Visiting Your Local Drop Off Recycling
Center
Have you been to your local drop off
recycling center? I am not talking about a small drop off station
at your local grocery store, but the actual drop off recycling
center for your city or county. Every area in the United States
today has a main drop off recycling center where recyclable items
are processed. A simple look in the phone book, or call to your
nearest landfill, will give you the information on where you can
find your local drop off recycling center. Generally they can be
found in an out of the way place around other industrial type
businesses.
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A visit to a drop off recycling center is a
very interesting experience. At the drop off recycling center
you will see many things of interest that you just don’t see
anywhere else. I recently went to my local drop off recycling
center with my children so that they could start to learn where
things go when we are finished with them, and what they can
personally do to minimize trash in our ever increasing landfills.
The first stop for us at the local drop off
recycling center was the glass bins. My local center doesn’t
pay for glass, but has a line of large recycling containers for
placing your glass in. The containers are clearly marked with
the color of glass they are for. You simply take your glass to
recycle and place it in the recycling container with the other glass
of that color. This glass is then hauled off, melted down, and
used to make more glass.
The next stop for us was the aluminum recycling area. Our
local recycling center has a large machine where you put your
aluminum cans in. This machine rolls and shakes the cans to
get out anything that doesn’t belong in them and to insure the end
result is only aluminum being processed. |
The cans are then loaded
into a very light weight bin and weighed. For each pound of
aluminum you are paid based on the going rate for aluminum. At my
local center that price is generally about $1.30 a pound.
The next stop at the local drop off recycling
center was the plastics recycling area. There you separate all of
your plastic items based on the type of plastic listed on the
triangle on the bottom of the item. These items are then weighed
and you are paid based on the going rate. The workers at the
recycling center then place all of plastics into their own sorting
containers. From there they will be baled, sold, and shipped to
companies who purchase plastic to use in their recycling process.
The next stop is the place where you can bring
your newspapers for recycling. Our local center does not pay for
them, but offers you a place to bring them to be recycled.
The final stop at the local recycling center is
the payment hut. It is a small mobile building where you take a
piece of paper with the weight of each of your recyclables and they
total up what you are owed. Here you have the option of being paid,
in cash, for your items or donating your money to the local
charities who have drop boxes there on the counter.
As you leave the recycling center you see bales
of plastic and paper waiting to be picked up and transported to
their new homes. It’s an amazing sight to see all of the waste
generated and the amount of it which can be recycled with very
little effort. It really is a sight like no other.
If you have not been to your area’s drop off
recycling center I suggest you visit there soon. It makes for an
interesting and educational trip for your children as well. Mine
now want to recycle as much as possible because they see you can get
paid for your trash. It’s a start on them learning the real reason
to recycle – to keep things out of the landfill and use them again.
