So what does happen to the trash?
Most people think that their garbage just goes away to a dump, and gets added to the mountains of banana peels, soda cans, and diapers already there. That may be the case in some areas, but in the city of Sunnyvale, your trash doesn’t go directly to the dump. It makes a stop at a place called the SMaRT (Sunnyvale Materials Recovery and Transfer) Station first. The SMaRT Station is a waste materials sorting facility, and all of the garbage from Mountain View, Palo Alto, and Sunnyvale ends up there. The facility takes up 10 acres of land and cost $25 million to build, through a partnership between the three cities. The whole point of the SMaRT station is to sort out the reusable materials in garbage that typically just get sent straight to the dump. All types of wastes are managed there. There is a recycling center (including a California cash refund service), hazardous materials area (for substances like batteries, motor oil, etc), a yard waste area, electronics handling (for old computers, microwaves, etc), construction debris (concrete, wood), and the main area (called the tipping floor), where residential and corporate waste is handled.
How the whole process works is pretty exciting. First, the trucks come in and dump the trash onto the “tipping floor”, where workers must separate the larger, cumbersome objects out from the rest of the trash. The larger objects are pushed to the side, and what’s left is picked up by bulldozers and pushed onto a series of conveyor belts. The belts carry the trash through long rooms where more workers stand next to them and pull out things like glass bottles, tin cans, newspaper, and the like. The work is repetitive and tiring, requiring the men and women to stand constantly and remain focused.
After the trash runs through the rooms the conveyor belts dump it onto gigantic “shakers”. Shakers are like extremely wide escalators, except for the fact that these escalators rapidly shake back and forth and side to side. The shakers are used to break open sealed bags full of trash, and to sift out the small pieces of trash (like egg shells or bottle caps) from the medium pieces. The small pieces move to a separate bin to be compacted, and the medium sized garbage runs through a conveyor belt room once more.
As the garbage is carried along the conveyor belts, magnets are used to pull out metallic materials (mostly small items), which are then carried over separate containers and deposited. For larger items, like aluminum cans, something much more high tech is used. Computer guided blasts of compressed air and reverse magnets are used to shoot the cans down slides onto lower, recovery conveyors.
The whole system works quite well, with 175 trucks typically delivering to the SMaRT station each day, and only 40 taking what isn’t recyclable over to the landfill. In fact, in the 2004-2005 year, the SMaRT Station diverted 82,221 tons of material from the dump, out of the 258318 tons delivered (that’s 32%)!
The SMaRT Station is definitely an impressive place to be. Walking around the catwalks as the conveyor belts speed past is a strange feeling. The combination of motors, bulldozers, alarms and mariachi music forces you to shout in order to communicate. I found it hard to imagine working in a place like this...