I've been interested in taking Jasper to discover what happens to our garbage. We all know that after we throw things out, they don't just disappear! But after that, the process gets quite mysterious.
Garten Services in Salem offers a free tour of their facility, where they sort curbside recycling and recycle electronics. We visited with our homeschool group. They were really welcoming and showed us their whole facility. This was a big hit with the kids! Not only is Garten doing their best to get recyclable and reusable materials to businesses that can use them, they employ people with disabilities to do much of the work. This would be meaningful employment for anyone, and the fact that the disabled are given these jobs gives even more back to the community.
They stressed that people put a lot of ring binders in their recycling, and ring binders are not recyclable. If they are at all reusable, these are best donated! What they wish they'd see more of is shrink wrap. If your recycling service accepts #4 LDPE plastics, that includes shrink wrap, so be sure to recycle it!
Garten has a cool little store where they sell cheap refurbished computers, and they also sell big, round LED lights in red, yellow and green taken from old traffic signals, and the walk/don't walk LED lights. They told us these are very popular and surprisingly bright. They have a small retail store which is open on Fridays, and also sell via
Ebay.
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| Above this area is a sorting facility. Mixed curbside recycling goes down a conveyor belt. Workers look for like materials (different types of plastic, metal) and toss them into a cute as they pass by. Paper gets left on the belt to go down the final chute. Then it is collected and bundled to be transported to the facility that will recycle it. |
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Sensitive data is shredded. They told us that if we looked very hard, we might find a
fragment of one of our old Oregon tax returns! |
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| A barrel full of mice! |
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| Crushed hard drives. |
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| In their retail store. |
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