Ulster County Resource Recovery Field Trip

In mid April some of our waste management subcommittee met in Kingston to learn from Recycling Educator Melinda France. We learned so much. This one facility processes 30,000 tons of trash every year and sends it to a landfill in Syracuse. 10-15 Trucks full of trash leave UCRRA each day, 6 days a week. 32 tons in each truck. Landfills are really running out of room and new ones are very unpopular to build. So we come to alternatives like recycling and compost to take reusable things out of the garbage stream.

Did you know black plastic is never recyclable? The same with those “clamshell” packages used so often for takeout or pre-washed salad greens. That plastic bags and film are at grocery stores but really gum up the works if thrown in a “single stream” system? Every bottle and can and yogurt container and everything else is hand sorted into the proper area, bundled and then sold for reuse. Dirty or ineligible things make this process much harder and cuts into the already small profit margins to make this possible. Look for products in minimal and explicitly recyclable packaging.

A big part of trash is often food scraps. If you hold these out separately, they can be used to make compost to nourish the soil in your yard or nearby farms. The process takes about 60 days in an industrial facility such as UCRRC. Air, water, food waste and yard waste come together to make beautiful soil amendments. This is economical as well as disposal of foodscraps costs only $20 per ton verses $105 when it is mixed in with trash. We are looking at ways to bring a compost drop off option to Germantown.