Kent County reimagines trash

             A  front-end loader scoops a most-scrappy mound of trash and dumps the motley mixture into a machine. Soon, before my eyes, that mound and many more are gobbled up and spit out onto conveyor belts at the Kent County Recycling and Education Center. 

          In one tower  paddles suck up the light-weight paper and send it one direction while the heavy glass falls to the bottom and is crushed into sparking sand.  The mid-weight items come out in the middle. Magnets separate the metals until only plastics remain. Then a beam of light, like a giant grocery scanner,  sorts the various plastics by number. 

        The machines miss a few things. Operators snatch errant cardboard from the plastic parade, which also includes a few oddities like a black shoe, a tennis ball and a broken flowerpot. But eventually the jumbled mess from the front-end loader is sorted into huge, homogenous bundles.

         

    A car-size brick of flattened, translucent milk jugs looks vaguely like a cluster of big balloons. It certainly doesn't look like trash. In another corner bales of flattened cans are lined up like cartons of groceries. The sorted bundles will be sent in different directions to processing centers that deal solely with glass or plastic or metal in such places as Canada, Chicago and Indiana. 

           The Recycling and Education Center, 1045 Wealthy St. SW, is open for tours 1-5 on Monday afternoons. Associate Ally Beshouri was my enthusiastic guide on a recent Monday. 

        I've been dropping off my recycling at the center for several years but this is the first time I went in for a tour. Tours can be scheduled for groups including children who can learn to make toys from trash. There's also an interesting historic timeline on recycling going back to the Greeks. So if you haven't visited Kent County's Recycling and Education Center I strongly recommend it.