Last summer, a group of sturdy parishioners from St. Andrew's traveled to Chesapeake to tour Tidewater Fibre Recycling Plant. This is the first destination of your curbside recyclables- your rolling bin that you put out by the curb each week. It was a huge and dirty process but the way recyclables and garbage are sorted is amazing.

There are numerous conveyer belts that move things along and are diverted and sorted by huge machines. There are workers standing by the conveyer belts along the way, manually pulling out inappropriate items. At the end of the system, we saw stacks and stacks of bales of recyclables ready to be sold to downstream venders. Some bales were aluminum cans, some were paper and some were plastic jugs/bottles. In a separate building, we saw huge bales of cardboard ready for re-sale. Bales are visually inspected and the entire bale can be rejected if a plastic bag (or other non-recyclable) is caught. TFC is a private company that is contracted by municipalities to recycle. Municipalities are required by federal regulations to recycle a certain percentage of their solid waste collections. TFC is paid a designated amount for each household, for weekly pick up. Our 'buy a lot, throw away a lot' lifestyles provide them with tons of waste to process.

The tour helped us draw the following conclusions:

1. Recycling is helpful, but a dirty and energy intensive process. We'd be better earth stewards to USE LESS and create less trash.
2. The recycling system would be greatly improved if people did not put the wrong items in with their recyclables.

Here is a list of things YOU CAN RECYCLE in your blue recycle bin:

Aluminum and metal CANS (cans only-NOT curtain rods, clothes hangers or other metals)
Aluminum foil-clean-no food residue
Chipboard-which is thin cardboard- cracker/cereal type boxes, soda and beer boxes
Cardboard-clean and dry and broken down enough to fit in recycle bin (no pizza boxes or cardboard with food residue)
Paper-magazines, junk mail, phone books, office paper, paper bags, just about any type of clean paper (not napkins, paper plates, etc)
Plastic BOTTLES that have #1 or #2 on bottom ( has to have a neck, so no produce containers, food trays, etc-even if they have #1 or 2 on bottom)

But DON'T RECYCLE:

Plastic bags-they get caught up in machinery and cause frequent repair shut downs. No plastic bags-not even to hold your other recyclables.
Tops to bottles
Cardboard that is not flat or too big to fit in recycle bin
Styrofoam
Plastic bottles that don't have #1 or #2 on bottom
Plastic food trays or containers that are not bottles-even if they have a #1 or #2 on bottom

The bottom line remains that recycling is a dirty and energy intensive process. If we want to care for God's creation, creating less trash is our best earth stewardship. When we can, we need to recycle-taking care to sort and place only recyclables in the bin. Recycling diverts tons of solid waste from our overflowing and expensive landfills. Even safe landfills are huge mountains of trash we are saving for our children and grandchildren. Chemicals from batteries, electronics, and solvents are toxic and will cause problems for future generations. The technology to burn landfill gases to produce electricity is a good solution, but it is expensive and not widely used....yet. Landfills and pollution are not what we want to 'save for the kids'.

Using less is good earth stewardship.