Collections Crews Take a Recycling Center Tour

These are the sounds of recycling. Each day, about 52 recycle trucks collect residential paper and commingle and bring it here to the tipping floor. recently DEP [Department of Environmental Protection] Solid Waste collections managers showed their recycle contractor crews what happens on the other side of the tipping floor. [Joe: Now you understand it?] Collections Operations Manager Joe O'donnell gives crews the view from inside the Materials Recovery Facility, or MRF. while G.A. Corrick explains the process of sorting the commingle and removing contaminants such as paper and... basketballs?! at the end of the line the bales of plastic are ready to be sold to outside vendors. Currently the Recycle Center recovers about 1.3 million dollars from the sale of recycled glass, metals, and plastics. It definitely gave our collections crews a different view of their job. >> And now I'm that important >> between people who just >> didn't care about >> just putting all stuff together >> trash - everything mixed >> it's going to be hard for >> these people to do the kind of >> work that they do. >> Definitely different... >> we need to improve the job every day. >> I'm super-impressed >> and that makes me want to >> believe for the hard work that >> they do now. >> I want to do the same quality of >> what I do in my job. and we're trying to get that paper over to the right side. You can't do it all because some of it's... you shuffle carts... you know... but do what you can. Okay? Because these folks -- they got a bad job. Okay?