Recycling and Disposal Center in SF

SFGate had a pretty good article today about San Francisco’s recycling and disposal center. The Tunnel Road complex collects all of San Francisco’s garbage bins, green for compost, blue for recyclables, and black for trash. Norcal collects 82% of San Francisco’s trash and recycles 4 out of every 10 tons that passes through. Most of the Bay Area cities have a process that the bins go through before the waste gets disposed of.  All recyclables get shipped off to Recycle Central at Pier 96 where conveyor belts, machines, and people sort through more than 700 tons of paper, platic, glass, and other materials. The recyclable products get shipped all over the world to different processing plants. Paper could go to China, Indonesia, and South America but glass is shipped to a San Leandro facility that creates new wine bottles and other products. Compostable items get shipped to the Organics Annex. At Jepson Prairie Organics,  300 tons of compostable materials are processed daily.  The materials  take about 60 days to break down  into usable compost. The workers of the recycling and disposal centers all deserve great credit because it is not an easy job. I couldn’t imagine having to sort through garbage. The sorting site had sprinklers spray mist to keep down the dust and also has a strawberry scent added to keep the smell down but for anyone else other than its regular employees, that place must smell horrible. Cheers to those guys who are helping the environment.

Add comment July 20th, 2007 Alex

LuckyOliver Party at Ace Auto

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LuckyOliver had its one year anniversary birthday party last night at a junkyard in SF called Ace Auto. LuckyOliver is a stock photo website where you can buy single stock images easily as opposed to other stock photo sites where you have to signup or pay for packages, etc. Ace Auto in SF is a junkyard for auto dismantling, auto recycling and computer recycling. It is also a great place for parties and events as they have a huge area as well as tons of neat artistic things to see. It was a great place to take pictures and they also have a giant Rube Goldberg machine at the junkyard. It was pretty cool to see a junkyard that has turned itself into a art/event gallery as it reuses junk and waste and turns it into an attraction. What was really surprising is how clean and organized the junkyard was and how easy it was to walk around and look at all the interesting things that they had. There was also a Mariachi band and a taco truck there.

On SFGate today, there was an article discussing how much garbage we have in the United States as we are running out of room for all the garbage we produce. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, Americans generated more than 245 million tons of trash in 2005. Unfortunately, a lot of the things we buy or use is disposable. A lot of things can also be recycled, composted and reused and that can be a good business for new technology to create energy from waste and reusing old parts and materials. There are several companies in the bay area that focus on e-recycling and try to reuse and recycle old parts from computers, monitors and other gadgets. Metal and other material can be taken from old parts and be reused for other materials which is one of the things they do at the HP Recycling Plant.

Add comment July 13th, 2007 Alex

Oakland to follow San Francisco’s plastic bag ban

A measure has been passed by the key City Council Committee in Oakland to ban plastic bags from grocery stores and other large retailers similar to the ban adopted in San Francisco earlier this year. If the measure is approved, it could take effect in August preventing any retailer grossing more than $1 million a year from using the nonbiodegradable plastic bags. The measure is sponsored by Councilwomen Nancy Nadel and Jean Quan. 10% of petroleum is used to create the plastic bags and Californians use 19 billion plastic disposable bags each year. This ban will encourage more shoppers to use cloth or other reuseable bags for groceries and shopping. There have been different efforts in reducing plastic bag usage around the world such as Ikea charging 5 cents per bag. In New Zealand, Supermarket chains Foodstuffs and Progressive Enterprises have also recently announced a joint campaign to cut down on the number of plastic bags handed out. The republic of Ireland currently has a 15 cent tax on plastic shopping bags which started in 2002 and has caused a 90% reduction on plastic bag usage.

Plastic shopping bags were first introduced in 1977. Only 0.6 percent of the plastic bags are recycled as 100 billion plastic bags are thrown away in America. It takes 1,000 years for plastic bags to degrade. Plastic bags contain chemical additives that can be harmful to human health and the environment and are toxic to animals. An estimated 100,000 birds, and mammals die from eating plastic bags every year.

SFGate article

4 comments June 27th, 2007 Alex

HP Recycling Center

 The Hewlett-Packard Recycling Center in Roseville, California is where HP sends all its old monitors and computer parts for recycling. The facility processes 4 million pounds or 24,000 tons of hardware a month. HP has been recycling parts since 1987 but in 1997, the Roseville plant opened as the first electronics shredding plant. Parts are taken apart and separated for shredding while the hazardous materials such as mercury bulbs in in CRTs are taken out to be melted elsewhere. Some parts are shipped away to be reused in new computers while other parts are used to make new products such as auto body parts, toys, etc. So your next Honda could actually have parts that used to be part of a computer or monitor.

http://news.com.com/HP+grindhouse+Where+old+PCs+go+to+die/2100-1041_3-6191067.html?tag=nefd.lede

1 comment June 14th, 2007 Alex

Bring your light bulbs and batteries to Ikea for recycling

I went to Ikea over the weekend and saw that Ikea had an area with bins for recycling batteries, lightbulbs. It was pretty impressive to see such a big display and each bin actually had a significant amount of items in them. Ikea has been actively participating in helping the environment and recently started charging 5 cents per plastic bag in an effort to get people to start reusing bags and to cut down on plastic bag waste. They also sell big blue bags for 59 cents that are similar to the yellow ones that they have in the stores. These bags are actually great for many things because they are big and sturdy. We have personally kept them in the car to bring things in from Costco and for getting the laundry. If you want to be creative, you can even transform it into a shoulder bag!

Ikea was honored with the 2006 EnviroStars Recognized Leader Distinction and has made efforts to reduce its ecological footprint, eliminate hazardous chemicals used to create Ikea products, and participated in waste reduction and repurposing. You can read more about the list of things that Ikea has achieved here in the Envirostars webpage as well as on the Ikea website.

Add comment June 11th, 2007 Alex