Full-on tree-hugging with Mike & Mike

Published May 7, 2015
By Mike Blythe and Mike Jago
14th Civil Engineer Squadron

COLUMBUS AIR FORCE BASE, Miss. -- I can't believe I still have to say this 45 years after Earth Day was established, but here goes: recycling works.

I hope you are still not knocked out by that news, but honestly, I still get the questions, "Does it REALLY get recycled?" and "Does it matter?"

First, follow the money, as the investigators say. We have buyers of paper, metals, batteries, wood chip companies, used oil dealers and others. If it wasn't getting recycled, then why pay us for this seemingly useless stuff?

Does it matter? Yes, and for reasons you may not be aware of, so I will spill the secrets of recycling from the inside.

My first reason to recycle is it is the right thing to do. Even ancient civilizations saw value in recycling metals and glass. Not too many years ago, we made durable products that we now throw away after a few uses.

The idea of waste is offensive to me and I see it showing up as global warming, islands of plastic in all the oceans, and chemicals in our water. It matters, and it matters what I throw away. So I keep my waste pile small.

Recycling should matter to your budget, as money is the measure of the success of many things. "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle!" is still good advice today, as trash drives expenses.

The recycling message even applies to things like water use. California is facing a water crisis. Don't waste it with drips and leaks, save water by using sink and bath water for plants and as toilet water. It's called grey water systems and has been in use for decades.

Water is 100 percent recyclable. Nature does it by evaporation, leaving all the contaminants on the surface, but California is going to do it with Pacific Ocean water, and even recycling sewer water back to drinking standards. It is going to happen and is happening in several U.S. cities already. Look up Cloudcroft New Mexico near Holloman Air Force Base as an example of water recycling.

"Mississippi has all the water it needs so this doesn't apply." Wrong. Water takes energy to pump, clean and store in towers. Wasting water through drips and leaks runs up septic utility pumping bills, as they have electric pumps to run, too. Mississippi is a flat-ish state, so waste water must often be force pumped up grade. It is expensive and it shows up in your bill. Again, recycling is about money, my money and your money, and it applies to far more than paper and plastic recycling.

I live downtown and bring my recycling on base. There is a cart in the Exchange parking lot next to the gas station that takes paper, plastic, glass, metal and cardboard. I recycle so much, I don't put trash out more than once every two weeks, and that is one bag. Many bases don't like you to bring your home recycling to the base, but here we need the volume to make our shipments large enough to pay, so feel free to bring it on.

I had a conversation with a former mayor on recycling. He was not a fan of recycling. Cities have a tough time recycling because they try to make lots of money recycling to show the taxpayers a benefit. This is where accounting and recycling get involved.

If you look at your utility bill, there is a charge for picking up trash. It really isn't very much -- or is it? Trash costs about $.008 a pound to send to a landfill. Your bill is at a much higher rate than that to pay for the pickup service, so you may pay considerably more.

Columbus AFB has 100 percent control of all recycling and trash service, so we can look at both costs. There are labor and machine costs to baling and sorting recyclables, while trash needs to be taken to the Tri-County landfill, weighed and buried, and the truck returns empty but it still costs money to run it home.

It is the difference in the last step that recycling pays. The base reduces cost by nearly one-third to recycle, compared to the cost to have trash taken to the landfill. When the base trash bill can run $40,000 in a month, a one-third discount adds up. In the case of the mayor, he had only the recycling facility and its expenses, not the trash pickup. He never saw the savings from the landfill side of the expense so it just did not pay for the city to continue.

At SWANA, a conference for garbage men, it was observed that the landfills from before 1940 contain more chrome than South Africa exported last year, and the amount of methane produced was enough to power hundreds of local homes. The buried metals alone are in the millions of tons. Landfills are America's future resource.

