Cardboard Boxes Crowd Recycling Plants
Nine to five for Trevor Kramer is dirty and dangerous. He spends his days jumping on and off Bestway Disposal recycling trucks.
Kramer says, “jumping off the side of the truck or running around you got to watch out for lots of cars.”
He and a crew maneuver the narrow streets in Manitou Springs, emptying recycling bins as fast as they can. After 35 million Americans turned to the internet for their holiday shopping, Kramer says he’s seeing a lot more cardboard boxes.
After they’re picked up, trucks take them to the Bestway Disposal Recycling site on Interpark Drive in Colorado Springs. The facility receives 100 tons of recyclables every day. That increased by 5 to 10 percent during the holiday season.
Clint Cordonnier, Logistics Manager at Bestway Disposal says, “Based on the size of our bales, it takes 22 bales to fill a truck so we’re making a truckload of cardboard a day.”
Trucks enter the facility and dump it into a general pile, it’s then sorted through a conveyor belt where sensors dump lightweight objects like paper and cardboard. The glass and plastic are sent to another area where workers sort through the trash.
After each category is sorted, it’s crushed and made into square bales, some of them weighing near 2,000 pounds. The cardboard is shipped to Oklahoma where it’s re-purposed into drywall.
