Its morning. You pull out your favorite box of cereal and pour it into a bowl. Then you go to your fridge to grab the milk, only to find that the jug is practically empty.
After you mutter a few unrecognizable words, you toss the milk container into your recycle bin and move on to finding something else to eat. Weve all been there.
While youll likely never think about that plastic milk jug again, its journey into a complex system of waste has only just begun.
What starts out in a Kansas kitchen now figures as a small part of a $100 billion dollar global industry facing serious challenges largely because Chinese officials have decided theyre tired of being the worlds dumpster.
If recyclers cant find a solution to those challenges, the convenience of putting all of your recycling in one bin might go away. That, or the plastic you put in the recycle bin, will end up in a landfill anyway.
From your curb to the landfill?
In 2017, people and businesses in Sedgwick County produced almost 397,000 tons of trash and 65,000 tons of recycling. Statewide, Kansans produce on average about 2.8 million tons of trash.
The cycle starts with consumers. We eat food, order stuff from Amazon and, every once in a while, clean out our closet. Each of those activities produces waste.
Some of it is trash and meant for the landfill. And some of it can be recycled, such as cardboard Amazon boxes, plastic milk jugs, and aluminum cans.
In most medium to larger cities in Kansas, its up to consumers to separate the waste into two usually different colored bins: one for trash and one for all things that can be recycled.
And a lot of people arent that good at sorting.
A trash truck then drives down your street and picks up the trash bin, while a separate truck picks up the recycling bin.
From there, the trucks usually go to the same place: a transfer station.
A transfer station is essentially a large warehouse where trash and recycling trucks dump their loads. The trash and recycling, which remain separate, are then put into semi-trailers and trucked to their next destination.
The trash ends up at a landfill, where its journey ends.
The practice of shipping trash from one county to the next is pretty common. About half of all counties in the state do it, with some trucks traveling as far as 200 miles.
As for the waste from your recycling bin, it goes from the transfer station to a recycling company.
