Without Recycling, County’s Trash Mountain Would Be Even Higher

At the threat of sounding like a pitchman for the county MUA, I think recycling is a terrific idea. It’s a pain, at times, but I’m a believer, tried and true. I will sort through our trash, when needed, to ensure things that ought to be recycled are, and things that ought not to be are in the rightful bag.
Fortunate for my fellow citizens, I don’t rule the world, or at least Cape May County. If I did, every man, woman and child would be made to take an annual trip to the MUA’s Woodbine Sanitary Landfill and, while there, tour the Intermediate Processing Facility.
The enormity of the trash disposal dilemma becomes quite apparent as you stand atop Cape May County’s highest point, about 95-98 feet up that stretches for many acres. It’s all our trash, all sorts of grungy stuff is stacked up there, rotting away, last Labor Day’s steak bones, decomposing ice cream cartons from last summer, disposable diapers from who knows when, broken toys and other “stuff” of every description.
One’s eyes see, from that county-owned mountain of trash, Great Egg Harbor Bay and down toward Court House, it’s possible to watch the crews of workers dumping more trash while another corps of heavy machine operators covers the trash over with soil.
If that mountain of waste doesn’t impact your thinking about recycling, get into a vehicle and ride down the mountain to the IPF. There, workers bend over conveyor belts all day, sorting through recyclables that contain stuff that should not be recycled: pizza boxes, for example, and printed beer and soft drink cardboard boxes which are already recycled, have little pulp value, and cannot be sold to recycling paper mills.
The heat and noise would drive you nearly insane, and workers there wear ear protection to deaden the sound. Still, it’s a rotten job, but it’s one that must be done.
Cast an amazing look down into the huge garage-like cavern that contains Type 1 and 2 recyclable plastics. A front-end loader shovels scoop after scoop of milk containers and plastic bottles or every description. They held last week’s 2 percent fat milk at the breakfast table and microwave meal plates from a couple weeks back.
On the other side of the observation deck a continuous flow of metal, some ferrous some non-ferrous moves. Lighter aluminum cans from last Friday or Saturday’s beer bust are filtering up the belt to be blown into a section where aluminum is retained, then smashed into huge blocks for resale to recyclers.
The same thing happens with the soda and milk cartons.
Clean, recyclable paper, last week’s Herald, and the Sunday paper, your 1987 income tax return and a bundle of examinations from somewhere are baled and weighed awaiting sale to another recycler.
Glass is sorted by colors, clear, white, brown, green, and pulverized. It can become glass again, or used as a road base material known as “glassphalt.”
Wood pallets are chopped into mulch. Christmas trees face the same inglorious end, although mulch is good for around the home and garden. Tires, piled high, await other means of recycling.
To be sure, the MUA isn’t sitting around waiting for decay to take place. It’s marketing the electricity that is generated by methane gas resulting from decomposing yucky things inside the 98-foot mountain. So that’s good, and it cuts down foul-smelling scents from the landfill.
When, last week, the MUA sent out news of rebates to communities for recycling, the amounts looked substantial. For example, Middle Township, home to this “recycling Nazi,” as I’ve been called, totaled nearly $97,000.
That’s not “free” money, not by a long shot. And some would say it doesn’t even begin to cover the cost involved in collection.
On the other hand, it represents materials that would otherwise have made that MUA 98-foot mountain probably a 150-foot mountain.
Unless you like to ski, and Woodbine could offer itself as a nearby alternative to the Poconos with man-made snow on the mountain, a big hill of trash is hardly the sort of monument we want to leave for the next few generations.
It was heartening to read Lauren Suit’s story May 7 that the United Way of Cape May County would like to “go green,” and stop handing out donations in plastic bags. Will it catch on? Perhaps some local business will view the advertising potential on reusable cloth bags, and give some to the United Way.
Even more wallet warming was the MUA story that noted the rebates to municipalities were the second highest in 18 years.
That tells me someone is listening to the message. Where does the message begin?
Look in the classrooms around the county. That’s where ideas on recycling may start.
Look next to your family’s weekly recycler. That person should keep a sharp eye out for what goes into the recycling can.
Is it easy? No. In fact there was a time when my better half was cleaning out the attic of several decades of “saved stuff,” there were many hardback books to be tossed.
I called county recycling coordinator Bridget O’Connor on a Sunday (my apologies), and asked her how I was to recycle those things, since there was no mention of hardback books in any recycling information readily at hand.
“Take them to Raff’s on Goshen Road,” she said.
Why won’t the municipality take them? They can’t go directly into the paper waste stream because there is glue in the backing that must be removed prior to recycling.
Raff, or someone they sell the books to, cuts off the backing, then recycles the pages of all those steamy novels and boring college textbooks.
Recycling can be a chore, but take heart in the fact that it’s working, and growing. That 98-foot mountain isn’t going skyward as fast as it otherwise would.