Sustainability News and Events

On another leg of our tour of waste, we visited the Montcalm Material Recycling Facility in Indianapolis.  What a sight!  At this facility, run by Republic Services, workers sort, bale, and then ship the materials to customers who will melt them down and form them into new things.

In addition to aluminum, tin, steel, and paper, the plant is only able to sell plastics number 1 and 2 (the bottle and jug kind).  All other plastics, number 3-7 and the oddball 1’s and 2’s, are baled but just kept in the warehouse as they search to find a market.

In this picture, workers are sorting

through aluminum to make sure there are no items that don’t belong.

Here are some other facts about the plant:

• 50 employees
• receive 70 tons /day:
  • 2 truckloads of newspaper
  • 4-5 truckloads of everything else
• items defined as “trash” are always re-sorted to make sure there are no recyclables among them
• do not currently recycle plastic Starbucks-type cups, yogurt cups, or plastic bags
• all post-consumer
  • the Langsdale plant handles “pre-consumer” clippings of unused paper

To help us better understand the waste process at DePauw, Missy!, Taylor, Craig, and I shadowed a team of third-shift custodial staff members in the Julian Center on Sunday night.  This experience allowed us to debunk some myths as well as get to know some workers we never see during the day at school.

We saw . . .

• the color-coded reusable microfiber rags for cleaning
• picking up trash and recycling and taking them to their respective outdoor bins
• a CFL getting replaced–and a confirmation that in six years, they still haven’t had to replace all of the bulbs in Julian
• professors’ trash cans full of recylables

As part of our effort to follow our waste and educate the DePauw community about what happens to it, Professor Everett, Missy!, Craig, and I visited the Sycamore Ridge Landfill in Terre Haute.

We learned of the complicated layering process that lies beneath the waste to protect from leeching, and we were able to watch a tractor-trailer dump it’s load on the ground.  Our guide, the general manager of the landfill, estimated that 10-15% of the waste we saw was plastic, including plastic Kroger-type bags that get blown around and become a nuisance.

PLUS, we were astounded to see the “community investment” that has been made around this landfill.   The former, now completed and closed landfill across the street produces methane–as do all landfills.  Instead of selling this methane back to the grid for use as energy (which wouldn’t be economical), Republic Services sells it directly to Boral, a brick factory right next door.  This methane provides enough energy to supply the majority of the factory’s needs.

In addition, Boral gets its clay for the bricks from land that had been strip mined before regulations were in place.  Boral’s involvement removes arsenic from the soil and will leave the land a better place in about 70 years.

Members of the DePauw Environmental Policy Project–Anthony Baratta, Beth Lunik, Craig Melancon, and Tiffany Nichols–wrote an op-ed in the Indianapolis Star detailing the importance of mass transit opportunities, published on July 2nd.

Read more in . . .

• DePauw News, 7/2
• Read full text: Waiting is not the answer for regional mass transit (PDF)