The point was made if our generation of Mississippians is not interested in recycling, that is our loss and our shame. Burying mixed trash in landfills is not a great solution for disposal, it just combines many chemicals that never should mix and can generate methane, and can make an unstable mound of earth that should not be built on for decades. There are liners in landfills now, so the chemical soup is pumped out and re-injected in deep abandoned oil wells if it can't be treated on site.

Landfills are filling up nationwide and the next crisis will be finding landfill space. New York City now sends trash to western Pennsylvania, South Carolina and New Mexico by rail. Mississippi will be on the receiving end of outside trash increasingly every year, because there is excess capacity here.

Recycling isn't a perfect answer, but it can extend the useful life of oil by re-refining it to new product. All metals are 100 percent recyclable and it saves the pollution and cost of mining for new metals. Plastic recycling is difficult in America because there is no standardization of containers like Germany and other European countries, but it is getting better.
If recycling wasn't a good idea, then why do aluminum cans now have inked-on labels? The aluminum can industry spent millions to make the used aluminum free of paint and plastic so it is cheaper to smelt to new sheet of aluminum. Industry figured it out years ago. Follow the money and recycle.

For more information about recycling please contact Mike Blythe and Mike Jago at 434-7353/7974.

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If you want to be a super home recycler, here are some tips to reduce trash even further:

- Separate paper, glass, plastic and cans. Use shopping bags and tie them off when full. Rinse containers to ensure there is no liquid inside. This helps to cut down on the smell and to discourage pests like rats and roaches.

-Flatten all cardboard. Recycle paper milk cartons and paper juice cartons too.

-Cut the tops and bottoms out of cans, rinse and flatten. Recycle aerosol cans by puncturing them and flattening them. They must be empty to be recycled and flat.

-Recycle all rechargeable batteries; lead, lithium, cadmium. The recycle center has plastic bags or they can be placed in plastic bags, use the cheapest bag possible without holes. Each battery needs to be bagged separately to keep the acid inside and the ends from touching.

-Take packaging apart so the paper can be recycled even if the rest can't be. Put all your plastic or paper shopping bags together and those are taken too. Again, please remove all contents and no goo or liquids should be in the bags. If the eggs broke in the bag, throw it out.

-Pizza boxes are problematic because pizza crust, grease and cheese ruins the whole batch of paper slurry and there is no way to get it out once it is in the process. Paper with oil on it is not useful for recycling and paper used for human consumption like napkins, plates and tissues are too contaminated to use again.

-Shredded paper is a premium product and gets high prices on the recycling market. Pure white shredded paper is the best money maker at a recycle facility. Cardboard is the next best so any cardboard packaging is good. Take the liner out of cereal boxes and flatten them.

-Look at all your plastics for a number 1 or 2 in the recycle triangle. They are on the majority of all bottles and containers. The other numbers are not accepted as there are no buyers, but clean and empty 1 and 2 of any color, shape or size are good.

-Glass bottles are all that can be used here. Glass is heavy, so it saves $200 per ton to recycle it even into gravel that is only worth $20. It is not the value of the end product; it is the savings on disposal which makes it worth doing. The recycle center always has crushed glass for free issue if you have a use for it. The rest of the types of glass are not recycled because they tend not to break into such nice smooth pellets that are safe to handle.

-The last big recycling tip is compost. In Mississippi, composting is easy, but may not be as accessible to everyone. Make a container, anything that will hold stuff in such as old fencing or even pallets, and pile in leaves, grass, weeds, wet kitchen waste like coffee filters and vegetables. Reuse an old garbage can lid over it to keep the critters out and turn it with a shovel every so often. It will become hot, steam on a cold day, and cook down into the best black topsoil for spreading on your lawn in the fall or as garden soil. If you put in bones, meat or fat it may attract animals such as rats, but the good news is they will help turn the soil, the bad news is they are rats or the neighborhood stray and they might make a big mess.

Once you put more in your recycle containers than in your trash can you are well on your way to becoming a super recycler. Over 90 percent of what is normally thrown away is recyclable, but the last 30 percent requires more work than it is generally worth. See how you do, and good luck.