Shiny recyclables

>> The long and winding path that brings glass jars and tin cans back from the dead

By PHILIP PREVILLE

When it comes to sorting people's green-box recyclables, glass and metal are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Metals basically recycle themselves: as the goods enter the conveyor-belt system at the north-end sorting centre, a series of high-powered magnets pulls all the tin cans out of the mix. Glass, however, is the most dangerous product of all: it inevitably breaks as it makes its way down the high-speed conveyor, where sorters wearing extra thick gloves reach in and pick the plastic and the garbage out of the shards.

Steel cans are probably the least valuable of all recycled materials. The cans that Montrealers put in their green boxes are compressed into 3' x 3' x 4' bales and sent to companies like Sidbec-Dosco, which melts them down along with old automobile carcasses. But cans collected from the curbside amount to barely one per cent of all recycled steel. More often than not, they are transformed into re-bar and encased in the concrete foundations of new buildings.

Aluminium pop cans, more valuable than steel, are bundled separately. (Montrealers toss about 15 per cent of their pop cans into the bin instead of returning them to the dep for the five-cent refund.) They are sent to a west-end recycling operation called Camco. There, a vibrating table shakes all the cigarette butts and olive pits out of the cans' tiny openings; Camco then washes them and sends them back to aluminium corporations for re-smelting. The pop can you recycle today will end up back on the supermarket shelf, refilled with your favourite beverage, within as few as 45 days.

Glass bottles and jars require equally high-tech machinery for recycling. From the sorting centre, glass of all colours is sent to Longueuil-based Unical. There, a similar vibrating table shakes out any glass shards smaller than 15 millimetres in diameter; these smaller pieces are further crushed and used either in fibreglass insulation or as a substitute for sand in the sandblasting of stone buildings. For the larger pieces, a conveyor belt equipped with a series of colour detectors and blowers automatically separates the more valuable white glass from the brown and green. The white is transformed back into mayonnaise jars, while the green and brown are exported to Italy and South America and turned back into wine bottles.

Final factoid: Though Montreal will finally reach its 50,000-tonne recycling target this year, the sorting centre is only running at two-thirds of its capacity. Manager Patrick Beaudoin hopes Montrealers will one day produce enough recyclables for him to add a third overnight shift and keep the conveyor belts running 24 hours a day. Mind you, he'd still have to stop everything one day per week to hose the place down and disinfect it. :

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