Where Do All The Bottles Go?

With all the buzz about the pros and cons of going green, it's important for Fort Smith residents to know about the "green" options that our community provides. The city provides a blue recycling bin, but where do all those newspapers, magazines, bottles, cans, cardboard products, and papers go? 

Operators of Fort Smith's recycling program point out that Fort Smith residents can put almost all recyclables into one blue recycling bin, but items that held food products should be rinsed, tops to plastic bottles and jugs should be thrown away, and clear glass should be bagged separately. All of these co-mingling items, however, must be sorted after pick-up.

Sebastian Hills, a neighborhood located in central Fort Smith, is one of the areas included in the city's first phase of automated trash collection. This neighborhood has a very high percentage of households that recycle, which led to its inclusion in the first phase. As part of the automated trash collection, sanitation crews use the city's first compartmentalized recycling truck to collect the contents of those blue recycling bins. This truck has separate bins for paper, plastic, glass, and cardboard, which allows workers to sort recyclables at the curb.

Baridi Nkokheli, Fort Smith sanitation director, says that "The collectors actually separate the material at the point of collection. So, when we take it over to Fort Smith Waste Paper, it's already pre-sorted. That helps us to eliminate the level of contamination."

The contamination Nkokheli mentions occurs when non-recyclable items (styrofoam, plastic bags, mirrors, oil and pesticide containers) are mixed with the items in a recycling ben and thus the recycling truck. In areas of the city without the automated collection program, recycling bins are dumped into a city garbage truck where they are compacted and later taken to a Material Recovery Facility at Fort Smith Waste Paper Co. Once there, the recyclables are dumped onto a section of pavement and then loaded onto a conveyor belt that moves up about one story to the sorting line. These mixed items must be sorted by hand by sanitation workers as the items move along the conveyor belt. Each worker is assigned a specific material to remove from the belt and place in a bin. Newspapers, milk jugs, plastic bottles, and aluminum cans are picked out.

At the end of the conveyor belt, trash (the contaminants) is placed in a large compactor and trucked to Fort Smith Regional Landfill. This process is less efficient than the automated truck system because trash is essentially being "double-handled" by the sanitation department when contaminants in recycling bins are transported to Fort Smith Waste Paper. Last year, the city removed 471 tons of trash from recyclable material and moved it to the landfill.

The compartmentalized truck helps eliminate contamination because city crews can leave contaminated items on the curb and add a large, yellow sticker across the top of the recycling bin that signals "no pizza boxes or plastic bags should be placed in recycling container."

 Once the recyclable material is separated (either on the conveyor line or curbside), each type of item is stored until there is enough to bale. Steve Gately, owner of Fort Smith Waste Paper, says it takes 50,000 aluminum cans to make a bale and 30 bales to fill a truckload for shipping. Last year, the city produced 2,700 tons of recycled items and earned $72,000 for this sale. 

Currently, a bout a third of the city has automated trash collection, implemented in August. Nkokheli says that another advantage of automated collection is that residents place all of their sanitation materials (garbage, yard waste, and recyclables alike) at the curb on a single day while other areas of Fort Smith have three different pickup days.