A group from Keep Kingwood Green as well as Clarissa Perez from Councilman Dave Martin’s office recently toured the recycling facility recently built by FCC here in Houston to handle the City’s recycling materials. We followed lots of City of Houston recycling trucks from the Eastex Freeway east to the facility.
The operation is a new business in Houston but a well-established Spanish Company. It’s a new building operating with about 40 employees in East Houston. Cesar Garcia, the Production Manager, met us in their education and assembly auditorium. We were shown a ten-minute video about the importance of recyclingand why it is important to recycle right. During the whole tour it was stressed that by recycling right or eliminating contamination from the items we recycle we can help to make the recycling industry more efficient. Consequently, the materials that come out the back door of the facility will be more desirable for manufacturers to purchase for reuse into new products.
We then walked down a long corridor with large glass windows overlooking the tipping floor. Here is the beginning of the conveyor that lifts the materials into the dozens of machines, robots, and other gizmos that sort the materials into resalable commodities. From the bunkers under each sorting station, the materials are processed into huge bales which are then loaded on trucks. The bales are then taken to another processor who reconstitutes them into new raw materials.
Unfortunately, much of the material that comes into this MRF is trash that never should be recycled in the first place. This could be due to laziness or lack of knowledge on the part of people who use the city’s recycling. When you hear that Houston sends their recyclables to a landfill, that is true to the extent that residents put trash in with their recyclables. If it is not recyclable, it is trash! We only make the whole recycling process more inefficient if we send it to the MRF! There the trash has to be sorted out and then sent to the landfill.
Only if the City of Houston picks up your curbside recycling bin does it go to this MRF. The weekend recycling bins at the Park and Ride lot apparently go elsewhere. Since they are already sorted, they can be sold directly to a company that will re-manufacture them into a raw material. If your Trash/Recycling Service provider is Waste Management, Republic, or Best Trash, your materials go to a different MRF which may not have the same standards as this one does.
Bottom Line: Only recycle what your service tells you to recycle! You may have to go to their website for this information. Never put film plastic in any bin or curbside container.Take film plastic to your grocery store or other site that accepts that material separately. If you put it in the Park and Ride bins or curbside bins it will most likely become trash. If any item is dirty or food contaminated, either clean it up or send it to trash. At this facility, they prefer that you separate the tops from the bottles or jars and put them in your bin separately. Metal bottle caps can be recycled. Paperboard milk cartons are OK, too.You should, however, remove the plastic cap and put it in separately.
We get the sense that FCC has what will someday be a fantastic teaching facility at this site. They welcome school groups or any groups that want to learn more about the recycling process. At this point they are still working to get that all together. It was definitely a great educational experience for us. The facility has lots of excess capacity at this point. They appear to be ready to take on new customers. So, if the City is not your trash/recycling provider now, perhaps someday your trash provider will use this facility.