourselves were in a similar viewing room at the same height above the floor. A man in the recycle room separates out the plastic bags of bottles from the rest of the glassware, but not by taking the bottles out of each bag. Instead, he throws the bags WITH THE BOTTLES AND GLASSWARE IN THEM through a hole in the floor, where they fall some 40 feet onto the ground floor dumpster disposal area. This is kind of fun to watch. Ba-boom go the bags, one by one.

Thus, however, all the work anyone had done in separating out bottles goes for naught if they had put the bottles in a plastic bag! In fact, you would have saved both yourself and the recycle facility time if you had just tossed the bag of bottles in the dumpster. Or not separated out the bottles in the first place! The tour guide did not explain all this—I suppose it would not have been the best advertising. But I saw it, asked the guide about it, and she confirmed what I've just described.

Interestingly, on a part of the tour we were told what the future of trash disposal held. There were prototypes in various places in the country, the tour guide explained. The trash then would NO LONGER BE DIVIDED as it is now. Everything would go into one pile, we would go back to the old way of doing things in a sense, and machinery would do the dividing. 

The best thing we can do now, of course, is to use both recycle containers and, as the man in the video explained, not put our glassware in any plastic bags.