Visit to Your Local Recycling Center

Have you been to your local recycling center? I am not talking about a small drop off station at your local grocery store, but the actual recycling center for your city or county. Every area in the United States today has a main recycling center where recyclables are processed. A simple look in the phone book, or call to your nearest landfill, will give you the information on where you can find your local center. Generally they can be found in an out of the way place around other industrial type businesses.

A visit to a recycling center is a very unique experience indeed. There you will see many things of interest that you just don't see anywhere else. I recently went to my local center with my children so that they can start to learn where things go when we are finished with them, and what they can personally do to minimize trash in our ever increasing landfills.

The first stop for us at the local recycling center was the glass bins. My local center doesn't pay for glass, but has a line of large trash containers for placing your glass in. The containers are clearly marked with the color of glass they are for. You simply take your glass to recycle and place it in the recycling container with the other glass of that color. This glass is then hauled off, melted down, and used to make more glass.

The next stop for us was the aluminum recycling station. Our local recycling center has a large machine to put your aluminum in. This machine rolls and shakes the cans to get out anything that doesn't belong in them and to insure the end result is only aluminum.
The cans are the loaded into a bin and weighed. For each pound of aluminum you are paid based on the going rate for aluminum. At my local center that price is generally about $1.30 a pound. Just for reference we recycled eight large trash bags full of cans and were paid about $22.00. Not bad.

The next stop at the local station was the plastics recycling. There you separate all of your plastic items based on the type of plastic listed on the triangle on the bottom of the item. These items are then weighed and you are paid based on the going rate. The workers at the recycling center then place all of plastics into their own sorting containers. From there they will be baled, sold, and shipped to companies who purchase plastic to use in their recycling process.

The next stop is the place where you can bring your newspapers for recycling. Our local center does not pay for them, but offers you a place to bring them to be recycled.

The final stop at the local recycling center is the payment hut. It is a small red mobile building where you take a piece of paper with the weight of each of your recyclables and they total up what you are owed. Here you have the option of being paid, in cash, for your items or donating your money to the local charities who have drop boxes there on the counter

As you leave the recycling center you see bales of plastic and paper waiting to be picked up and transported to their new homes. It's an amazing sight to see all of the waste generated and the amount of it which can be recycled with very little effort.

If you have not been to your areas recycling center I suggest you visit there soon. It makes for an interesting and educational trip for your children as well. Mine now want to recycle as much as possible because they see you can get paid for your trash. It's a start on them learning the real reason to recycle - to keep things out of the landfill and use them again.