Recycling warehouse

>> The place where garbage is resurrected from the dead

by PHILIP PREVILLE

by PHILIP PREVILLE One year ago, the City of Montreal began implementing new trash bylaws, including fines for putting garbage in plastic grocery bags and for putting recyclables in the trash. The new rules were widely ridiculed, and this reporter was among the harshest critics.

A year later, it's time to eat some crow. The city has issued only a dozen fines more than last year. More impressively, Montrealers suddenly started recycling en masse: the volume of recyclable materials shot up by 41 per cent virtually overnight. This year, for the first time ever, Montreal will meet its annual recycling target of 50,000 tonnes.

Where does it all go? Well, that's a long story. But the first stop for the contents of every single green box in the city is a nondescript north-end industrial warehouse: the sorting centre.

The place: The 90,000-square-foot sorting centre, located on the city's north-end eco-campus right next door to the Miron dump, is run under contract by a company called Rebuts Solides Canadiens. Trucks make over 200 trips to the sorting centre every day to drop off the load of recyclables. Only two years ago, the centre's exterior was relatively clean. Today, a massive pile of plastic containers (shown here) covers the entire north face of the building.

The workers: The sorting centre employs about 100 people, half of whom have jobs worse than garbage collectors: they stand at a conveyor belt for eight hours a day, picking the stray food morsels and grease-stained paper bags out of the never-ending river of margarine containers and dep-wine bottles. The workers are covered by the city's blue-collar union and earn around $11 an hour.

The machinery: Inside, the place resembles a massive urban digestive tract. A labyrinthine maze of tubes, conduits and conveyor belts moves materials through the system like an intestine. Once sorted, the materials are shuttled along a colon-esque floor-level conveyor to a compressor. The hydraulic press then compacts the materials and, like a big industrial sphincter, squeezes out an endless queue of perfectly formed recyclable turds: 3' x 3' x 4' bales of compressed paper, plastic and metal.

The weird stuff: People put the darnedest things in their green boxes! Sorters regularly dispose of soiled diapers and syringes. They once watched an entire cow's head make its way along the conveyor, and once saved a live cat and her kittens from the newspaper compressor.

Final factoid: Of all the things that people throw into the recycling, the most surprising are all the pop bottles and cans that can be refunded for five cents each at the dep. While the pop containers still get recycled, Montrealers are throwing money away one nickel at a time. The sorting centre sets them aside and collects the deposit for themselves (they're paid by the pound instead of by the bottle).

What happens to all the other stuff--the papers, plastics, bottles and cans? Those are Things in themselves. Next week: Paper.

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