RECYCLING IN ACTION

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] Our land is not unlimited. We are rapidly depleting our resources and in the process we create waste that threatens to bury us. There's endless consumption and thoughtless disposal of materials. Most people are concerned about the problem and some are doing something about it. People in industry as well as individuals. Recycling is their answer. [Music] Our Westside Environmental Center is operated entirely by volunteers with the help and cooperation of the people in the community. There are just all kinds of people working here. Uh we have all all age groups. We've had junior high and then others are students and uh people who have employed full-time and housewives. My husband and I are able to recycle almost everything in our household. I still feel though personally that this isn't enough. I volunteer my time at the depot. So I feel that this might add a little bit to cleaning up the environment. The older people are especially conscious. They remember how they saved their their cans and their papers and they don't like to waste things. So, uh, everyone I think the the acceptance and the involvement in this has been very broad in the community. We collect cans, bottles, tin. We bring it here and then we put them in the boxes where the signs say to. We do it because we won't waste anything. One of the main functions for running a recycling center of of the type that we have here is that it makes people think. Some people may just do it uh like a fad at first because everyone's carrying their trash down to the recycling center, but I I know many people and I hope everyone will think when they bring a load down, what materials went into this? What resources? Uh did I have to buy this in the first place? Should I throw it away? You must have purity in a product to recycle it. The paper, for example, there are many grades of paper. If they're all mixed up, they can't be recycled economically. Here, we separate them into newspaper, magazines, cardboard, and other grades. And then we sell it to a waste paper dealer. [Applause] A waste paper dealer collects waste paper from several different sources. We might uh collect IBM cards, computer printout data, uh data sheets, bank statements, uh newspapers, uh several different grades of waste paper. From these grades, he sells to different sorts of uh secondary paper mills. At the pulp mill, the waste paper is taken and put into a hydropuler where the water friction separates the fibers, disperses the inks, and generally makes a a slurry type mix. And this is taken to a chest where it's stored and taken through various cleaners. The water is pressed out and then the pulp is resold to a paper maker who could use it for tissue paper and writing papers or any other kind of secondary uh use. Our goals go beyond just recycling material. We also try to make people aware of other environmental issues both by talking to them and by posting information on our bulletin board. And since we do have a net income from our operation, we can donate this money to other environmental causes. We try to run the center on a self-service basis, but some things seem to be impossible to do this way, like the glass has to be color sorted and the metal caps and rings have to be all taken off. So the volunteer workers uh must check the glass and see that this has been done and put it in the proper bin. When the bin is filled, it is hauled to a glass factory where the glass is melted down and made again into glass containers. [Music] The aluminum cans are probably the most valuable at the recycling center. We do have one of our volunteers who hauls them off to uh the processing plant. The efforts of the volunteers and and what the volunteers are trying to do for their environment by recycling would be impossible without uh the cooperation of industry. [Music] Our plant is devoted exclusively to recycling of aluminum, beverage cans, foil containers, TV dinner trays. The aluminum comes to us from the general public, beverage distributors, and other recycling centers. The aluminum cans are dumped onto a conveyor which goes over a magnetic device pulling out all the steel cans which cannot be used. The cans are shredded and the shredded material is then shipped to a wreath melting plant where the metal is used entirely. In this plant, we recycle the materials in telephones and uh switchboard apparatus and in the wire and cable used in the telephone communications industry. The apparatus goes into the furnaces for the combustible material to be burned off and the zinc to be sweated out. The balance of the material being copper and iron and precious metals. We also sweat the uh lead cable and uh recover the lead and the copper that's in the cable so that it uh is a rather pure form of uh copper scrap and a raw material for the refineries which will recycle the material and turn it back into copper wire and cable. We have quite a number of private people who understand and know the value of certain types of metals and different types of scrap and they have been for years uh saving it and then from time to time they will dispose of it to junkyards such as ours. And then we have factories that create scrap from the product that they manufacture. And that scrap they sell to us. And then as machinery and parts become obsolete, they are sold to us. Different metals go to different smelters and reused and made and new products made out of them. [Music] I started uh working at the scrap metal yard and while I was here and had quiet times during the winter, I started putting things together with the scrap metal and trying to make pictures out of them. I use faucets and sprinkler heads and springs, parts of radiators, uh copper wire. So, you can use just a little bit of everything and imagination and you've got a picture. We collect um aluminum cans and TV trays and stuff we use in our home. And we also go around the neighborhood and collect um aluminum cans and TV trays from the neighbors. And we have about two or three bags. We take it and we sell it to the junkyard. [Music] When my clothes and my family's clothes get all run down and the toys and stuffed animals get all old, we take them down to the Goodwill booth that other people will have them to play with and to use rather than throwing them away. People come in and bring bottles and aluminum cans and we have to separate them into the different color groups and crush them up so that they can go and melt them and recycle them. Like the whole um council's doing it like they switch off with troops and like the money goes to the troops for troop equipment. The main purpose is like to recycle stuff and help the environment. everybody brings in. You can get it off your neighbors. Like I took some from my house, some jars and glass and papers because we have a big pile up in our house of papers. It's about six guys in plastics classes at this school. A lot of times on Saturdays and after school, we go around and we ask people for their bottles and people send them over to us and we spend a lot of time cleaning them and uh just recycling these bottles. The motivation that made this club at our school is that we're trying to prove to people that plastics can be used over instead of just thrown into the ground or burnt. We take these bottles from our school and we use our equipment here. We grind it up and uh it comes out like a flakes and then we take it to a company and they put it in this big machine and they melt it down and they make big long strands of plastic and they chop it up into these little pellets. And what we do is we trade them our scrap material and they give us back pelletized material. Then we bring it back here to school and we use our equipment and uh we made glass projects out of it. Right now what we're basically making is uh the plastic bags or what we do with the plastic bags. We just give them back to our school and they use them in the trash cans here. Also, what we're making is uh bottle caps and uh also we're working with uh different uh usable products for the home, different products that we eventually could sell and thus get back the money and put it back into the program. And also what we're working with is styrene, polystyrene, styrofoam, some cups are made out of it, surf riders and stuff like that of grinding up these uh different things. We go over to these companies that make packaging or packages out of styrene and we get their scrap. We just grind it up and grind it up and we got just bags full of it and we made beam bags with a large machine and these small machines were mass-producing thumbtacks or map tacks. Plastics basically is a byproduct of many resources. It's a byproduct of oil, cotton, milk. The reason we really were motivated into this is that uh there's a lot of waste in this country and we felt if we could prove that we could recycle these bottles or anything made out of plastic that we could save some of these natural resources such as oil, you know, we could cut down on the waste and plastics is a greater part of that. Now, basically what uh EAL Hall is all about is what we uh operate a home pickup service of recyclables in which we uh travel around the neighborhoods and pick up uh people's recyclables that uh cannot get to the recycling centers. It's inconvenient. And what we do is we just ask them to separate their glass from their cans, rinse things out, and uh stack their newspapers inside. We pick up twice a month and we charge $3 for this service. We also operate the uh recycling centers. We're going to try and go profit trying to make a business out of it. We're stripping the earth of its resources and we're going to have to start thinking about it seriously before it's too late. You do have a responsibility to future generations to take care of these resources to preserve them and stretch them out as much as possible. It's not just this one little place isn't going to solve the problem. The whole country should be doing that in each little community. Recycling is only the beginning. It depends on every individual to do something about its environment to try and find other means of combating the pollution and and the overuse and the waste and that's happening in our environment. Each person has to do his share. [Music]