Green Star of Interior Alaska returned to the Midnight Sun Festival this year, offering trash and recycling services for the festival. Volunteers assisted Green Star staff collecting plastic #1 and #2 bottles and aluminum cans.
Green Star deployed over 40 recycle bins at the fair, each bin paired with a trash can. Green Star staff made rounds to each trash bin to monitor and collect trash while volunteers made rounds to monitor and collect recycling. When full, trash was taken to dumpsters that were stationed around the outskirts of the fair, and the recycling bags were taken back to the Green Star recycle sorting station. The sorting station consists of a sloped table, upon which the mixed bottles and cans are dumped for sorting. At the lower end of the sorting table, there are three plastic bins: one each for plastic bottles, aluminum cans, and trash that inadvertently gets mixed into the recycle bins.
We collected 35 lbs of aluminum cans, 48 lbs of plastic bottles, and 82 lbs of cardboard, totaling 165 lbs of recyclable material!
Following the fair, we sent the plastic bottles, aluminum cans, and cardboard that we had we collected at the Midnight Sun Festival over to the FNSB Central Recycling Facility (CRF) while at the same time we received our weekly shipment of electronics recycling to process. The FNSB CRF bales up plastic bottles, aluminum cans, and cardboard (as well as mixed paper) and ships them to a national integrated recycler called, WestRock in Anchorage or to the Port of Tacoma to be recycled.
Unsurprisingly, recycling doesn’t always happen correctly. We deploy recycling bins such that they are paired with every trash can present at an event. Oftentimes plastic bottles and aluminum cans end up in the trash (and we take them out and put them in the recycling as much as we can), and oftentimes trash gets in the recycling (which we sort out).
Some fair vendors use #1 plastic cups for the drinks they sell. The #1 plastic bottles and cups are all #1 plastic (which is to say, polyethylene terephthalate or PET); however, the process of heating and polymerizing the plastic during manufacturing alters the properties of the material (viscosity, strength, melting behavior, etc.) in the final product. Bottles and cups are created by a process called, “injection blow molding.” Their differing shapes (narrow-mouthed vs. wide-mouthed) and material properties necessitate different recycling processes. #1 and #2 plastic bottles and jugs are the easiest types of plastic to recycle and yield the highest bale prices, making them the most worthwhile for the FNSB Central Recycling Facility to accept.
Although we dream of perfect recycling rates, we are pleased that the errors are small, and we are proud that so much does get recycled properly!