Sorting for Pleasure

Today I volunteered to help Jacob, the summer student/researcher at the dump, sort garbage. There has never really been a trash audit of the dump, so part of Jacob's job is to determine what actually gets into the dump, and maybe figure out where it comes from. For the construction and auto piles, that's not too hard; you can just ask people at the gate and go look at the pile. But for the domestic pile, it's nasty. It involves opening up a random pile of bags and sorting the trash into several categories (clean paper, soiled paper, compost, hard plastic, film plastic, hazardous waste, metal, refundable recyclables, etc). And those bags bake in the 24 hour sun.




Jacob, being the gentleman he is, took any bags that I retched over. A hot-moldy yogurt took me by surprise when I cracked open what I was hoping was an office bag of paper trash and I nearly tossed my cookies. Everything went pretty smoothly after that.

We ended up with about 30% film plastic, by far the greatest category. Clean paper came in second. Right now its not recycled here, just burned, but it is technically a money-making recyclable. And New J Jersey apparently has a new technology that's like mascara for paper - it lengthens the paper fibers which otherwise break down into smaller bits with each recycle, meaning that right now paper is only recycled once, maybe twice, before it hits the landfill (down-cycling). There was also a significant amount of refundable recyclables, which the program here desperately needs to keep running. And one bag (22 liters) of hazardous waste. We had three bags of compost, which comes in at around 15%. In New York, compost is around 30-45%. Its much higher in the summer (up to 65%) when grass-cutting season is in (even though I don't know a single person with a lawn in New York).

I got a few tea bags and some hair out of the domestic sort, but I realized early on that any paper or other domestic trash I want I will have to get before it hits the dump stream. So the gallery asked some of the local restaurants if they'd save their tea bags and thin cardboard for me.